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Articles: Business | World Economy & Child labour
- Mr. T.R.Sridhar Prasad. Uppalapati.
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Long Cycles:
Child labor leads to a continuing cycle of poverty, even in countries undergoing a process of economic development. At an adequate income level, parents hardly wish to hold children back from education and advancement. It is abject poverty that forces parents to view their children as economic resources in the struggle for survival. But children who labor full-time (or more) for subsistence wages are permanently closed out of the possibility of educating themselves for skilled work. Thus poverty continues generation after generation.
The social movements which succeeded in placing such issues on national and international agendas for change have taken a long time to gestate. They are often politically confused, complicated webs drawing together a myriad of different interests, aiming at unattained goals but achieving results nevertheless. The experience of today's developed countries, as they were developing, contains lessons for social movements, antiglobalization activists and children's advocates. In the United States, for instance, child labor was uncontroversial in the colonial period, as children worked on family farms or would enter into trade apprenticeships between ages 10 and 14.
The rise of the factory system in the nineteenth century led to widespread employment of children as cheap laborers. Educational reformers in the mid-nineteenth century pressed for legislation that would establish wage minimums and school attendance requirements. These efforts at the social protection of children were stymied by the influx of southern and eastern European immigrants, the patchwork quality of American state legislation and the powerful interests who sought, for economic reasons, to confine the protective legislation.
Child labor grew such that by 1900, 18 percent of 10-15 year olds -- the official figure of 1.75 million -- were employed. One-quarter of southern cotton mill employees were under 15; half of these children were under 12.
The National Child Labor Committee was organized in 1904 to address the problem. Along with numerous state child labor groups, the movement 'pioneered the techniques of mass political action, including investigations by experts, the widespread use of photography to dramatize the poor conditions of children at work, pamphlets, leaflets and mass mailings to reach the public, and sophisticated lobbying.' Still, the political mood was such that little progress could be made. When Congress passed federal child labor laws in 1916 and 1918, they were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Child labor opponents managed to press for Congressional passage of a constitutional amendment authorizing federal child labor legislation in 1924; church groups and farm organizations prevented ratification.
Only under the New Deal was lasting progress finally achieved. The codes of the National Industrial Recovery Act sought to reduce child labor, but the codes as a whole were struck down as unconstitutional. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for the first time established national minimum wage and maximum hour standards, and established limitations on child labor.
Now children under 16 were effectively prohibited from manufacturing and mining employment.16 The political mood had of course changed, now making such legislation possible. The technical-economic situation had changed, as well -- the mechanization of jobs diminished the usefulness of unskilled child laborers. But the decades-long work of children's advocates was indispensable to the passage of any protective legislation at all.
The jermal children and their millions of brothers and sisters toil daily under the weight of grinding poverty. Their futures are bleak so long as subsistence is bought at the price of foregone education. Activists against poverty, globalization and sweatshops are working to awaken world consciousness to their plight. While this movement has been temporarily sidelined by the political reaction to September 11, perseverant and patient activism is indicated. In the coming decades, world-level labor standards, including a global minimum wage, comparable to the national legislation that elevated children out of sweatshop work in the early twentieth century, can be made central to the global social justice agenda
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