DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN-LATIN AMERICA: Laws and Marches Have Little Effect on Child Labour

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, May 2 1998 (IPS) - International treaties and local legislation enacted over the past few decades have done little to eradicate child labour, which affects close to 200 million girls and boys worldwide.

The Global March Against Child Labour is the newest international effort to achieve that goal, which many see as a Utopian idea.

Mexico is the last stop of the LatinAmerican contingent of the international march, which set out from Brazil in February. The children participating in the effort, backed by close to 400 non- governmental organisations, arrive April 30. As in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, the children and their escorts will meet with authorities in Mexico to demand an end to child labour, an objective laid out in International Labour Organisation (ILO) treaties and norms.

Ater Mexico the marchers head to Geneva, to participate in a late May conference with the other contingents, which have been marching through the rest of the continents.

“It is a praiseworthy effort, but we don’t believe the situation will change significantly, because the problem’s origins lie in the social and economic structures prevailing in the world,” said Mexican lawyer Emilio Krieger, a member of the International Tribunal Against Child Labour – a coalition of trade unionists, parliamentarians, academics and human rights activists.

Although a number of countries have enactd legislation prohibiting child labour and providing for stiff sentences for those who tolerateand promote it, according to the ILO some 200 million children work worldwide, a figure that could rise to 400 million by the mid-21st century if governments fail to adopt drastic measures.

Child labour has expanded so much in the past few years that several countries and international bodies, including the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF), have replaced the idea of eradicating child labour with the concept of “humanising” it.

In Latin America alone, an estimated 17 million six to 14-year- olds work, many in virtual slavery conditions. And the figures are even higher in Asia and Africa. Many leftist and centre-left politicians maintain that unfortunately eradicating child labour is a Utopian idea under the current “neoliberal” economi structures.

In Mexico, the International Tribunal Against Child Labour declared transnationals and multilateral lending institutions guilty in 1996 of “organising child labour in order to accumulate profits for speculation.”

Among the entities accused by the Tribunal figured Coca Cola, Volkswagen, Reebok, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. The Tribunal also condemned governments that are seeking to decriminalise the exploitation of children.

But the UN Economic Commission for Latin America andthe Caribbean (ECL warns that if the children still living with their parents did not work, poverty in developing regions like Latin America would rise from 10 to 20 percent, and extreme poverty from five to 10 percent. Nearly 15 million of Latin America’s 200 million children live on the streets, while six million are malnourished.

“Child labour in most of its forms is an outrage, because it robs a significant portion of the population of the right to education, to play and laugh, and to a happy future,” said Krieger.

Poor children aged five to seven in Latin America tend to engage in two or more money-earning activities, saysa sudy by the Latin American Centre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In some countries, including Mexico, the labour conditions in which children work are not much different than those seen in the 19th century, said Jean Maninat, ILO director for Mexico and the Caribbean.

ILO covenant 138, drawn up in 1973, commits the world’s governments to “applying national policies designed to ensure the effective abolition of child labour, and to gradually increase the minimum legal working age.”