By IPS Correspondents
MADRID, Aug 1 2001 (IPS)

More than 200,000 children in Spain work, some of them carrying out arduous farm labour and others hawking goods as street vendors, according to the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children.

Unicef warned that the worst child labour situations in this country of 40 million involved young immigrants, mainly from North Africa, who are hired, for example, to harvest olives in the southern autonomous community of Andalusia.

“Minors should not work, not even young immigrants. There should be no first and second-class children,” said Joaquín Ruiz Giménez, chairman of Spain’s Unicef committee, which carried out its study on the request of the Ministry of Labour and Social Action.

Although he called for an end to exploitative child labour in Spain, Ruiz Giménez, a prominent 87-year-old activist, clarified that the problem was not nearly as serious here as in other parts of the world, especially poor nations.

The gravity of the child labour situation in Spain is similar to that seen in other members of the European Union, he underlined.

On the other hand, millions of children work in the developing South, many of them in slavery conditions, stated the latest report by the London-based Anti-Slavery International.

The international watchdog reported that slavery exists in countries of the South like the Ivory Coast, where a child can be “bought” for just over 50 dollars – much less than the 50,000 dollars that a slave could fetch at the height of the slave trade in 19th century Alabama in the United States.

The report by the Spanish committee of Unicef stated that although child labour should not be seen as a serious problem in Spain, the existence of a significant number of minors who spent too much time working must not be ignored.

Ruiz Giménez said work violated one of the key rights of children, because “using minors to work is to rob them of study time, which is indispensable to their future in the knowledge society.”

According to the Unicef report, surveys carried out in schools indicate that around 170,000 children work in Spain, although not all of them in full-time jobs.

But the Spanish branch of Save the Children points out that at least 70,000 child workers who have completely dropped out of school must be added to that total.

Unicef also warned that the statistics leave out minors who work as domestics and in family businesses, as well as those who are sexually exploited or are dedicated to panhandling, because labour inspectors have no jurisdiction to intervene in such cases.

Ruiz Giménez, or “Don Joaquín” as he is known by his friends and fellow activists, said child sex exploitation rackets have been discovered in Spain.

The only alternative is to “squash them, and to do so now, with determination,” said Ruiz Giménez. But to do that, he added, political will was needed, as were reforms of Spain’s laws.

The Unicef report added that six percent of the students surveyed reported suffering some form of labour exploitation, and that more than half of those children, most of them girls, were forced to work more than three hours a day in their homes.

The report also stated that some 15,000 children worked in family businesses, while a similar number worked in the countryside, harvesting crops, caring for livestock or working as assistants in the fishing industry.

In addition, some 10,000 children worked in TV, in commercials or as participants on programmes with live audiences.

But the children that awaken the most concern among Spaniards with a social conscience are the mainly immigrant youngsters seen panhandling in the downtown areas of Spain’s large cities. Although they do not comprise a majority of the children who work instead of attending school, they are the most visible expression of a situation of social injustice.

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