From Child Labour to Working Children’s Movements

Abstract

If we look at children’s work from a world history perspective, children have always played an active role in the economy and have worked as soon as they were able to. At first playfully imitating the working kin in whose vicinity they spent most of their time, they gradually learned to lend a helping hand in and around the household, normally growing into full-fledged workers only in their teens. The industrial revolution made some of this work — for which I reserve the use of the term ‘child labour’ — problematic. Child labour was typically conceived as a fairly recent phenomenon limited to industrial societies in Western Europe and North America, distinct from the more mundane activities which children continued to undertake. It came to be closely related to the notion of exploitation and fuelled a growing public sensitivity to the wrongs it implied in respect to children. The prohibition of child labour became a major post staking out the project of modern childhood. But it also gave more mundane activities that did not qualify as child labour, such as helping out in and around the home, working on the land and in the household and going to school, a positive flavour that they often did not deserve.