The Numbers:
Total number of children 5-14 years, 2004: 1.2 billion
Child workers worldwide, 2004: 166 million
What They Mean: International Labor Organization researchers, quoting children working in rural northern Ghana:
“Stress; exhaustion; sunburn; too much heat; backache; long working hours; a lack of good drinking water; falling trees; tripping on ropes; wounds from machetes; using bare hands to apply fertilizer….”Their experience is the typical one: More than two-thirds of the world’s working children are on the land. The ILO’s 2006 report The End of Child Labor: Within Reach, noted that (as of 2004) about 190 million of the world’s 1.1 billion children aged 5-14 were “economically active” and that 166 million of them were engaged in child labor. Supplemented last week by a new report focusing on girl workers, the ILO’s research divides the totals as follows:
- Agriculture: Roughly 115 million child laborers, 69 percent of all working children, are on farms, including both small-scale family farming and larger-scale plantations. Last week’s update suggests that agriculture employs about 61 percent of the world’s working girls, and 70 percent of the working boys.
- Urban services: About 22 percent of working children, or 37 million, are in low-level services work. These are fields like maids, newspaper carriers, restaurant workers, street sweepers, and so on. Many more girls — 30 percent of all working girls — are in these fields.
- Industry: Industrial work accounts for the remaining 9 percent of child workers, or 15 million. Most, according to the 2009 update, are in manufacturing, including factory work and home production. A smaller number are in construction, and about 1 million are in the especially dangerous mining and quarrying industries.
The 2006 report, though full of still unhappy statistics, was optimistic. It found child labor rapidly declining. One reason is the general decline in poverty; World Bank researchers find that child labor rates tend to fall by 4.7 percent in poor countries with each additional $100 jump in per capita GDP. Another is that child labor seems to be an area in which innovative government policies, especially in Latin America, have worked. In the late 1990s, many Latin governments, led by Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, began paying small stipends to low-income families who can show good school attendance. The ILO found Latin child labor rates nose-diving, down by two-thirds from 16 million in 2000 to 5.7 million by 2004. And while Latin America’s progress was fastest, child labor rates were falling everywhere, especially for young children and in abusive industries. The 2009 follow-up is more worried than optimistic, especially for girls. After a decade of rapid progress, it suggests, this year’s financial crisis may push many children in rural areas out of school and into work, as parents and older siblings lose urban factory and construction jobs and families fall into poverty. The report believes that girls are at especially high risk, since low-income parents often pull girls out of school before boys. Short-term options to reduce the risk will include emergency financial support for laid-off adult workers and preservation of stipends for low-income parents during budget cuts. In a longer perspective, though, the ILO remains optimistic, looking to generation reduction of poverty, universal education, and effective labor-inspection (especially in agriculture) as proven ways to reduce and (one hopes) to end child labor.
