Foreign Policy
Summer 1998

Some Child Labor Works

At first glance, abolition of child labor looks like one of the few labor standards on which everyone could agree. An estimated 250 million children under the age of 14 work. Some 60 million of these are under the age of 10; of those who are older, one-half work nine or more hours a day—enough to interfere with their normal development.

These statistics and the horror stories often behind them have inspired worldwide action, from the creation of new NGOs, such as Free the Children, to this year’s Global March Against Child Labor, a five-month demonstration spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Meanwhile, consumer outrage has prompted multinational corporations such as Nike and the Gap to adopt codes of conduct (which prohibit child labor in their factories abroad) and attach "child labor–free" labels to the products they sell.

But do these initiatives make poor children in developing countries better off? Probably not. In many cases, a child’s income defines the difference between destitution and mere "poverty" for a struggling family. Without it, indigence (earnings per capita of less than $1 a day) would more than double among many of these households; in urban Latin America, for example, the incidence of poverty in low-income households would rise 10 to 20 percent without the earnings contributed by working children.

When children work because they must, banning their labor can actually make them worse off. Legally invisible, they may end up working anyway—unprotected by laws that prohibit long hours, abusive treatment, and hazardous conditions. Business codes of conduct are just slightly better. They affect only a small percentage of child workers in organized export industries and may simply drive children into lower paying, and more dangerous, work in the streets. Labeling programs do have one advantage: The levies that participating firms pay can be used to educate child workers, subsidize parents who send their working children to school, or create local partnerships between employers and community groups that monitor working conditions.

Unfortunately, these efforts to deal with child labor may also blind people to a more troubling bottom line: The real solution to the exploitation of child workers involves the complex business of economic growth and development in poor countries.

—N.B.