Abstract
Child labor occurs on almost every continent in the world. Very few countries seem to escape this exploitative phase as they develop into fully industrialized countries. Child labor began during the eighteenth century in Great Britain and it continues in the twenty-first century in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras. This paper offers an explanation for the persistence of child labor through history. The increase in the employment of children during industrialization is caused by an increase in the supply of children from poor and working-class families and an increase in the demand for child labor by the factory owners. Parents trapped in poverty have no other choice but to send their children off to work to contribute to the family income. Children’s wages, moreover, often make the difference between starvation and survival. Employers are happy to oblige the parents because children are more productive than adults in the new industrial regimen. As the principle of the division of labor has been applied to the production process, unskilled children replace skilled adults in factories, mills, and mines. Children are preferred to adults because they are cheap, submissive, uneducated and nimble. These economic forces are so strong that neither child labor laws nor mandatory schooling legislation are an effective deterrent against employers or families. Since history is repeating itself in the developing world by industrializing on the backs of children, alternative policies are recommend to cut this stage short so that the future generations of Latin America will become educated instead of exploited.
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Notes
Internal trafficking occurs when a child is sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, domestic servitude or arranged marriages within a country whereas external trafficking occurs when the child is sold across borders.
A maquiladora is a foreign-owned firm which assembles goods for export.
Refer to the article by Tuttle in Research in Economic History, Volume 18, pp. 53–82, “A Revival of the Pessimist View: Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution” which discusses the child labor debate.
A viable alternative would be to use the ILO Minimum Age Convention 138 to define the age of childhood. This 1999 Convention states that the minimum age for children “should not be less than the age for completing compulsory schooling and in no event less than age 15” (ILO, 1996, p. 24). Unfortunately schooling laws set different ages across the countries included in Latin America. This would make it very difficult to make country comparisons using statistical data.
Biased technological change was a term dubbed by Tuttle in her 1999 book, Hard at Work in Factories and Mines: the Economics of Child Labor during the British Industrial Revolution. She argues that when a country develops it may adopt technological change that favors hiring children over adults. It is made up of three components: labor intensive, labor-substituting, and labor-specific. Labor intensive techniques are often used when machinery can be automated and the principle of the division of labor can be applied to the production process. This allows unskilled workers to replace skilled workers in performing simple one step tasks. If innovations in machinery cause the level of skill and strength to fall, cheap unskilled labor can substitute for expensive skilled labor. And in some industries machines or the work situation are confined that only small children can perform the tasks (machines low to the ground or thin seams in coal mines).
It has been estimated that there are over 100 million street children worldwide, 17 million in Brazil. These street children will often sniff glue and other aerosols to get high because their life is so hopeless (Rizzini & Lusk, 1995, pp. 391–400).
Trafficking takes place when children are bought and sold across national borders into domestic service, prostitution, pornography, or the sale of drugs. According to the ILO, there are five known international networks trafficking children between continents (ILO, 1996, p. 16).
Throughout this paper, exploitation encompasses both the “hard times” view and the “neoclassical view.” According to the “hard times” view, exploitation is associated with low wages, long hours and harsh treatment (Nardinelli, 1988, p. 244). The neoclassical definition claims that workers are exploited whenever they are paid less than the value of their marginal product (Nardinelli, 1990, p. 68).
Such labor violations could include employing underage workers, making people work past the maximum hours set, requiring that workers work overtime, locking exit doors, and not paying the national minimum wage.
See for example the wages reported in the British Parliamentary Papers, for the British Industrial Revolution (1834 (167) XIX, Supplementary Report, Part I, pp. 19–39).
Convention # 138 sets the minimum age for employment at 15 or the age for compulsory schooling, whichever is higher. In addition, it sets the minimum age for hazardous work at 18. An exception is made, however, when the economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed, the minimum age is 14 (ILO, 1996, pp. 23–27).
ILO Convention #182 requires ratifying nations to prohibit and eliminate the worst forms of child labor. The worst forms of child labor are defined as: (1) all forms of slavery; (2) child prostitution and pornography; (3) child trafficking and children used for the sale of drugs or any other illicit activity; and (4) children performing any type of work that will harm their health, safety, or morals (U.S. Department of Labor, 2004, p. xliv).
For a complete discussion on solutions to world poverty see chapters 12 and 13 in Jeffrey Sachs (2005) book.
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Tuttle, C. History Repeats Itself: Child Labor in Latin America. Employ Respons Rights J 18, 143–154 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9012-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9012-0