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Articles: Business | World Economy & Child labour
- Mr. T.R.Sridhar Prasad. Uppalapati.
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What can break this cycle? The ILO report calls for higher living standards, improved schools and effective mechanisms for monitoring child labor. That child labor is linked to poverty is 'widely acknowledged and undeniable.' Labor force participation rates for children 10-14 is 30-60 percent in countries with annual per capita income of $500 (US) or less [in 1987 prices]. When income rises to 501-1000 dollars, participation drops to 10-30 percent.5 'No one would argue with the general proposition that child labor is both a result and a cause of poverty.
Household poverty pushes children into the labor market to earn money to supplement family income or even to survive. Evidence is also clear that, by lowering human capital accumulation, child labor perpetuates household poverty across generations and thereby slows national economic growth and social development.'.
If the global phenomenon of child labor appears today as a ubiquitous feature of economic life, it is hardly a recent development. Some of the most moving passages in Karl Marx's Capital concern the length of the working day and the conditions of child laborers. We get a real sense of the nature of industrial work, of the ceaseless conflict between rapacious factory owners and generally powerless laborers, in the work's concrete and descriptively empirical chapter on the working day. Marx, we might say, sublimates his outrage at the conditions of laborers to create the systematic and rigorous understanding of the laws of motion of capitalist development.
Marx marshals myriad sources, including the observations of men of the cloth and government inspectors, in describing the manufacturing employer's 'werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor.' The capitalist in basic manufacturing is endlessly enterprising in extending the length of the working day. Even slave-owning conquistadors were no more cruel.8 Marx relies heavily upon ordinary newspaper reports and official government investigatory documents.
In the lace trade, in Nottingham, England,children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate...The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally and spiritually.
Marx goes on to cite depositions given by children themselves, reported in documents of parliamentary inquiries. 'William Wood, 9 years old, 'was 7 years 10 months old when he began to work.' He 'ran moulds' (carried ready-molded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the very beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off at about 9 p.m.' Fifteen hours of work per day, six days a week, at the age of seven. Laborers in this industry, children and adults, suffered a high rate of pulmonary illnesses and short life expectancy.
The hand manufacture of matches led to a form of tetanus peculiar to workers in the industry. 'The manufacture of matches, on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness, has such a bad reputation that only the most miserable part of the working class, half- starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, their 'ragged, half-starved, untaught children'.' Some workers in this industry were as young as six. The working day extended from twelve to fifteen hours, including 'night-labor, irregular meal-times and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus.'
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