Child labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This practice is considered exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in many countries. Child labour was employed to varying extents through most of history, but entered public dispute with the advent of universal schooling, with changes in working conditions during the industrial revolution, and with the emergence of the concepts of workers’ and children’s rights. In many developed countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works (excluding household chores, in a family shop, or school-related work).
An employer is usually not permitted to hire a child below a certain minimum age.
This minimum age depends on the country and the type of work involved. States
ratifying the Minimum Age Convention adopted by the International Labor Organization in 1973, have adopted minimum ages varying from 14 to 16. Child labor laws in the United States set the minimum age to work in an establishment without restrictions and without parents’ consent at age 16, except for the agricultural industry where children as young as 12 years of age can work in the fields for an unlimited number of non-school hours. See Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act).
During the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production factories with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions. Based on this
understanding of the use of children as labourers, it is now considered by wealthy
countries to be a human rights violation, and is outlawed, while some poorer countries may allow or tolerate child labour. Child labour can also be defined as the full-time employment of children who are under a minimum legal age. The Victorian era became notorious for employing young children in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps.
Child labour played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset,
often brought about by economic hardship, Charles Dickens for example worked at
the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with his family in debtor’s prison. The children
of the poor were expected to help towards the family budget, often working long
hours in dangerous jobs for low pay, earning 10-20% of an adult male’s wage. In
England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered
cotton mills were described as children. In 19th-century Great Britain, one-third
of poor families were without a breadwinner, as a result of death or abandonment,
obliging many children to work from a young age.
Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling
matches, flowers and other cheap goods. Some children undertook work as apprentices to respectable trades, such as building or as domestic servants (there were
over 120,000 domestic servants in London in the mid-18th century). Working hours
were long: builders worked 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter, while domestic servants worked 80 hour weeks. Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as prostitutes. Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per
day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of
nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile
industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and
children to 10 hour working days. An estimated 1.7 million children under the age
of fifteen were employed in American industry by 1900. In 1910, over 2 million
children in the same age group were employed in the United States.
Present day Child labour is still common in some parts of the world, it can be
factory work, mining, prostitution, quarrying, agriculture, helping in the parents’
business, having one’s own small business (for example selling food), or doing odd
jobs. Some children work as guides for tourists, sometimes combined with bringing
in business for shops and restaurants (where they may also work as waiters). Other
children are forced to do tedious and repetitive jobs such as: assembling boxes, polishing shoes, stocking a store’s products, or cleaning. However, rather than in factories and sweatshops, most child labour occurs in the informal sector, "selling many
things on the streets, at work in agriculture or hidden away in houses—far from the
reach of official labour inspectors and from media scrutiny." According to UNICEF,
there are an estimated 250 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labour worldwide,
excluding child domestic labour. The United Nations and the International Labor
Organization consider child labour exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article
32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that: ...States Parties recognize the
right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing
any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or
to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. Although globally there is an estimated 250 million children working.
In the 1990s every country in the world except for Somalia and the United States
became a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or CRC. Somalia
eventually signed the convention in 2002; the delay of the signing was believed to
been due to Somalia not having a government.
In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998) argue that the primary cause of child labour
is parental poverty. That being so, they caution against the use of a legislative ban
against child labour, and argue that should be used only when there is reason to
believe that a ban on child labour will cause adult wages to rise and so compensate
adequately the households of the poor children. Child labour is still widely used
today in many countries, including India and Bangladesh. CACL estimated that
there are between 70 and 80 million child labourers in India. Anti-discrimination
law Anti-discrimination law refers to the law on people’s right to be treated equally.
Some countries mandate that in employment, in consumer transactions and in political participation people may be dealt with on an equal basis regardless of sex,
race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and sometimes religion and political views.
Titany answered the question on December 3, 2021 at 05:30