Child labour

• 1. Introduction

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  Child labour is any work that interferes with a child's ability to attend regular school, or that harms them mentally, physically, socially or morally. In the world's poorest countries, around one in five children are engaged in it, and in sub-Saharan Africa the figure rises above one in four. UNICEF and the ILO estimated that 168 million children aged 5 to 17 were involved in child labour in 2013. Behind those numbers sits a longer story. Why did children as young as four once climb into chimneys and tend factory machines? What turned this from an accepted, legal practice into something nearly every country now bans? And why, despite all those laws, do millions of children still work today? The answers run through cotton mills and cocoa farms, through Karl Marx and Lewis Hine, and through the question of whether poverty, not cruelty, is the real engine.

• 2. Before Childhood Existed

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  In pre-industrial societies, there was rarely a concept of childhood in the modern sense. Children began to take part in child rearing, hunting and farming as soon as they were competent, and in many societies a 13-year-old was already treated as an adult. These were economies marked by low productivity and short life expectancy. A child's labour was not an abuse to be corrected. It was a contribution that the survival of the group depended on, and keeping children from productive work would have harmed everyone's welfare in the long run. Schooling held little value here, especially in non-literate societies. Most skill and knowledge could pass from one generation to the next through direct mentoring or apprenticing by competent adults. A child learned the trade by doing the trade. That arrangement held for most of human history, until a new kind of workplace began drawing whole populations off the land and into the growing cities.

• 3. The Victorian Workshop

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  With the Industrial Revolution arriving in Britain in the late 18th century, the exploitation of child labour climbed sharply. Small villages such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool swelled into large cities, fed by a population growing on the back of rising agricultural output. The Victorian era became notorious for the conditions it imposed. Children as young as four worked in factories and mines under often fatal conditions, and boys that age, frequently orphans, were sent up chimneys as sweeps. That last job carried a grim distinction. Percivall Pott's discovery of chimney sweeps' carcinoma, a cancer afflicting sweeps, was the first recognised form of occupational cancer. Economic hardship drove all of it. In 19th-century Britain, one-third of poor families had no breadwinner because of death or abandonment, forcing children to earn from a young age. In 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills in England and Scotland were described as children, and their wages ran as little as 10 to 20 percent of an adult man's. The author Charles Dickens himself was once a factory worker. Karl Marx attacked the system in vivid terms, saying British industries "could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood too." The poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon condemned the practice in her 1835 poem "The Factory," and pointedly folded portions of it into her 18th Birthday Tribute to Princess Victoria in 1837.

• 4. The Long Retreat

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  Britain passed its first act to regulate child labour in 1803, at the very dawn of the industrial age. Factory Acts followed, and a series of chimney sweepers' acts steadily raised the minimum age for that trade, with Lord Shaftesbury emerging as an outspoken advocate for reform. The historian Colin Heywood traced how left-leaning historians later told this story. It begins, in their telling, with young people dragooned into mills, mines and factories, where new machinery let owners substitute women and children for adult men. The workshops were damp, dusty and disciplined without mercy. Then a disparate group of reformers stepped forward, including hardheaded businessmen, philanthropic gentry, and in the American case, leaders of organized labor. Through trial and error, Heywood wrote, the state gradually managed to curb the worst excesses, "notably excluding younger age-groups from workshops, overcoming opposition from many industrialists and working-class parents in the process." Census figures track the slow decline. The share of boys aged 10 to 14 counted as child labour in England and Wales fell from 26.0 percent in 1891 to 18.3 percent by 1911, though those are averages. In Lancashire the rate reached 80 percent. As technology spread, employers needed educated workers, and the eventual arrival of compulsory schooling pulled children out of the workshop and into the classroom. By 1933, England and Wales adopted legislation restricting the employment of children under 14.

• 5. Hidden In Plain Sight

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  By 1900, an estimated 1.7 million children under 15 were employed in American industry, and by 1910 the figure topped 2 million. They rolled cigarettes, doffed bobbins in textile mills, dug coal and worked in canneries. In glassmaking, thousands of boys faced furnaces that had to melt glass at 3,133 degrees Fahrenheit. Because the furnaces burned constantly, boys worked night shifts from 5:00 pm to 3:00 am, and because they were paid by the piece, they laboured for hours without a break. The result was eye trouble, lung ailments, heat exhaustion, cuts and burns. One man set out to make this visible. Lewis Hine took photographs of working children between 1908 and 1917 as the staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, capturing the plight of children across the American south. Yet factories and mines were never the whole picture. As reformers pushed work out of regulated factories, much of it simply moved into urban homes. Families, and women in particular, welcomed home-based manufacturing because it generated income alongside household duties. In France, over 58 percent of garment workers operated from home, and in Germany the number of full-time home operations nearly doubled between 1882 and 1907. American families turned out garments, shoes, artificial flowers, feathers, match boxes, toys and umbrellas seven days a week, with children aged 5 to 14 working beside their parents. In 1946, Frieda S. Miller, then Director of the United States Department of Labor, told the ILO these home operations meant "low wages, long hours, child labour, unhealthy and insanitary working conditions."

• 6. An Empire Of Apprentices

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  Between 1650 and 1950, the systematic use of child labour was commonplace across the colonies of European powers. In Africa, colonial administrators encouraged hiring a whole household rather than just the adults, and millions of children worked on agricultural plantations, in mines and in domestic service. Children aged 5 to 14 were taken on as unpaid apprentices in exchange for learning a craft. A system of Pauper Apprenticeships emerged in the 19th century in which a colonial master needed neither the parents' nor the child's approval to send a child to labour at a distant farm. Law and taxation did the rest. Britain passed the Master and Servant Act 1889, followed by a Tax and Pass Law, offering native men legal ownership of some land in exchange for making the labour of their wives and children available. A Head Tax in the British and French empires fell on everyone older than 8 in some colonies, and to pay it children had to work. The justifications shifted by region. In southeast Asian colonies such as Hong Kong, the Mui tsai system was excused as cultural tradition, while Dutch East India Company officials framed child labour as a way to "save children from a worse fate." Christian mission schools from Zambia to Nigeria required work from children and gave religious rather than secular education in return, while Canada's Breaches of Contract Act set jail terms for uncooperative child workers. Proposals to regulate colonial child labour had begun as early as 1786.

• 7. The Map Of Work Today

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  Two out of three child workers labour alongside their parents in unpaid family work, a fact that overturns the common image of children chained to factory machines. If every child aged 5 to 17 in any economic activity is counted, estimates run between 250 and 304 million. About 60 percent of child labour is agricultural, in farming, dairy, fisheries and forestry, while another 25 percent works in services like hawking goods, polishing shoes, picking through trash or domestic help. The work concentrates in rural areas, around 70 percent, and the informal urban sector, about 26 percent. Fewer than 3 percent of child labourers aged 5 to 14 work outside their household. The burden falls unevenly across the globe. Child labour makes up 32 percent of the workforce in Africa, 22 percent in Asia, 17 percent in Latin America, and just 1 percent in the United States, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations. Asia holds the largest absolute number at about 114 million, while Africa carries over 65 million and the highest incidence rate. Some of the picture stays deliberately obscured. The extent of child labour in China is unclear because the government categorises the data as "highly secret," and in 2014 the U.S. Department of Labor attributed 12 goods to China, including electronics, garments, toys and coal, produced by underage and indentured workers alike. The Maplecroft Child Labour Index 2012 ranked Myanmar, North Korea and Somalia as the three highest-risk countries for companies operating worldwide.

• 8. Laws, Loopholes, And A Hard Question

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  The ILO's Minimum Age Convention of 1973 has been ratified by 171 countries, defining the lines between prohibited work, light work and hazardous work by age. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1990 and now joined by 196 countries, defines a child as anyone below 18 and requires states to make primary education compulsory and free. One nation has still not ratified it. The only holdout is the United States. The ILO calls poverty the single greatest cause of child labour, since a working child's income, even when small, can supply between 25 and 40 percent of a household's earnings. Yet the lawmaking carries its own exceptions and tensions. The United States amended the Fair Labor Standards Act in 2004 to let certain Amish children work with their families around wood-processing machinery, honouring a community that believes children learn best on the job. Scholars themselves split on the path forward. Some want a blanket ban on all work by anyone under 18, arguing it depresses adult wages and traps poor economies in low-skill exports. Others counter that child labour is merely a symptom of poverty, and that banning the work which keeps families alive would only push children into less visible, more hazardous occupations. In poor countries such as Ethiopia, Chad, Niger and Nepal, these scholars note, the alternatives to work can be subsistence farming, militia or prostitution. Their reading of the history is pointed. Early 20th-century child labour in Europe and the United States, they argue, ended largely through economic development and rising prosperity, with the laws and ILO conventions arriving only afterward.