A REPORT in a local daily mentioned that almost 93 percent of the 7.3 million children worked in unrecognised industries like moulding workshops and those producing rope and balloons, as per an ILO survey of 2002-03. Most of these labourers worked over 13 hours a day in deplorable conditions for wages as low as Tk 30 a day. In 2011, the then UNICEF Country Director Carel De Rooy was frustrated at the child labour scenario in Bangladesh and the government’s indifference to the issue given that half of the country’s population were children. Grown up in Brazil, Rooy recollected how denial of a dignified life turned generations of children into criminals only in four decades. He compared the situation in Bangladesh to the one prevailing in Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya.
Child labour was employed to varying extents through most of history. Before 1940, numerous children aged 5-14 worked in Europe, the United States and various colonies of European powers. These children worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining. The International Labour Organization says that around 215 million children today are working, many of them full time. But on the World Day Against Child Labour, Thursday, an international children’s advocate says halting the practice may do more harm than good, and that creating an age barrier to hiring children is too simplistic to solve a complex social and economic problem.
Laws banning children from work can have unintended consequences. In Bangladesh, studies show that when about 50,000 children were barred from garment factory work in 1992, very few attended schools but instead were forced into worse forms of labour, their incomes were cut, their diets “deteriorated seriously” and they used health care services much less. Removing children from visible work can push them into less protected areas, like the sex trade. Child labour has since returned to the factories, and so have perilous conditions.
The ILO says that underage work can have devastating consequences for many children. “They do not go to school and have little or no time to play,” it says. “More than half of them are exposed to the worst forms of child labour such as work in hazardous environments, slavery or other forms of forced labour, illicit activities including drug trafficking and prostitution as well as involvement in armed conflict.”
If children are not working in dangerous or degrading conditions, they can gain some advantage from their jobs by learning “hard” employment-centred skills, and “soft” skills of responsibility and managing their lives. Working children who are only 10 to 14 years old take so much pride in their work. They have strength and resilience. They are strong human beings who care about their community and the world. It is unfortunate that due to the extremely high levels of inefficiency present in our system of governance we cannot do anything for the true treasures of our society. While child labour declines is correlated to increases in real GDP per capita, studies have shown that a more important reason why it falls is due to the social attitudes of parents — if they are more educated they keep their kids in school and kids who don’t work tend to be better educated. So a comprehensive approach which would try to educate parents socially is a very good way to eliminate child labour.
