Child Labor - The Facts

Quoted from No Sweat: How Levi Strauss and Reebok Cleaned Up Child Labor in the Sporting Goods Industry

According to the International Labor Organization (www.ilo.org), 211 million children ages 5-14 are still suffering under the conditions of child labor, and this brand of child labor is not Hollywood style—kids singing, dancing and playacting for a living, getting personal tutoring, their own crafts table and a trust fund for college. The internationally recognized definition of child labor excludes children 12 and older, who are just working a few hours of light work each week. It focuses instead on children 15 and under whose work is hazardous, who are not given adequate education and who are, many times, forced to work under subhuman conditions.

According to the ILO, 171 million children ages 5-17 are working in hazardous situations, with 8.4 million involved in the worst forms of child labor, like trafficking (1.2 million children), forced and bonded labor (5.7 million), war (300,000), prostitution (1.8 million) and illicit activities (600,000). The conditions under which these children are forced to work read like a sordid headline from the Industrial Revolution--lack of light and/or ventilation, extreme heat and/or cold and backbreaking labor that can result in death, maiming and/or loss of limb, not to mention the lifelong psychological damage of war, prostitution and corruption. Some of the worst occupations and situations that these kids have been subject to include: airport runways, railway stations, dangerous animals, brick manufacturing, care for mentally disturbed individuals, carpet weaving, night clubs and bars, machinery, prisons, mining, war, asbestos, mercury, radioactive substances and corpses.

So what can we do about it?