Child Labor and Trafficking

Since 2002, World Education has been using education to address abusive forms of
child labor. The International Labor Organization defines child labor as "work
situations where children are compelled to work on a regular basis to earn a living
for themselves and their families, and as a result are disadvantaged educationally
and socially; where children work in conditions that are exploitative and damaging
to their health and to their physical and mental development; where children are
separated from their families, often deprived of educational and training

opportunities; where children are forced to lead prematurely adult lives."

The worst forms of child labor are those situations where children work more than
nine hours in a day; earn less than a minimum wage or no wages at all; work in
hazardous conditions for health and safety; have no access to education; and, work
outside of their family's home. World Education and its partners are reaching those
children in the worst forms of child labor, including those exploited for the
commercial sex industry and other forms of bonded labor in Africa and Asia. World
Education is also working with children at risk of becoming child laborers, which
means they are not enrolled in school; they are victims of domestic violence; they
are orphaned or have only one parent; and, they are vulnerable to sexual
exploitation.
To reduce child labor, World Education and its NGO partners are equipping children,
aged 8-14 years old, in labor situations or at risk of being put into a labor situation
with the basic skills and life skills boys and girls need to protect themselves and
create opportunities for the future. From vocational and practical skills training to
basic literacy classes for children, World Education helps girls and boys learn about
personal safety, opportunities to enter or reenter the formal school system, and
equips them with practical vocational skills.

Child Labour guide

Consumers in affluent countries are appalled to

think that their clothes or household goods might
be the products of child labour. Strong
international treaties are in place to outlaw the
practice. But deep-set cultural traditions and
impoverished economies do not respond readily
to moral lectures from afar. Resistant to all but
the most comprehensive development strategies,
child labour shows little sign of becoming history.

Zambian child labour in

the stone quarry
Manoocher Deghati / IRIN
News

updated February 2011

Definitions and Facts
Causes
Laws

Development Solutions
Consumer Campaigns
Child Soldiers

Definitions and Facts

In 2008 there were 215 million children working illegally in the eyes of international
law, almost 14% of all the worlds children under 18. In sub-Saharan Africa, this
proportion rises to 25%. Countries with a particularly high incidence of child labour
include Nigeria, Malawi, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The global total includes 115 million children under 18 engaged in "hazardous work"
which could threaten their safety or health, such as handling chemicals, carrying
heavy loads, mining, quarrying or enduring long hours.
The remaining 100 million child labourers are those
aged under 15 - the international minimum age for legal
employment whose tasks are not hazardous but are
more substantial than permitted light work.
Almost all child labour occurs in developing countries,
with about 60% engaged in agriculture. Other
occupations include domestic service, factory
production and backstreet workshops.

Brick kiln labour in

Pakistan Kamila
Hyat / IRIN News

The darkest category of child labour relates to those

children caught up in criminal activities such as
prostitution, military enrolment, slavery (such as
bonded labour), or trafficking (which involves the removal of a child from its home,
often involving deception and payment, for a wide range of exploitative purposes).

These categories are beyond the reach of statistical surveys but the numbers are
likely to be over 10 million. Together with hazardous work, they are described as the
"worst forms of child labour."
The small decline in the overall incidence of child labour in the four-year reporting
period to 2008 is inconclusive and disappointing. The most significant change is a
31% drop in hazardous work for children under 15, but this is countered by a 20%
rise amongst the 15-17 age group. Figures are gender-sensitive for the first time
and suggest that child labour amongst girls fell by 15% over the four years.
The accuracy of this child labour data is improving but is based on national surveys
conducted over the period 2005-2008. The impact of more recent economic
instability and rising food prices on poor households is therefore not yet reflected in
the figures.

The International Labour Organization Reports on Child Labour statistics and

trends published in the 2010 progress report, from ILO TV.
top
Causes of Child Labour
Poverty is the main cause of child labour. Poor parents send their children to work,
not out of choice, but for reasons of economic expediency. The hunting grounds for
child traffickers are invariably areas of the most extreme poverty where families
have exhausted all other strategies for survival.
Poverty is also a symptom of child labour. Denial of education blocks the escape
route from poverty for the next generation of the household.
Other factors may provoke this cycle; for example, schools in poor countries are
often inaccessible or prohibitively expensive, with inadequate teaching and
classroom resources.
Many agricultural economies involve seasonal migration
for whole families, to the detriment of schooling and
inevitable employment of children. Cultural pressures
too can undermine perception of the long term value of
education, especially for girl children.
Charikar High School,
Afghanistan Beth
Economic setbacks arising from recession, climate
Bolitho
disaster, conflict or family bereavement will therefore
regenerate the supply side of the child labour equation. This has been one
consequence of HIV and AIDS in Africa - household resources have been depleted by

prolonged absence from work and by medical expenses.

This supply of child labour is matched by the demand of unscrupulous employers for
a cheap and flexible workforce. This attribute appeals especially to small-scale
enterprises, including those whose owners exploit their own family members.
There is perceived value in the particular skills that childrens dexterity can offer; for
example in weaving or in tasks involving crop seeds. Girl children are in demand for
domestic service, the invisible nature of which adds to their vulnerability to abuse.
Absence from official statistics is also the fate of those girls kept away from school
in order to work for their own families in the home or on the land.

Extreme family poverty and the lack of free education drives young children on to
the streets of Karachi to work as best they can, from Al Jazeera English.
top
Child Labour Laws
Global political initiatives to combat child labour are undertaken by the International
Labour Organization (ILO). Technical support for governments, together with the
production of internationally recognised statistics, is provided by the ILOs
International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC).
The ILO has sponsored the two key instruments of international law. First, the 1973
Minimum Age Convention 138 establishes the obligation for countries to work
towards a minimum age of 15 for legal employment. Secondly,
the 1999 Convention 182 for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of
Child Labour calls on governments to identify and quantify the
incidence of such child labour, backed by national plans for its
elimination.
The ILO aims to achieve this goal by 2016, backed by its ten-year
Global Action Plan drawn up in 2006. Unfortunately, the ten
countries yet to ratify Convention 182 as at February 2011 included
India, Burma and Sierra Leone, countries with high incidence of the Child labour
worst forms of child labour.

ILO
Furthermore, many countries which have ratified the Convention
/International
are failing to set themselves time-bound objectives, the essential
Labour
driver for introducing national legislation and policy initiatives. A
Organisation
major review published by the ILO in 2010 says that the pace of
progress is not fast enough to achieve the 2016 target."

Although almost every country has laws prohibiting the employment of children
below a certain age, legislation is difficult to draft and too often proves ineffective.
New laws periodically introduced in South Asia are shrugged off by hardened
business owners and disillusioned campaigners alike.
Laws tend to be particularly impotent where the state itself is economically
dependent on child labour. As the worlds third largest cotton exporter, the
Uzbekistan government becomes an active agent in child labour by closing schools
at harvest time. Laws introduced under international pressure have failed to break
up this institutionalized abuse of children.
Malawi is dependent on the labour-intensive tobacco crop for most of its foreign
exchange. Here too legislation for a minimum working age had made little
difference to widespread engagement of children on the farms.
Extra-territorial laws which attempt to overcome the weakness of Convention 182
on the special vulnerability of girl children have had greater success. Nationals from
many European countries and the US can now be charged at home for engaging a
child prostitute in countries such as Thailand.

A combination of ineffective laws and crippling poverty ensure that children

continue to work for Indias carpet industry, from AlJazeera English.
top
Development Solutions to Child Labour
A rights-based approach to child labour, relying on laws and their enforcement, is a
necessary but insufficient solution to child labour. Broader human development
interventions relevant to the underlying causes must play a role.
The fight against child labour therefore shares common
ground with poverty reduction programmes, and would
benefit from greater recognition by them.
The connection is most apparent in the strategy of
conditional cash transfers (CCT), payments to poor
households made on condition that children attend
school and health clinics. The success of Brazil in greatly
reducing the incidence of child labour is in part
Child fruit seller in
attributed toBolsa Familia, recognised as the worlds
Zambia Manoocher
largest CCT programme.
Deghati / IRIN News
Progress towards education for all children is the

development indicator most closely linked with child labour. Every full-time student
is one less potential full-time child worker. There is correlation between those
countries lagging behind education targets and those in which child labour thrives,
such as Pakistan and Nepal.
Unfortunately, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for primary school
enrolment aims for a total of only five years of education, far less demanding than
implied by the Minimum Age Convention. Countries will be encouraged to follow the
example of the Indian government which, in 2009, introduced a law backing the
right of children to free and compulsory education from age 6 through to 14.
The integration of child labour concerns into national development strategies,
backed by effective legislation, is therefore the preferred route to a lasting solution.

Indias Midday Meals scheme illustrates how getting children into school keeps
them away from illegal labour, from ILO TV.
top
Consumer Campaigns
Failure to deal with child labour is an emotive issue in rich countries. Consumers are
sensitive to the track record of globalisation in driving labour costs and standards to
the bottom.
Disclosure of the use of child labour in a supply chain represents amajor public
relations disaster for both multinational companies and the host countries
concerned. Even Apple, one of the worlds most respected corporations, faced a
crisis in 2010 in admitting the presence of child labour in a Chinese factory
producing the iPhone.
The 2010 World Cup re-awakened old controversies over
the role of children in sewing soccer balls. Although
doubts linger, the long-established partnership between
ILO, the world football authority - FIFA, and factory
owners in the region of Sialkot in Pakistan is generally
regarded as a success.
However, general attempts to develop a certification
label to reassure consumers that goods are child labour
free have struggled to establish credibility.
Child labour in Pakistan
David Swanson/IRIN / IRIN
Manufacturers in developing countries often subcontract News
labour-intensive segments of the product to backstreet

producers which are very difficult to trace. And there is confusing overlap with
standards that are equally important for adult workers.
One of few successful certification schemes is the GoodWeave label which protects
the carpet industry and focuses largely on child labour issues, including
rehabilitation. GoodWeave International claims that more than half a million
weaving jobs previously occupied by children in South Asia have been replaced with
adult labour.
A much less convincing example is the cocoa industry in West Africa, with particular
focus on the troubled country of Cote dIvoire. As long ago as 2001, US Senators
Harkin and Engel drew up an agreed programme to certify chocolate products but
the deadlines have been missed repeatedly.
Hershey, the leading retailer of chocolate in the US, has been singled out for making
insufficient efforts to support poverty reduction programmes in the countries
concerned. Almost 300,000 children are believed to perform hazardous work on the
cocoa farms, many of them trafficked from Mali and Burkina Faso in conditions of
bonded labour.
Many governments respond to public opinion by introducing conditions relating to
child labour in trade agreements or laws. A leading example is the 2008 US Farm
Bill which includes a voluntary directive for companies to establish whether an
imported agricultural product has been associated with child labour.
Many campaigners are uncomfortable with these linkages which some interpret as
protectionism. They prefer that child labour be addressed by explicit and
enforceable domestic laws.
top
Child Soldiers
The recruitment of children under age 15 for military purposes is a war crime under
a statute of the International Criminal Court. Although progress is slow, the Court is
currently pursuing its first case in this category - against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a
militia leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2007 the
war crimes court for Sierra Leone was successful in convicting
three warlords for the use of child soldiers.
These landmarks are tempered by the knowledge that children
remain vulnerable in countries suffering longstanding civil conflict,
in regions of extreme poverty or complete breakdown of central
authority. For example, residents of camps for refugees and
internally displaced persons such as those in Somalia, Sudan and

Children at
war in DRC
Amnesty
International

Chad are particularly at risk.

The proliferation of lightweight but deadly small arms of sophisticated modern
design enables a cheap, acquiescent and expendable army to be conscripted by
warlords. A child of ten can be trained to strip down a Kalashnikov.
Despite the ending of various civil wars and release of tens of thousands of child
soldiers in the period since 2004, the UN still names as many as 16 armies and
groups where recruitment continues. An estimated total of up to 300,000 children
are in military service, including a significant proportion of girls.
There may be as many as 70,000 child soldiers engaged by government and rebel
armies in Burma, the country named as the worst offender. Rape and sexual
violence are rampant, especially within groups in The Democratic Republic of Congo
and amongst the Lords Resistance Army which was formed originally in Northern
Uganda.
Campaigners are putting pressure on over 60 countries which have so far failed to
sign the Optional Protocols to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Drawn up in 2000, these Protocols prevent recruitment of children under 18 for
hostilities.
They are supported by the 2007 Paris Commitments and Principles, a set of
practical guidelines for the process of disarmament, demobilisation and
reintegration which is particularly sensitive for children, often psychologically
disturbed by violence.
The UN's efforts appeared to have been supported in the tough Child Soldiers
Prevention Act passed in the US in 2008. The Act prohibits military assistance for
countries which turn a blind eye to the engagement of child soldiers.
However, the intent of the Act has already been undermined by acontroversial
waiver approved by President Obama in 2010. This allows US support to continue
for Chad, DRC, Sudan, and Yemen.

Labour rights is a very broad issue; however, it can be boiled down to the
protection and respect of human life in the workplace and the right to work itself.
Some components of labour rights are the rights to job safety, collective bargaining,
and equal pay for equal work.
Labour rights vary by country, however the International Labour Organization (ILO)
provides universal standards and guidelines. The ILO, a part of the UN, aims to
provide guidance and standards for labour practices around the world.

One labour issue that the ILO is making progress on is child labour. According to
UNICEF (http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_childlabour.html) an estimated 246
million children are working, and nearly three quarters of those children are working
in hazardous places like mines, or working with dangerous tools like machinery and
pesticides. A large number of child labourers are girls and are susceptible to sexual
exploitation. While most everyone agrees that child labour cannot be condoned, the
issue is complex. Impoverished families or parents who are unable to work depend
on their childrens income source for survival. The cycle of poverty and its gendered
implications must be adequately addressed so families can find other means to
survive.
When it comes to labour rights for the general population, in many places around
the world people have to work in sweatshops that have questionable labour policies
in order to make a living. Defenders of sweatshops argue that without the factories,
the workers wouldnt have a job. Labour activists note that a major problem of
sweatshops is the awful treatment of workers and the lack of opportunity. Workers
deserve respect and safety from harm.
There are other labour rights issues that need global attention like bonded labour
people forced to work to pay off debts of ancestors. And human traffickingOther
issues include, but arent limited to, maternity rights, living wages, working time,
gender equality, decent work, and of course, unionization. Freedom of association is
essential because it allows people to discuss matters: whether they are political or
social- and act on them as well. This issue is so important that it is "at the core of
the ILOs values."
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 schoolrelated work).[2] 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. [3]
The incidence of child labour in the world decreased from 25 to 10 percent between
1960 and 2003, according to the World Bank

Historical

Child labourer, New Jersey, 1910

During the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production factories with
dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions.[5] 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.[6] 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 blackingfactory,
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,[7] 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 millswere
described as children.[8] 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.

Two girls protesting child labour (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York City Labor Day parade.

In coal mines, children would crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults. [9]
Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling matches, flowers and
other cheap goods.[7] Some children undertook work asapprentices 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.
[10]

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 1118 should work
a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 911 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.
[11]

In 1910, over 2 million children in the same age group were employed in the United States. [12]

Present day

A young boy recycling garbage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2006

See also: Children's rights

Child labour is still common in some parts of the world, it can be factory work, mining,[13] 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 housesfar
from the reach of official labour inspectors and from media scrutiny." And all the work that they did was
done in all types of weather; and was also done for minimal pay. As long as there is family poverty there
will be child labour.[14]
According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 250 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labour worldwide,
excluding child domestic labour.[15] The United Nations and the International Labor Organization consider
child labour exploitative,[16][17] 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.[17]
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. [18]

A boy repairing a tire in Gambia

In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998)[19] 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.[20]
Child labour accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin America, 1% in US,
Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations.[21] The proportion of child labourers varies a lot among
countries and even regions inside those countries.

Recent child labour incidents

This section's tone or style may not reflect the formal tone used on
Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See
Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (February 2011)

Young girl working on a loom in At Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.

Meatpacking
In early August 2008, Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that his department had found
thatAgriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking company in Postville which had recently been raided
by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had employed 57 minors, some as young as 14, in violation of
state law prohibiting anyone under 18 from working in a meatpacking plant. Neil announced that he was
turning the case over to the state Attorney General for prosecution, claiming that his department's inquiry
had discovered "egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowa's child labor
laws."[22] Agriprocessors claimed that it was at a loss to understand the allegations. Agriprocessors' CEO
went to trial on these charges in state court on May 4, 2010. After a five-week trial he was found not guilty
of all 57 charges of child labour violations by the Black Hawk County District Court jury in Waterloo, Iowa,
on June 7, 2010.[23]

Firestone

The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company operate a metal plantation in Liberia which is the focus of a
global campaign called Stop Firestone. Workers on the plantation are expected to fulfil a high production
quota or their wages will be halved, so many workers brought children to work. The International Labor
Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Firestone (The International Labor Fund vs. The Firestone Tire and
Rubber Company) in November 2005 on behalf of current child labourers and their parents who had also
been child labourers on the plantation. On June 26, 2007, the judge in this lawsuit in Indianapolis,
Indiana, denied Firestone's motion to dismiss the case and allowed the lawsuit to proceed on child labour
claims.

GAP
After the news of child labourers working in embroidery industry was uncovered in the Sunday
Observer on 28 October 2007, BBA activists swung into action. The GAP Inc. in a statement accepted
that the child labourers were working in production of GAP Kids blouses and has already made a
statement to pull the products from the shelf.[24][25] In spite of the documentation of the child labourers
working in the high-street fashion and admission by all concerned parties, only the SDM (Sub-divisional
Magistrate) could not recognise these children as working under conditions of slavery and bondage.
Distraught and desperate that these collusions by the custodians of justice, founder of BBA Kailash
Satyarthi, Chairperson of Global March Against Child Labour appealed to the Honorable Chief Justice of
Delhi High Court through a letter at 11.00 pm.[26] This order by the Honorable Chief Justice comes when
the government is taking an extremely reactionary stance on the issue of child labour in sweatshops in
India and threatening 'retaliatory measures' against child rights organisations. [27]
In a parallel development, Global March Against Child labour and BBA are in dialogue with the GAP Inc.
and other stakeholders to work out a positive strategy to prevent the entry of child labour in to sweatshops
and device a mechanism of monitoring and remedial action. GAP Inc. Senior Vice President, Dan Henkle
in a statement said: "We have been making steady progress, and the children are now under the care of
the local government. As our policy requires, the vendor with which our order was originally placed will be
required to provide the children with access to schooling and job training, pay them an ongoing wage and
guarantee them jobs as soon as they reach the legal working age. We will now work with the local
government and with Global March to ensure that our vendor fulfils these obligations." [28][29]
On October 28, Joe Eastman, president of Gap North America, responded, "We strictly prohibit the use of
child labor. This is non-negotiable for us and we are deeply concerned and upset by this allegation. As
we've demonstrated in the past, Gap has a history of addressing challenges like this head-on, and our
approach to this situation will be no exception. In 2006, Gap Inc. ceased business with 23 factories due to

code violations. We have 90 people located around the world whose job is to ensure compliance with our
Code of Vendor Conduct. As soon as we were alerted to this situation, we stopped the work order and
prevented the product from being sold in stores. While violations of our strict prohibition on child labor in
factories that produce product for the company are extremely rare, we have called an urgent meeting with
our suppliers in the region to reinforce our policies." [30]

H&M
In December 2009, campaigners in the UK called on two leading high street retailers to stop selling
clothes made with cotton which may have been picked by children. Anti-Slavery International and
theEnvironmental Justice Foundation (EJF) accused H&M and Zara of using cotton suppliers in
Bangladesh. It is also suspected that many of their raw materials originates from Uzbekistan, where
children aged 10 are forced to work in the fields. The activists were calling to ban the use of Uzbek cotton
and implement a "track and trace" systems to guarantee an ethical responsible source of the material.
H&M said it "does not accept" child labour and "seeks to avoid" using Uzbek cotton, but admitted it did
"not have any reliable methods" to ensure Uzbek cotton did not end up in any of its products.Inditex, the
owner of Zara, said its code of conduct banned child labour.[31]

India
Main article: Child labour in India
In 1997, research indicated that the number of child labourers in the silk-weaving industry in the district of
Kanchipuram in India exceeded 40,000. This included children who were bonded labourers to loom
owners. Rural Institute for Development Education undertook many activities to improve the situation of
child labourers. Working collaboratively, RIDE brought down the number of child labourers to less than
4,000 by 2007.
On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan, [32] with the help of the Labour Department
and NGO Pratham mounted the country's biggest ever raid for child labour rescue in the Eastern part of
New Delhi, the capital of India. The process resulted in rescue of 480 children from over 100 illegal
embroidery factories operating in the crowded slum area of Seelampur. For next few weeks, government,
media http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr050708laterdayslave.asp and NGOs were
in a frenzy over the exuberant numbers of young boys, as young as 56 year olds, released from
bondage. This rescue operation opened the eyes of the world to the menace of child labour operating
right under the nose of the largest democracy in the whole world.

Next few years Junned Khan did extensive campaigning on the issue of children involved in hazardous
labour,[33] advocating with the central and state governments for formulation of guidelines for rescue and
rehabilitation of children affected by child labour. In 2005, after the rescue, Junned Khan, collaborated
with BBA to file petition in the Delhi High Court for formulation of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of
child labour. In the following years, Delhi's NGOs, came together with the Delhi Government and
formulated an Action Plan for Rescue and Rehabilitation of child labour.[34]

Primark
BBC recently reported[35] on Primark using child labour in the manufacture of clothing. In particular, a
4.00 hand embroidered shirt was the starting point of a documentary produced
by BBC'sPanorama programme. The programme asks consumers to ask themselves, "Why am I only
paying 4 for a hand embroidered top? This item looks handmade. Who made it for such little cost?", in
addition to exposing the violent side of the child labour industry in countries where child exploitation is
prevalent. As a result of the programme, Primark took action and sacked the relevant companies, and
reviewed their supplier procedures.
Child labour is also often used in the production of cocoa powder, used to make chocolate.
See Economics of cocoa.

Defence of child labour

Child workers on a farm in Maine, October 1940

Wasim, a child labourer, works at a tea stall - cleaning glasses and serving customers, inIndore, India.( 9 July 2010)

Concerns have often been raised over the buying public's moral complicity in purchasing products
assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labour. However, others have
raised concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child labour may force these children to
turn to more dangerous or strenuous professions, such as prostitution or agriculture. For example,
a UNICEF study found that after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated
50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to
jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution", jobs that are "more hazardous and
exploitative than garment production". The study suggests that boycotts are "blunt instruments with longterm consequences, that can actually harm rather than help the children involved." [14]
According to Milton Friedman, before the Industrial Revolution virtually all children worked in agriculture.
During the Industrial Revolution many of these children moved from farm work to factory work. Over time,
as real wages rose, parents became able to afford to send their children to school instead of work and as
a result child labour declined, both before and after legislation. [36] Austrian school economist Murray
Rothbard said that British and American children of the pre- and post-Industrial Revolution lived and
suffered in infinitely worse conditions where jobs were not available for them and went "voluntarily and
gladly" to work in factories.[37]
British historian and socialist E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class draws a
qualitative distinction between child domestic workand participation in the wider (waged) labour market.
[5]

Further, the usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current

trends has been disputed. Social historian Hugh Cunningham, author of Children and Childhood in
Western Society Since 1500, notes that:

"Fifty years ago it might have been assumed that, just as child labour had declined in the
developed world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so it would also, in a trickledown fashion, in the rest of the world. Its failure to do that, and its re-emergence in the developed
world, raise questions about its role in any economy, whether national or global." [36]
According to Thomas DeGregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston, in an article
published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank operating in Washington D.C., "it is clear that
technological and economic change are vital ingredients in getting children out of the workplace and
into schools. Then they can grow to become productive adults and live longer, healthier lives.
However, in poor countries like Bangladesh, working children are essential for survival in many
families, as they were in our own heritage until the late 19th century. So, while the struggle to end
child labour is necessary, getting there often requires taking different routesand, sadly, there are
many political obstacles.[38]
The International Labour Organizations International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour
(IPEC), founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labour. It operates in 88 countries and is the largest
program of its kind in the world.[39] IPEC works with international and government agencies, NGOs,
the media, and children and their families to end child labour and provide children with education
and assistance