A young child dies from exhaustion, their limp body has been pushed to the very limit and they finally give in to death and another child has just become a statistic. This child was not even eleven years old. They had just completed their twenty hour day and then stumbled home 6 miles from where they were working. They saw their house in the distance which gave them hope to keep on walking. They dragged their feet towards the corner where they slept; their eyes are drooping not just from physical tiredness but from the pain of living this way. The last thing this little child saw was darkness, the last thing this weak child felt was coldness and the last thing this unfortunate child could do, was give up. At last this child is able to rest. This child was a victim of child labour. So, I ask you; is child labour morally right? I will argue that the exploitation of children is always wrong but that sometimes child labour is a necessary evil. I will also distinguish between child labour and child work.
According to UNICEF, there are an estimated one hundred and fifty eight million children aged five to fourteen in child labour worldwide. Millions of children are engaged in dangerous situations or conditions, such as working in mines, working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or working with dangerous machinery. They are everywhere but invisible, working as domestic servants in homes, labouring behind the walls of workshops, hidden from view in plantations. If there is nothing wrong with child labour, then why is the exploitation so secret? Do you ever wonder when you go into certain shops how a handmade t-shirt can be so cheap? Or on the other hand, products which are sold to us at extremely high prices and we assume...
... middle of paper ...
...elivers newspapers before school might actually benefit from learning how to work, gaining responsibility, and a bit of money. If a child has a part time job they can learn the value of money.
So I believe that the issue of child labour is not simple. As Unicef’s 1997 State of the World’s Children Report argued, children’s work needs to be seen as having two extremes. On one hand, there is the destructive or exploitative work and, on the other hand, there is beneficial work - promoting or enhancing children’s development without interfering with their schooling, recreation and rest. ‘And between these two poles are vast areas of work that need not negatively affect a child’s development.’ My firm belief is that there is a difference between child labour and child work and that in both cases the issue is whether or not the child is deliberately being exploited.
The novel Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys does an excellent job illustrating the troubling issue of child labor. The extent of child labor in a country is directly linked by the nature and extent of poverty within it. Child labor deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity. It is detrimental to physical and mental development. Today, there are an estimated 246 million child laborers around the globe. This irritating social issue is not only violates a nation’s minimum age laws , it also involves intolerable abuse, such as child slavery, child trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, and illicit activities. In Between Shades of Grey , Lina and her ten year old brother are unrightfully charged 25 years of labor at a work camp in Siberia. It prevented the children from going to school and used them to undermine labor standards. In the harsh winter and even worse living conditions, they watched their mother as she starved to death.
Shah, Anup. "Child Labor." - Global Issues. Anup Shah, 17 July 2005. Web. 26 Nov. 2013. .
All of my life I have considered myself as a person who loves children. I enjoy playing with them, helping them, and just being around them. So when I first agreed with corporations who use child labor I shocked myself completely. After examining two articles; one “The Case for Sweatshops”, by David R. Henderson, and two “Sweatshops or a Shot at a Better Life”, by Cathy Young, I came to the conclusion that in some cases when young children work under proper conditions it can keep them out of the streets and be helpful to them and their families.
Throughout time children have worked myriad hours in hazardous workplaces in order to make a few cents to a few dollars. This is known as child labor, where children are risking their lives daily for money. Today child labor continues to exist all over the world and even in the United States where children pick fruits and vegetables in difficult conditions. According to the article, “What is Child Labor”; it states that roughly 215 million children around the world are working between the ages of 5 and 17 in harmful workplaces. Child labor continues to exist because many families live in poverty and with more working hands there is an increase in income. Other families take their children to work in the fields because they have no access to childcare and extra money is beneficial to buy basic needs. Although there are laws and regulations that protect children from child labor, stronger enforcement is required because child labor not only exploits children but also has detrimental effects on a child’s health, education, and the people of the nation.
Want to know how many deaths does Child labor cause throughout the whole year? Because of child labor, there are over 2.7 million deaths every year! Child labor is a definite human rights violation which is included in both factories and farms. There they are overworked, underfed, and have no medical attention. The use of children for child labor is gross to even think about and is a major human rights issue. First of all, child labor should not just be used for their size to work in factories. Secondly, they should not be the victims to the harmful pesticides and chemicals sprayed over the field to help the crops.
Many people are unaware of how common child labour truly is, and although child labour continues to decrease around the world, it is still prevalent in developing countries, with high ...
Child Labor is not an isolated problem. The phenomenon of child labor is an effect of economic discrimination. In different parts of the world, at different stages of histories, laboring of child has been a part of economic life. More than 200 million children worldwide, some are as young as 4 and 5 years old, are slaves to the production line. These unfortunate children manufacture shoes, matches, clothing, rugs and countless other products that are flooding the American market and driving hard-working Americans out of jobs. These children worked long hours, were frequently beaten, and were paid a pittance. In 1979, a study shows more than 50 million children below the age of 16 were considered child labor (United Nation labors agency data). In 1998, according to the Campaign for Labor rights that is a NGO and United Nation Labor Agency, 250 million children around the world are working in farms, factories, and household. Some human rights experts indicate that there are as many as 400 million children under the age of 15 are performing forced labor either part or full-time under unsafe work environment. Based upon the needs of the situation, there are specific areas of the world where the practice of child labor is taking place. According to the journal written by Basu, Ashagrie gat...
I don’t believe that the use of child labor is unethical. I for one had a full-time job at 8 years of age, the difference being that I chose to help out in the house. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that some of the children in the mines chose to work to support their families, but they didn’t choose to be exploited. Children have a lot of energy and can be naive enough to be overworked and undercompensated. Even allowing the parents to make that decision for them should come with its restrictions, parents can exploit their children as well. In the end, as long as the children aren’t abducted, sexually or physically abused, forced to work and unpaid, I don’t see a problem with the use of child
People might argue that children should not be allowed to work because for them at this tender age they should be provided with an education system that will make them occupationally flexible. Basically, they think education is important for the children future. At some point, may be they are right but as we know some children are fortunate enough to receive an excellent education because many families might be facing problem like poverty. This is more common in developing countries. Think about it…a work experience can help learning some important things such as appreciation of real value of money and also enhanced work ethic can be great benefited to a children and society both personally and professionally. There you go, it is not obvious that child labour is wrong for society or children, everyone just need to change their thought to positive side of
Child labor is where an underage person does work for a pay, however big or small. Some people feel that it is morally wrong to purchase items crafted through child labor. Others think that it is okay, because they are helping their families survive. I feel that child labor can be a good thing if the kid is paid enough money to survive. If you are the one purchasing the item, child labor might seem like a cruel way for companies to make money, but in most third-world countries, children work for money because if they didn't, they and their family would die.
In document UN/ CRC/ 531, analyzed through UNICEF, an estimated 25% of the world’s children (developing world) are in the web of child labor. To add to this, nearly 70% of all girl/female laborers go unregistered, often performing acts of prostitution and strenuous domestic housework. This form of unregistered work is dangerous to young girls because the employers often abuse their employees sexually and physically, as well as psychologically scarring them for years. This alarming fact can be attributed to the inequality of education given to young girls.
Child labour is an issue that has plagued society since the earliest of times. Despite measures taken by NGOs as well as the UN, child labour is still a prevalent problem in today’s society. Article 23 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child gives all children the right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child 's education, or to be harmful to the child 's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.1 Child labour clearly violates this right as well as others found in the UDHR. When we fail to see this issue as a human rights violation children around the world are subjected to hard labour which interferes with education, reinforces
Forced child labor from a young age can be extremely demanding of the child. If a child is working from a young age, they will not know that what they are doing is bad for them, because they won’t know anything else but work. This is abusive to the child mentally, but these jobs can also be abusive physically. Certain jobs have children weaving rugs or putting small parts together in a factory. One source says these jobs “can put intense pressure on children’s finger joints and cause lasting damage” (Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2014). If the child is unable to move their fingers properly, they could lose their fingers later in life, or have them amputated. The jobs these children do are also so dangerous to the point where children can be hurt in other ways. Children working in factories around the world can get caught in machines and hurt themselves, causing short term damage or long term damage to themselves. If the child hurts themselves at such a young age, they won’t be able to perform their jobs later in their lives. If a child is being abused and hurt both mentally and physically by numerous causes, why doesn’t child labor stop? It doesn’t stop because so many countries around the world need children to work to benefit their economy. But if these places don’t stop and realize what they are doing to their children, child labor will never stop and more children will be
Globalization has brought with it both threats to and opportunities for better global governance, regulation and multi-agency work aimed at reducing the risks and impacts to vulnerable groups around the world. One such group is children, and one way in which they are vulnerable is through exploitative labour.
For all these reasons the fact that even where child labor is declared illegal, it continues to exist and is seen as a natural phenomenon, and it is invisible to the casual observer. Child labor is often surrounded by a wall of silence, indifference and apathy. But that wall is beginning to crumble. The process of globalization and the development of modern means of communication have made the plight of working children a major issue on the agenda of the international