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Elimination of child labour or work in dignity for children?

Working children from Latin America criticize the new Global Report and action plan of the International Labour Organisation

On the occasion of the Global Child Labour Conference, which took place from the 10th till 11th May in The Hague and was organized jointly by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Dutch Government, an alternative meeting was arranged by the Latin Ameri-can and Caribbean Working Children and Adolescents Movement (MOLACNATs) in collabora-tion with different European Solidarity Groups. Children delegates from Venezuela, Peru and Paraguay as well as delegates from Germany, Italy, Belgium and France took part in the meeting. While the official conference asked for an acceleration of the fight against child labour, working children and adolescents demanded that their rights should be more re-spected and claimed that the international community should stop making decisions without the involvement of the children themselves. The Alternative Meeting was dedicated to the motto: “Towards a world with work in dignity for working children and adolescents: steps towards 2016”.

Questioning ILO conventions on child labour

Social movements of working children and youth have been active in Latin America since the 1980s and in Africa and Asia since the 1990s. They question existing procedures aiming at the prohibition and elimination all kinds of work children are performing. Based on those policies working children feel discriminated against and pushed into working illegally. They do not see work as the cause of the problem, but the conditions they have to work under. Therefore they want the international community to rather fight the causes of exploitation and enable them to work under human conditions to support their families.

Efforts to abolish children’s work are mainly expressed through two international conven-tions, developed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). ILO-convention 138 (1973) prohibits children to work before reaching a certain minimum age (based on the kind of work and “development” of the country, 13, 15 or 18 years). ILO-Convention 182 (1999), obliges the ILO member states to eliminate immediately “worst forms of child labour”. Fur-thermore those conventions are complemented by the “International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour” (IPEC), which was initiated by the German government in 1992 and is implemented with different programs in 88 countries today.

To deal with the often-acknowledged critique of generalizing all work performed by children, the ILO started in the end of the 1980s to distinguish between child labour and child work (a differentiation that seems to vanish when it comes to the translation into other languages, like into Spanish, French or German). Child Work, which the ILO regards as “tolerable”, are marginal tasks performed in the own family’s household that are insignificant for the main-tenance of the family. Child labour on the contrary is any paid or unpaid work that generates

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products that do have an impact on the economy. Because a lot of occupations, which are characterized as harmful by the ILO, do not fit into this definition, the ILO started to classify unpaid work in the domestic service (often performed by girls) which is done over a long period and in an “unhealthy environment” to as child labour too.

With ILO-convention 182 defining the “worst forms of child labour” the understanding of the term child labour was even extended. Child Labour is no longer work that is likely to “harm health, safety and morals” of children, and was so far described as “hazardous work” but also the sale and trafficking of children, the recruitment of children for use in armed conflict and the use of children for prostitution, production of pornography and trafficking of drugs. Regarding the fact that the focus here is rather on what happens to the children than what children do, we have to ask if such an understanding of child labour is useful at all. Working children movements at any rate feel discriminated against by such reinterpretations of work-ing definitions. They claim that the work defined as “worst forms of child labour” should be rather seen as abuse of children, a crime that has to be prosecuted. They themselves see work as an activity that keeps human existence alive and can give life a meaning.

Questionable data about child labour

On the occasion of the Global Child Labour Conference, the ILO presented the latest Global Report concerning child labour (“Accelerating action against child labour“). There they had to admit that the last report’s promise that the elimination of child labour would be “within reach” could not be sustained any longer. According to new ILO estimations the number of working children globally decreased in the time period 2004 to 2008 from 222 million to 215 million, which is only 3 percent. Juan Somavía, ILO Director-General said on this that: “Pro-gress is uneven: neither fast enough nor comprehensive enough to reach the goals that we have set.” As reported by the ILO the number of 5 to 14-year-old children performing child labour decreased by 10 percent because of the lower employment of girls, but still in the South-Saharan Africa the number increased among the 15 to 17-year-olds. Furthermore the number of children performing “worst forms of child labour” has increased by almost 20 percent, from 52 million to 62 million.

This data, published by the ILO, is however not built on a solid foundation. The information is again based on categories and investigations that do only capture a fraction of the work children are performing. Although the ILO claims to have included the work performed by children beyond the “production boundary”, namely non-paid household chores and other “non-productive” activities, the published report is based on investigations made between 2004 and 2008, where this category of work was not of relevance. Furthermore the compari-son with previous data is not serious, because this old data is based on incomplete and non-comparable enquiries made in only a few countries. Information about the way the new data was found are only made in a footnote, where the ILO refers to a “separate technical publi-cation”, whose completion seems to be harder than assumed.

One of the fundamental mistakes of the ILO reports (nowadays as well as in the past) are that they declare the work of children as something entirely negative ignoring all other exist-ing and possibly positive perceptions of children’s work. Although many children are well able to accomplish both school and work, children’s work and school life are believed to be

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absolutely contradictory. Moreover and due to a mix-up of cause and consequence, chil-dren’s work is likely to be blamed for causing poverty and exacerbating the fulfilment the UN MDGs. Even though children confirm certain economic activities, the ILO-reports simply do not include them neither into their statistics nor into considerations. As a result, the public’s focus is almost exclusively on the harmful aspects of children’s work. The authors who write the ILO-reports are so eager to illustrate the danger of children’s work that they completely overlook the desires, needs and expectations of the working children.

Human capital instead of children’s rights

Being supported by the World Bank, the ILO’s “world wide movement against child labour” regards working children primarily a waste of human capital. This approach stigmatises chil-dren solely as contribution to economic growth denying children the right for a human life in the present. The fact that the ILO-reports refer to certain children’s rights although in prac-tice they do not grant them any meaning, can be considered hypocritical. For instance UNI-CEF, the known supporter of children’s rights, damages its own credibility by being a mem-ber of this “movement”.

Within its report, the ILO announced doubts about the range and efficiency of its strategy for the first time (“tick box approach”). The strategy has been conducted within the IPEC Pro-gramme with the help of NGOs and other civil groups. In order to accelerate their approach on child labour the ILO now uses a “strategic trade union and business alliance”. Despite the change of strategy, the ILO is still not taking account of the negative consequences that its strategy often has on the working children. The consequences are obvious in, for instance, in Mexico, Peru or Columbia since children who try to sell home-made food, sweets or art products in the street may get expelled by the police on the grounds of the ILO conventions and programmes “against the worst form of child labour”. Even mothers who are simply accompanied by the children during their work feel forced to hide their children just to avoid being punished for not fulfilling their “parental responsibility”. Strategies for the “protec-tion” of children from “the worst forms of child labour” are unofficially used to legitimatize “social cleansing” in favour of rich business men or even the tourist industry.

The participation of working children is not desired

Although the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) grants all chil-dren the right to be heard and to participate in all matters affect them, neither the Global Report nor the actual conference took account if this right. As distinct from the past, nowa-days the working children and their organisations are not even mentioned as potential co-operating partners. This is even more evident regarding the fact that the 380 participants of the conference were solely consisting of UN organisations’ delegates, governmental repre-sentatives, employers’ organisations, banks, trade unions and some NGOs, excluding com-pletely representatives of the working children.

Among the few scientists, who attended the conference, there were only those who work closely with the World Bank and ILO and share their perception. Critical announcements and an open debate about objectives and means evidently were not welcome. Yet, a single dele-gate supported by the video-message of a girl from Africa (who was unable to attend the

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conference in person) criticised the exclusion of working children from the conference. The conference took account of the children’s right for participation only via a five-minute deco-rative stage performance of a Dutch group of dancing children and via a “speech of thanks” of a 14-year-old former child worker from India, in the presence of the Dutch Queen at the end of the conference.

The agreed “Roadmap” which requires the “elimination of the worst forms of child labour by 2016”, has been downgraded from being a compulsory self-commitment to being moral pledge. The basic principles recommend the governments to take account of “the best inter-ests of children” and the families individual perception, however, a certain paragraph has been erased from the “2nd draft outline”, saying that for preventive reasons no child should be removed from his/her work “without adequate protection and service provision”. This makes clear, that the elimination of child labour still dominates the ILO’s strategy without regard to any possible (negative) consequences for the concerned children and their fami-lies.

Protests against the ILO-conference

Even before the ILO conference the Latin American and Caribbean Working Children and Adolescents Movement started protesting against the lack of respect “shown to us by the organizers of the Hague Conference by neglecting to invite us to participate, or indeed, even informing of us that it would take place”. The exclusive attendance by adults, “most of whom are quite distant from the realities of our lives”, once again confirms “that the ap-proach taken to working children and adolescents continues to be adult-centred and child and adolescent participation is relegated to lofty intentions and legal texts”. At the end of the conference, the movement did not grant the “roadmap” any legitimacy since it came into existence without agreement of any working children’s organization. Moreover, they explicitly blamed the Dutch government and the ILO of violating the provisions of UNCRC through hosting the conference.

The way how the abuse and the exploitation of working children is handled still establishes a huge divide between ILO and their members (governments, trade unions, etc.) on one side, and the organizations of working children on the other side. This gap can only be bridged by acknowledging the fact that simply abolishing child labour does not solve the problem. In-stead of that they need to address those social and economic conditions which turned out to be exploiting, towards all human beings, no matter what age.

At the end of their meeting the delegates in The Hague agreed on another meeting, this time in the Peru’s capital Lima, in order to concrete the strategy of the Latin American and Carib-bean Movement of Working Children and Adolescents, and to intensify the cooperation with the organized working children and youth in Asia and Africa. The solidarity groups built up the network EUROPANATs (info@europanats.net) indenting to rise awareness on the Euro-pean level.

Berlin, May 2010

ProNATs e.V.