Child Labor: Beneficial in Some Circumstances?

The first one is right here:

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What are the under-14s to eat?

The magnitude of the problem cannot be overemphasised. Children who pick up scraps from the road are the ones who cannot get work. The ones who can get some work may never get rich on it, but they won't be waiting outside homes at night to salvage their meals from the garbage that is thrown outside for the municipal trucks to pick up in the morning.

It all boils down to money, of course. Government projects claim to release funds that will enable the rescue of at least 100,000 children from desperate conditions every year. However, the government takes the problem so seriously that not only do we not have any official figures on the number of children taken in, we also do not have any information about what happens to them. I've been to some of these homes -friends of mine have adopted children with extreme malnutrition, just skin and bones from homes like these. They have some staff, but teaching staff is inadequately trained [which may have something to do with the poor pay] and luxuries like food and clothing, medicines and healthcare, education and vocational training are dependent on the trickle of donations which may or may not arrive. Often conditions are so poor that children sleep without beds and eat inadequately - little and cheap food - and many run away [as my mother did] to the more bearable lifestyles offered by begging, prostitution and labour. For some reason, children cannot accustom themselves to living without food, basic comfort and security. Whats an arm or a leg when compared to one square meal a day?

The homes which do slightly better are the ones which use the children as labour for small scale industries - since they don't pay the children, they call it vocational training - but at least the children are able to eat. But even if ideally, government "welfare" was able to rescue 100,000 children every year, considering that roughly 2 million children enter the sex industry alone in the same time [we have no figures for the number of children entering the labour force] it would merely scratch the surface of the problem

Here is an example of what you may see in some of the homes provided for these "problem" children:

What you will find in many of these homes: inadequate nutrition, less than potable drinking water, skin infections, poor clothing, gangs, sunbstance abuse, violence...

 

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First, I don't see why birth control would be a part of this thread. Second, I also don't understand how one can attribute such resource depletion to population numbers when you can go to any food-service facility such as restaurants and supermarkets and see for yourself how much food is thrown away hourly.The fact that people complain about population without doing enough to reform resource-utilization leads me to believe that the real political interest behind population-control is political-economic control over human capital so that wealthy people can guarantee their position of power vis-a-vis those they don't want to extend their way of life to include. Third, I don't understand how you can attribute such to have few childern born when goods require labor to produce, and services are direct consumption of human labor, wealthier people are the ones creating more demand for human capital - and then complaining about over-population!

 

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In poor countries having lots of children is like insurance...in a society where there is no old age security.

 

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That nails it...perfectly!

 

but

We can minimize or eliminate both child labor and child prostitution.

 

This is how the public school system should function in poor countries...with a combination of labour, learning and LUNCH!

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The students arrive at 8am, work to support the cost of the school until 12pm when they prepare their own lunch, and then take classes in reading, writing and arithmetic until 4pm.

 

No they don't. Repetitive paid labor done for more than a couple of dozen hours a week stultifies and degrades adults as well as children - the only excuse is fending off extreme poverty, and most often that situational choice is imposed by bad politics.

Work does not make free.

That is unduly pessimistic. The money saved short term buy coercing child labor is normally lost long term in the absence of efficiencies possible with a healthy and capable work force of educated adults - and we're talking day labor and local economy here, where educated means basically literate and/or skill trained, not some fantasy of everyone taking in each other's lawsuits.

Industrial hour-paid child labor is normally - in most cases; Scientific American ran an article reviewing a few studies a couple of years ago - a low equilibrium trap maintained by a local economic elite. Higher eqs are nearby and possible, in almost all cases. There is no necessary hardship involved in converting to the higher eq, no sacrifice ovrall - industrial child labor is almost always a political problem, not an economic fact fo life.

That, I think, misleads. Most Americans live in "relative poverty" compared with an income of 250k. And the extremes of poverty we see in child labor economies are not necessary for the support of the incomes typical of comfortable American lives.

The major and most difficult feature of a child labor economy is its degradation of opportunity and compensation for the adults trapped in it - not only as a legacy of abused and damaged childhoods, but also in large part through the established low overall economic efficiency throughout the economy. Everybody is poorer in consequence - the better off as well.

Choices imposed by a small and powerful elite, nine times out of ten.

What will happen - continue to happen - to the children and adults of India - almost all of them - if industrial exploitation of industrially created refugee children is maintained at the foundation of the Indian economy in perpetuity?

 

Of course child labor is beneficial in some circumstances. So are sweatshops. This isn't slave labor, and so these people have a choice. They choose to work because the alternative is economically undesirable and while facing the choice between child labor or starvation is terrible, it beats having no option other than just starvation.

Some might say that child labor is always bad, and if the choice is between that or abject poverty, then we must eliminate both the child labor and the poverty. That's not an unfair thought, but it's also not exactly realistic in most places. Add to that that child labor doesn't cause poverty (the reverse is more true), so the better solution is to eliminate the abject poverty *first* and, if successful, then eliminate child labor.

 

Too simple.

Child labor does "cause" poverty, in the sense that its coercion establishes and maintains an economic structure that imposes poverty on some large fraction of the people within it. It is a major, possibly the major, factor in keeping many economies at low productivity equilibria. It prevents investment.

A revocation of the ban on industrial child labor in the US, for example, could easily lead to the impoverishment of Los Angeles and similar cities within a generation.

 

Except that child labour was practised all over the country during the greatest period of economic growth in the history of the world...America in the 19th century.

 

An absence of work makes you free...to starve.

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Common worldwide. As was slavery and indentured servitude. Easy to be king of a low hill, if also given numerous other advantages.

The unusual feature of the US was not its inherited and patchwork setups of child labor, which in any case fell apart under the pull of the various frontiers among other escapes, but its large investments in the parents and children (especially girls) of the (white, anyway) poor. At the launchings of their industrial revolutions everyone had child labor, perverted from earlier family-oriented employments of children. Many States of the US (the ones soon to be most prosperous, btw) had public schools for the poor, boys and girls, paid for by taxing the wealthy - and mandatory attendance.

Only if accompanied by denial of resources. Most people in human history have managed just fine without jobs.

 

Is that the voice of experience? Because believe me, that requires not only being able to access charity/welfare but also having the kind of mentality where notions of pride or honor don't stand in the way of accepting them. I know, for example, that even with the job she found in the hospital, my mother and her family lived on just one change of clothes for months at a time and considered meat and milk as luxuries which came by a couple of times a year. This was a kind of life lived for almost a decade before the girls came "of age" and could get a job which paid sufficiently to make ends meet. Like illegal immigrants children who work do not qualify for minimum wage or perks like vacations associated with jobs and to my mind all that legislation does is make them easy victims for exploitation. All the good intentions in the world are a poor substitute for a meal and a bed. And while my mother [and her siblings] decades of struggle eventually paid off and provided them with the kind of lifestyle and security they sought, it would have been easier if they could have worked for better pay rather than being consigned to ill equipped homes from which they were forced to run away.

Child labour is as much a problem because of those who have tunnel vision where childrens rights are concerned, as it is because of poor management of it by the government. Of all the people we have seen do well coming out of slums, not one has done so because of being rescued by welfare and all have come from childhoods where labour was a necessity for survival of both the children and their families.

 

Hey since you're where you are Sam, and it might occur to some reading the thread to toss in a few Rupees (would help me feel better). I put on 17 pounds of fat on my body this holiday season. I've got a mind to ask some friends to pay a charity to lose it, and toss in some spare money of my own, so: From your vantage point -and where the grubbers meet the road in Mumbai- what international charity do you think is most efficient for getting help to ones like this little fella?

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http://www.frishta.org.uk/donate.html​

 

CRY, Child Relief and You.

http://www.comminit.com/en/node/118970/303

http://www.cry.org/whatwedo/whatwedolp.html

I would recommend that while money is always a relief, what we really need is to sensitise the people to the realities that these children face and volunteer to make their lives better.

 

Jobs themselves, what we refer to with the word, are fairly recent inventions.

Many people do well coming out of the slums of the US, where child labor is never a necessity for survival.

If you allow the establishment of child labor as a major, shaping economic force in a modern industrial economy, you will entrench a truly miserable level of poverty among the adults as well as the children involved. Few children of the poor will do well, by any means, in such a society: the opportunities for adults are blighted as well.

 

Reality check. India is not the US.


No matter what criteria you use, there are hundreds of millions of poor people in India

More than the population of the entire United States.

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Secondly, while as a society, we are pulling ourselves out of poverty by leaps and bounds while maintaining the democratic fabric of the country, we are still essentially a Third World nation and have not yet reached the point where we are supplying food, water, shelter and electricity to all. The priority is to eliminate poverty, after which luxuries like rights will come into play. Social conscience is not a priority when you are fighting for survival or come from backgrounds of deprivation. While one may not condone them, the tendency of those who come from want to accumulate, hoard or otherwise surround themselves with symbols of security is human nature.

Thirdly, opportunities for adults first require the children to survive to adulthood. In a country where 5000 children die every day from hunger or starvation or problems associated with them, the priority is to keep them alive long enough that they survive to explore these opportunities.

 

savethechildren.in has a (pdf) presentation here called Child Labour doesn’t work!

It starts off with a point that S.A.M. made (although the presentation title isn't quite Samite)

 

I don't think anyone is arguing for child labour here. The problem is one of priorities. In an ideal world, one would not only have all the resources required to provide for all the children [which we do] but also the means and moral conviction to ensure that they get it [which we don't]. When the sweeper from the street begs me to find a respectable position where his daughter can work, platitudes about the morality of child labour are not what he needs. What he needs is to ensure that his daughter is well fed and secure. I cannot ensure that by sending him to a government official, but I can help by finding a good home where that child will be fed, clothed and feel secure in return for simple household chores or office work.

 

No, and that was my point.

For one thing, India allows industrial child labor, thereby entrenching extreme poverty among entire demographic groups.

You will never eliminate poverty, or even reduce it below a certain large minimum, if you base people's survival on industrial scale child labor. Children are not productive enough.

No one is arguing for platitudes, either.