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Citation: NACLA Report on the Americas Jan-Feb 1999, v.32, 4,
21(7)
Author: Green, Duncan
Title: Child workers of the Americas.(Tough Times: Labor in
the Americas) by Duncan Green
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1999 North American Congress on Latin America Inc. (NACLA)
The need for an extra family wage earner has driven millions of families to
pull their children out of school and put them to work.
By 6:00 a.m. in the market of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, horses are hauling
carts loaded with pineapples, bananas and vegetables to the market stalls,
sending up sweet smells of pineapple, coriander and rain from last night's
thunderstorm. As the traffic builds up, smog starts to clog the dawn sky. The
first school uniforms appear. On the corner two small girls, aged perhaps five
or six, are collating the newspaper supplements ready for sale. Everyone is
chewing on mangos. A group of teenage girls lounge around a table, each
turning out tortillas from a huge ball of dough. Their bored, indolent faces
contrast with the speed of their hands, mechanically but expertly slapping and
patting the dough.
At 13, Marina is already part of Central America's tortilla production line.
A diminutive, blonde girl with a prominent nose, she sports the ubiquitous
market woman's apron, as she struggles back to her stall - a rickety table
hidden under the obligatory straw cowboy hat, pushing hard on a handcart with
wobbly wheels.
"At 4:00 a.m. I leave home with my dad," says Marina. "He's a porter in the
market, so we come to work together - it's an hour's bus ride. I prepare the
dough for the tortillas before the patrona arrives - she takes care of the
selling. I finish around 10:00 a.m., then I go home to eat. At 2:00 p.m., I
change and go to the Academy - I'm learning dress-making. Academy finishes at
4:00, then I go home and help my mother with the housework."
Marina works for a friend of her father. "She asked me to come and wash her
plates once, then she decided to give me work," she explains. "Before then, I
worked for another senora washing plates, but she bossed me around a lot, so I
left after a month." Marina earns about $2.70 a day. Of that sum, she says,
she gives about $1.60 to her mother, spending the rest on the costs of
dress-making school. "Some of the regulars buy me a drink or an avocado," she
adds. "Today l even got sixty cents extra in tips."
Marina is typical of millions of child workers all over Latin America and
the Caribbean. From as young as five or six, poor children start their working
lives either on the street or in the home. From then on, they must juggle the
conflicting demands of school, work and home as best they can. Discussion of
their work is complicated by the lack of reliable statistics. Much of the work
performed by children, particularly domestic labor either at home or as a
maid, as well as much agricultural work on family farms, is invisible and
fails to figure in surveys or statistics on child labor. Furthermore, neat
income - or releases older relatives to go out to work.
The shortage of hard facts and credible research on crucial topics such as
how many children work, what they do, whether numbers are rising or falling
and the impact of child labor on the wider economy is one of the most striking
features of the whole debate on child labor. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF)
explains it as a lack of interest from governments, problems of definition -
such as when do household chores become work - and the illegal status of child
labor in many countries, which drives it underground, making it much harder to
gather reliable information.(1)
Although they are undoubtedly underestimates, UN figures give a hint of the
extent of child work, with one in five children between the ages of 10 and 14
working in Brazil, Honduras and Haiti, and more than one in ten in most Latin
American and Caribbean countries. The International Labor Organization (ILO)
puts the figure for the total number of working children in Latin America and
the Caribbean between the ages of 5 and 14 at 17.5 million.(2) The proportions
are many times higher among boys than girls, underlining the invisibility of
much of girls' labor in the home.(3)
Like Marina, most child workers operate in the urban informal sector or in
agriculture, especially on peasant farms. Although some children work in
commercial agriculture in areas such as sugar cane or coffee picking,
worldwide only about 5% of child workers are in the export sector.(4)
The informal sector is a catch-all category that includes all those working
on their own account, rather than for a regular wage. In many Latin American
and Caribbean countries more people work in the informal sector than in
"regular" jobs. Children are especially likely to be found there, since the
informal sector needs no prior qualifications, start-up capital or papers.
Furthermore, it functions largely outside government control, making any
existing child labor laws irrelevant. The hours are flexible, can be fit in
around school or other commitments, and often it can take place under the
supervision of a parent, relative or friend, which on Latin America's perilous
streets is a reassurance to both family and child. As one Lima market woman
explains, "I don't want my daughter to go out to work. The temptation of the
devil is on all sides. I prefer that she sells potatoes here, where I can keep
an eye on her."(5)
In recent years the informal sector has boomed, as government austerity
programs have driven millions out of regular work. In this brave new world of
"flexible working patterns" children make perfect employees - the cheapest to
hire, the easiest to fire and the least likely to protest.
The informal sector's most visible child members are the street workers, but
those most at risk are household workers - the invisible multitudes, mainly
girls, shut away from scrutiny behind the front doors of Latin America's
family homes. Many more millions of girls work in their own homes, caring for
younger siblings, or maintaining the household so that their mothers can go
out to work.
According to UNICEF, "Child domestic workers are the world's most forgotten
children. They may well be the most vulnerable and exploited of all, as well
as the most difficult to protect."(6) Child domestics' isolation can be almost
total; in Peru, a study showed that nearly a third never leave the
premises.(7) Invisible and unprotected, child household workers are vulnerable
to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their employers, and are often
treated in a subhuman fashion.
In addition to the urban informal sector, many more children work in
agriculture. In rural Colombia, over 50% of children between the ages of 12
and 17 work in some capacity, compared to less than 20% in urban areas.(8) A
survey of 1,220 working children in a rural smallholder community near the
Nicaraguan town of Esteli concluded: "Work is a fundamental aspect of
children's lives in Santa Rosa del Penon. It is an important part of
children's socialization as members of their families and communities." Girls
are mostly involved in "reproductive work" in the home, while boys were found
to carry out roughly equal amounts of reproductive and productive work, the
latter growing as they grew older. "Few boys clean the house, cook or care for
younger children. On the other hand, relatively few girls are involved in
farmwork, fetching firewood, or taking lunch to their fathers in the fields."
Girls on average worked longer hours.(9)
Hours worked are just as varied as the kinds of job done. The survey in
Nicaragua found that about half of children under nine worked two hours a day
or less, but the working day increased rapidly with age. An analysis of
Brazil's 1995 household survey found that, among the country's four million
child workers, one in five under the age of ten worked 20 hours a week or
more, as did half those in the 10-14 age bracket.(10) Most work is done within
the family for no pay. Those older children who do earn money receive about
half as much as adults with seven years of education.(11)
The reasons why children work are complex, combining both "push factors" on
the supply side, and "pull factors" on the demand end. The most significant
push factor is poverty. According to the ILO, when children work, they
commonly contribute around 20 to 25% of family income.(12) Their income keeps
numerous families above the poverty line. UNICEF notes that in a survey of
nine Latin American countries, the incidence of poverty would be 10 to 20%
higher if it were not for the income of working children between the ages of
13 and 17.(13)
Yet not all poor children work, nor are all working children poor, so
clearly there are many other factors involved. One is unpredictability - for
poor families, it is not just poverty which makes them send their children out
hard a particular child works. Across Latin America, women are going out to
work in increasing numbers. As a result, eldest daughters are forced to stay
home from school to mind the house and look after younger siblings. Parents
who do piece work are more likely to rely on "help" from their children,
although few families see this as real work, making it invisible in many
surveys.(16)
What about the demand side - why do adults employ children? ILO research
suggests that the "nimble fingers" argument that children are better able than
adults to do some jobs is "entirely fallacious." "Children are easier to
manage," says the ILO report, "because they are less aware of their rights,
less troublesome, more compliant, more trustworthy and less likely to absent
themselves from work."(17)
Despite the lack of specific research on the impact of globalization on
child labor, most observers agree that the numbers of child workers are
increasing. A comparison of Brazil's household surveys in 1976 and 1995 showed
a rise in urban male child workers from 10% to 15%, and urban females from 4%
to 8%. In addition, the proportion of working children in the cities not
receiving a wage rose from 33% to 44%. All this during a time of rapid
population growth, meaning far greater increases in the absolute numbers of
working children.(18) At a regional level, even in the relative boom period of
the early 1990s, UN figures show that child labor among 13- to 17-year-old
adolescents rose in five out of seven countries studied, and fell in only
one.(19) Latin America's much-vaunted "modernization" appears to lead to more,
not fewer, children in the workplace.
The reasons for the increase are not hard to find, especially in those
countries which have undergone the worst rigors of structural adjustment since
the onset of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Structural
adjustment ties into child labor in numerous ways.
Nicaragua is an extreme, but illustrative case. After the election of the
anti-Sandinista candidate, Violeta Chamorro, to the presidency in 1990, the
country was rewarded with a flood of aid from the United States and
international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). But it came with numerous
strings attached: the government had to agree to implement painful neoliberal
economic reforms.(20)
In a series of stabilization programs, the Chamorro government raised
interest rates and cut spending to the bone, duly reducing inflation from
13,000% in 1990 to just 19% in 1993. It privatized hundreds of state-owned
companies, removed regulations on trade and banks and other financial
institutions, and pushed up interest rates to "squeeze inflation out of the
system."(21)
But despite the huge dollar inflows, the combination of rocketing interest
rates and layoffs of thousands of state employees precipitated further
economic collapse. Unemployment surged from 25% in 1988 to 52% in 1993. By
1994 three out of every four Nicaraguans were living below the poverty line.
The state has ended all food subsidies and cut most school feeding programs,
so children eat less - per-capita consumption of the national staples of rice
and beans fell by 15% between 1990 and 1993.(22) Many of Nicaragua's social
improvements, which won admiration around the world in the 1980s, are being
swiftly reversed.(23)
The social impact of such measures is felt throughout the country, not least
in the shantytown of Acagualinca, next to the main garbage dump of the
capital, Managua. Here, most bread-winners have lost their jobs in recent
years, driving entire families to swell the ranks of the rubbish-pickers,
scavenging the dump for recyclable materials. Recycling rubbish on the Managua
dump is just one of many informal-sector trades, most of them plagued by
insecurity and pitiful wages, and home to the country's rising number of child
workers. At one Managua crossroads, 30 children weave between the cars begging
or selling everything from chewing gum to super glue. Some of the children are
so small that their larger brothers and sisters have to hoist them onto the
car hoods before they can run a dirty rag over the windscreens in exchange for
a few coins or a curse.
Neoliberal reforms across the region have pushed more Latin Americans into
poverty. After decades of steady improvement, the numbers of Latin Americans
living below the poverty line rose from 136 million in 1980 to 197 million in
1990. As recession gave way to growth in the 1990s, poverty continued to grow,
albeit more slowly, reaching 209 million in 1994, or 39% of the region's
population.(24) Since poor families have more children than rich ones, the
proportion of children living in poverty is even higher - in Mexico, Paraguay
and Venezuela, half of all children live below the poverty line.(25)
Rising poverty and inequality, combined with the rising cost of schooling
due to government cutbacks in education spending and new "user fees," have
driven families to pull their children out of school and put them to work.(26)
The collapsing education system and the slump in the number of decent jobs
offers few alternatives to hard-pressed parents. As an exhausted mother in a
Chilean shantytown commented, "why should kids read Neruda or go to the
theater if they're just going to end up picking oranges?"(27)
Other, more intangible facets of globalization have also played a part.
Nike-style consumer consciousness has penetrated down to the poorest barrios
and favelas, influencing children's perceptions of their relative poverty.
Increasingly, children make up their own minds to go out to work, and their
aim is not mere survival, but the enticing prospect of acquiring fashion icons
like trainers or brand-name clothes.(28)
But there have been countervailing trends, making hard research into the
changing face of child labor all the more essential. Urbanization has
continued apace, with some 70% of Latin Americans now living in cities.(29)
This should have decreased the proportion of child workers, which is
invariably higher in rural areas. Family size has fallen drastically in recent
years. In the 1950s, the average Latin American woman had six children, but
that figure has almost halved - which should have reduced the pressure on
older siblings to go out to work to help maintain their younger brothers and
sisters.(30) The spread of electrification and access to potable water should
have eased the burden on children in the home. And while the quality of
education has fallen, the availability of schooling is now very broad. The
region's governments have managed to expand education coverage faster than
population growth, incorporating an additional two million children into
primary-school education every year since 1950 - even during the "lost decade"
of the 1980s. Across the region, about 94% of 8 and 9 year olds now attend
school, producing close to total coverage at that age range.(31) More children
now at least have the option of attending school.
For any child, going out to work brings both benefits and costs. Many
working children do not feel coerced, but are proud of their contribution to
the family income, while usually having plenty to say about how their lives as
child workers could be improved. By working, children gain self-esteem, skills
and respect from their elders. On the other hand, working long hours can rob
them of the chance of a decent education, since even if they manage to go to
school, they are often too tired to concentrate in class. There are also more
direct costs, in jobs where children run serious risks of damage to their
health from poisonous chemicals, dust or workplace accidents, or simply by
placing too much strain on growing bodies.
Adults concerned about the impact of children's work, however, often fail to
weigh both the pros and cons of child labor, and rarely consult the children
themselves. There is a growing international recognition, enshrined in the
1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which all Latin American
governments have signed, that children are not passive recipients of programs
and policies, but individuals with rights, including the right to participate
fully in the design of such policies. Nevertheless, their voices and views are
largely absent from the debate on child labor.
The rare occasions when adult policy makers do talk to working children are
highly enlightening. When Paraguayan child workers were asked what they most
liked about their lives, the most popular response was their jobs, well ahead
of school, family and playing ball. A survey of 1,500 Central American child
workers showed that they felt they were discriminated against in the workplace
simply for being children; street workers and maids feared violence; working
conditions and long hours were criticized; and children resented being
deprived of their freedom and income (by having to give it to their parents,
for example).(32) But they definitely did not want to see their jobs made
illegal. In Peru and Nicaragua, working children's organizations have gone
further, campaigning for workers' rights to be extended to children, including
the right to join a trade union.
Involving and consulting children also leads to better policies. Many
politicians and other campaigners who are distant from the reality of
children's lives take an unambiguous position that child labor is a moral evil
that should be stamped out, but this can lead to counterproductive attempts to
ban child labor through legislation, often making matters worse for the
children involved.
The most notorious example of this took place in Bangladesh, where,
following threats by the U.S. Congress to pass legislation preventing the
import of products from Bangladesh made by children under 14, garment factory
owners fired an estimated 50,000 children, mainly girls, who were forced to
exchange their jobs in relatively clean, hygienic textile factories for
prostitution. A belated effort by the ILO and UNICEF to repair the damage
provided school places for some 10,000 children, but the rest of the children
could not be traced.(33) On a recent visit to Bangladesh, I could find almost
no trade unionist or NGO who supported the threatened boycott, and the
suspicion was widespread that the action owed more to the desire to protect
U.S. jobs in the garment industry from foreign competition than to any genuine
concern with children's lives.
This gulf between well-intentioned campaigners and many of the children they
are trying to help springs from a Eurocentrism which sees it as "abnormal" for
children to work - the phrase "robbed of their childhood" invariably crops up.
"Normal" childhood is seen as a "mythic walled garden" of play and study, free
from the pain and responsibilities of adult life. Yet child work has been the
norm in most of the world, barring the last century or so of European and
North American history.
Another source of opposition to child labor springs from its impact on the
wider labor market. Trade unions fear that the lower wages paid to children
exert a downward pressure on wages for adults, while child workers take jobs
which could be performed by adults.
Another broader issue is that, in the words of the ILO, "although poverty is
a major cause of child labor, child labor is also a major cause of
poverty."(34) By going to work, children tend to forego educational
opportunities - they may go to school, but the strain of working prevents them
from learning. One UN study showed that Latin American boys who start work
between the ages of 13 and 17 accumulate an educational backlog of more than
two years compared to those who start work from 18 to 24, although the impact
on girls is not so great. Two years less education translates into about 20%
less wages for the rest of their working lives - in the end, they lose six
times more money than they gain by starting work early. At a national level,
high drop-out rates lead to a less skilled workforce, damaging the economy's
prospects of competing in an unforgiving global market.
Whatever the complexities of the issue, several million of the estimated 120
million working children around the world are working in subhuman conditions -
sold as underage prostitutes or bonded laborers, chained to carpet looms in
Asia, or ruining their lungs in the charcoal ovens of the Amazon - so what
should be done about it?(35)
Interview after interview with working children shows that most want to
study and work. What they need is better conditions in both. The first step
must be to involve the children themselves in designing policies. Anything
else risks backfiring on the scale of the debacle in Bangladesh.
Second, children's work should be treated not in isolation, but as part of a
general effort to increase their opportunities and quality of life. One of the
key aspects is improving the accessibility and quality of education, and
making it more relevant to children's lives. Policies should also be adopted
that increase school attendance and make up for short-term financial losses to
the family.(36)
In Brazil, the governor of the capital, Brasilia, Crist vam Buarque, has
come up with a novel scheme to help working and poor children stay in school
in which poor families who keep all their children in school receive a minimum
wage every month. The money is lost if any child misses more than two days in
a month, except due to illness. In 1996 the program was keeping 30,000
children in school at a cost of only 0.5% of the total state budget, and the
impact has been extraordinary. Repetition rates fell by 10% in the first year
of the program, while absenteeism fell from 7% to just 0.2%. Brothers and
sisters were even found to be policing their "problem siblings," since all the
children have to attend if the wage is to be earned.(37) The scheme is now
being introduced in other cities in Brazil.
Another option is providing workplace child care for working mothers, giving
them an alternative to pulling their eldest daughter out of school to look
after the younger children. The insidious rise in the cost of education to
poor families must also be reversed.
Meanwhile children should be banned from those jobs which are inherently
noxious or dangerous by introducing decent health and safety standards.
Elsewhere, the aim should be to provide better protection for working
children. In the best cases, work, whether at home or for money, allows
children to grow gradually from dependents into capable adults, renegotiating
family relationships along the way as they learn to cook, keep house, care for
children and earn money.
In the longer term, whether children work or not is likely to depend much
more on the way that Third World economies develop than on debates over the
merits of abolition. The British government - pushed by rising working-class
militancy - abolished child labor in Britain largely because industry had
advanced to a point where it needed qualified workers rather than malnourished
child slaves. In the poor countries of the South, children will continue to go
out to work as long as the causes of poverty have not been addressed and
children's work remains the only way for their families to survive.
NOTES
1. UNICEF, State of the World's Children 1997 (Oxford: Unicef, 1997), p. 26.
2. International Labor Organization, Child Labor: Targeting the intolerable
(Geneva: ILO, 1996).
3. Comision Economica para America Latina y El Caribe, Anuario Estadistico
de America Latina y el Caribe 1995 (Santiago: CEPAL, 1996) p. 34.
4. UNICEF, State of the World's Children 1997, p. 21.
5. Giangi Schibotto and Alejandro Cussianovich, Working Children: Building
an Identity (Lima: MANTHOC, 1990), p. 54.
6. UNICEF, State of the World's Children 1997, p. 32.
7. UNICEF, State of the World's Children 1997, p. 32.
8. Kimberley Cartwright, "Child Labor in Colombia," in Christiaan Grootaert
and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds., The Policy Analysis of Child Labor: A
Comparative Study (Washington: World Bank, January 1998), p. 85.
9. Save the Children Fund UK, Children and Work in Rural Nicaragaua,
Learning From Experience: What Do We Know about Children and Work? (London:
Save the Children Fund UK, September 1998).
10. Ana Lucia Kassouf, Child Labor in Brazil (London School of Economics,
September 1998), p. 18, Mimeo.
11. Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, Social Panorama
of Latin America 1995 (Santiago: ECLAC, 1996), pp. 54-55.
12. ILO website, "IPEC: Finding out about Child Labor: The Causes,"
September 1998, (www.ilo.org).
13. UNICEF, State of the World's Children 1997, p. 27.
14. Christiaan Grootaert and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds., The Policy
Analysis of Child Labor, p. 7.
15. Sergio Schneider, Fernando Cotanda and Marilis Lemos de Almeida,
Diagnostico do Trabalho Infantil em Novo Hamburgo e Dois Irmaos, Porto Alegre
(March 1997), p. 6, Mimeo.
16. Christiaan Grootaert and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds., The Policy
Analysis of Child Labor, p. 226.
17. ILO website, "IPEC: Finding out about Child LaboR"
18. Ana Lucia Kassouf, Child Labor in Brazil, p. 8.
19. ECLAC, Social Panorama of Latin America 1995, p. 134.
20. Trevor Evans, Carlos Castro and Jennifer Jones, Structural Adjustment
and the Public Sector in Central America and the Caribbean (Managua: CRIES,
1995), p. 179.
21. Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Structural Adjustment in Nicaragua, Sapping the
Social Fabric (Washington: Development Gap, 1995).
22. Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Structural Adjustment in Nicaragua.
23. Oxfam International, Debt Relief for Nicaragua: Breaking out of the
Poverty Trap (London: Oxfam International, October 1998), p. 14.
24. ECLAC, Social Panorama of Latin America 1995, p. 19.
25. ECLAC, Social Panorama of Latin America 1995, p. 115.
26. Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin
America (London: Latin American Information Bureau, 1995), p. 155.
27. Duncan Green, Silent Revolution, p. 102.
28. Ben White, "Globalization and the Child Labor Problem," Journal of
International Development, Vol. 8, No. 6 (1996).
29. UN Development Program, Human Development Report 1997 (New York: UNDP,
1998), p. 227.
30. ECLAC, Cambios en el Perfil de las Familias (Santiago: ECLAC, 1993), p.
35.
31. ECLAC, Education and Knowledge (Santiago: ECLAC, 1992), p. 37.
32. William E. Myers, Characteristics of Some Urban Working Children: A
Comparison of Four Surveys from South America (Mimeo, 1990), p. 19.
33. Manfred Liebel, "What do Working Children Want?" Envio (Managua),
February/March 1996, p. 36.
34. Author interviews with staff at Gonoshahajjo Sangstha, Bangladeshi NGO,
Dhaka, July 1998.
35. Richard Anker and Helina Melkas, Economic Incentives for Children and
Families to Eliminate or Reduce Child Labor (Geneva: ILO, 1996), p. 5.
36. Christiaan Grootaert and Harry Anthony Patrinos, eds., The Policy
Analysis of Child Labor, p. 1.
37. Andrea Barros e Policarpo Jr., "Ajuda e ate carinho fora do horror,"
Veja (Sao Paulo), October 30, 1996, p. 54.
Duncan Green is a policy analyst at CAFOD, the Catholic Aid Agency for
England and Wales. He is author of Hidden Lives: Voices of Children in Latin
America and the Caribbean (Cassell, 1998), and a member of NACLA's editorial
board.
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