|
|
|
|
  |
 |
 |
 |
|  |
Bulletin LIAISON > LIAISON-Canada Electronic Newsletter #4 Ce document est disponible seulement en anglais.
Problem of Child Labour not going away, says ILO As labour ministers from around the world gathered in Geneva in early June to assess progress in the global struggle against child labour, new figures from the International Labour Organization suggest that some 73 million children between the ages of 10 and 14 are now employed worldwide. The real numbers of child workers, however, could well be in the hundreds of millions, as no one knows how many children under 10 are working or how many girls around the world are engaged in full-time domestic labour. Last month, Kailash Satyarthi of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS) visited Canada with the message that child labour is not an isolated problem for developing countries themselves to solve. Child labour, he argued, is an integral part of the process of globalization, and must be tackled at an international level. Satyarthi used the example of the South Asian carpet industry, a $600 million business employing some 800,000 children in India and Pakistan. As 97 per cent of these carpets end up in the homes of Western consumers, Satyarthi said buyers bear much of the responsibility for the persistence of child labour in this industry. The effort to raise consumer awareness on this issue led to the development of the Rugmark system, through which 200,000 carpets have been exported from South Asia. Rugmark carpets are clearly labelled as having been produced without child labour, giving Western consumers a clear choice about whether or not to support businesses which use child labour. Satyarthi says the Rugmark system is a model which can be duplicated in other industries. But getting children out of the work force is only a solution if the children have somewhere to go. Free and compulsory education, Satyarthi said, is critical if child labour is to be eradicated in developing countries. So too is finding a way to ensure that poor families do not go hungry as the price of having their children in school. Solving this dilemma, he said, might require a type of Food for Education Campaign, where children would regularly be given a bag or grain or rice at school. However, the fact that countries such as India and Pakistan spend upwards of $30 on their militaries for each dollar spent on primary education, he said, shows that "children are not the priority at the moment."
Ultimately, however, the cost of not dealing with child labour may be far higher than the cost of a bag of rice per student. As ILO Director-General Michel Hansenne put it: "Today’s child worker will be tomorrow’s uneducated and untrained adult, forever trapped in grinding poverty. No effort should be spared to break that vicious circle."
|
