Frederick Reese
Throughout the developing world, one in six children aged five to 14 years old are involved in child labor, according to the United Nations’ International Children’s’ Emergency Fund (UNICEF). It is estimated by the International Labor Organization (ILO) that there are about 215 million children under the age of 18 throughout the world engaged in non-familial work, with most working full-time. In Sub-Saharan Africa, one in four kids work; in the Asian Pacific, it’s one in eight and one in 10 in Latin America.
This labor is typically dangerous work in which a child’s small stature can be useful, such as industrial operations and farming. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, 74 nations export goods and commodities produced using child labor to the United States, including gold from Colombia and Bolivia, gems from India and Pakistan, diamonds from the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and pornography from Mexico and Russia.
In the United States, more than two million kids between the age of 15 and 17 work in the United States due to exemptions in the Fair Labor Standards Act — mostly in the service industry. However, 25 to 30 kids a year die while working in the United States. In 2010, 34 workers under 18 died in the workplace — half of which were under the age of 16.
An example of this is the story of 14-year-old Wyatt Whitebread and 19-year-old Alex Pacas, who, while “running the corn” in a silo on a farm in Mount Carroll, Ill. three years ago, drowned by corn that filled the structure while they were inside it. The silo had safety harnesses installed, but did not mandate the teenagers to use them.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found the farm guilty of 12 violations and assessed it $555,000 in fines, which were reduced to $200,000. Farms have little incentive to mandate safety regulations: it has been discovered that of the $9.2 million in fines cited by OSHA for 179 preventable engulfment deaths, the fines were reduced to $3.8 million with no criminal prosecutions for repeat offenders.
The federal response
At home and abroad, the question of children working has raised ethical concerns about whether the nation is taking a hard enough stance on this issue. For example, the Department of Labor’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking (OCFT) has released “Reducing Child Labor and Forced Labor: A Toolkit for Responsible Businesses,” which was designed to meet the DOL’s obligation under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2005 which mandates the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to “work with persons who are involved in the production of goods on the list [ILAB’s List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor] to create a standard set of practices that will reduce the likelihood that such persons will produce goods using [forced and child labor].”
In meeting this requirement, ILAB created the toolkit as “a complement to its other efforts to ensure that workers around the world are treated fairly and are able to share in the benefits of the global economy. ILAB engages in diplomacy and technical assistance efforts with governments around the world to encourage them to improve labor laws and regulations, enhance labor law enforcement and administration and enact policies and programs in support of workers. These include child labor and forced labor laws, regulations, enforcement efforts, action plans and other social policies and programs.”
The toolkit is voluntary. No business is compelled to obey the recommendation within it.
“It’s a good all-in-one-place resource,” says Brian Campbell, director of Policy and Legal Programs at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF). “But … it doesn’t solve the problems that the Department of Labor points out. This doesn’t move the ball forward.”
The extent of the problem
In Cote d’Ivoire, of the 200,000 children that are involved in cocoa bean harvesting, 12,000 are suspected to be slaves. Cote d’Ivoire produces 35 percent of the world’s cocoa, and is estimated that more than 1.8 million West African children are involved in cocoa cultivation. The major chocolate fabricators (Nestle, Hershey, Mars, etc.) buy their cocoa from commodity exchanges, which mixes slave-grown cocoa with other global supplies.
In 2001, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill that would authorize the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to produce a “slave free” label that would be applied to chocolate packages made by producers that certified they are not using cocoa from farms that use slave labor. The bill passed the House 291 to 115, but before it made it to the Senate floor, lobbyists from the chocolate industry — led by former Sens. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and George Mitchell (D-Maine) — managed to kill the bill.
Instead, the chocolate manufacturers agreed to a resolution, the Harkin-Engel Protocol — or, formally, the “Protocol for the Growing and Processing of Cocoa Beans and Their Derivative Products In a Manner that Complies with ILO Convention 182 Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor,” that stated that the industry will address and eliminate child slavery in cocoa cultivation in five years. This five- year deadline was extended in 2005 to 2010.
As of today, none of the protocol’s six articles have been satisfied.
This is but just one example. In January 2012, federal investigators conducted a preliminary inquiry about whether Limited Brands Inc.’s Victoria’s Secret used organic cotton harvested by child labor. Bloomberg was able to secure the birth certificate of the deceased sister of a 13-year-old girl, Clarisse Kambire, who was confirmed to have picked cotton for the fair-trade Burkina Faso company that Victoria’s Secret later bought.
According to federal law, unless the material produced by minors gave the product a competitive advantage, the manufacturer may be immune from prosecution. For example, if a company use a particular type of honey that gives their product an exceptional smoothness, and the honey can only be harvested by children, the company’s competitors can sue the company for unfair trade practices. There is no remedy under the law for the kids.
Resolving the problem
Cesar Rosado is a professor of labor and employment law at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law. In conversation with Mint Press, he explained that the global economy and poverty in key agricultural regions are the primary culprits behind this.
“Studies done in third world countries have shown that when children are given meaningful education and nutrition, parents will be less inclined to send their children to work,” Rosado said. “But while immediate subsistence is faced by parents, child labor remains. This also means that no matter how stringent laws are enforced, if children and their families are threatened by poverty and hunger, parents will continue to send their children to work.”
“The parents and children will even resent government authorities that will deny work opportunities for children when poverty and hunger are the alternatives to child labor,” Rosado continued. “In Bangladesh there even was an incident where children and women massively protested when the government tried to enforce anti-child labor law at the bequest of the USA and the International Labor Organization. Such protests and other resistance by the alleged victims are things that we want to avoid.”
Victoria’s Secret formally disputed the charges and the federal government dropped the case with no further action taken.
From these examples, such as Hewlett-Packard’s and Apple’s use of involuntary student labor in China last year to meet peak production levels, it is clear that self-policing will not work as long as a profit motive is in play. While President Obama’s 2012 executive order — “Strengthening Protections Against Trafficking In Persons In Federal Contracts” — banning federal contracts with contractors that utilizes trafficked labor either directly or indirectly — is a noble effort, without leadership from the federal government and the states, this problem will persist.
Ultimately, however, governments favor making it easier for businesses to do business. In the United States and elsewhere, rollbacks to industrial regulations have actually made it easier instead of harder, to utilize illegal labor undetected. There must be an effort not only to reject child labor-made goods, but improve the local situation in a way that child labor is no longer an attractive option. “The root cause of forced labor and child labor, to a large degree, is poverty,” said Brian Campbell, director of Policy and Legal Programs at the International Labor Rights Forum. “Companies are going to say, we’re not responsible for the world’s poverty. My response is: You are responsible for the people your business touches.”