Children in hazardous work
What we know
What we need to do
International Labour Organization, Geneva
Extracts
Executive summary
Children in hazardous work are in many respects the silent majority within child labour. Although
they appear in photos, when it comes to action they are often eclipsed by forms of child labour
that have captured the public eye, such as child soldiers or trafficked children, or they are subsumed
within general child labour efforts. Still too few policies or programmes are geared to the
special needs of children who do hazardous work.
There are solid reasons for giving this issue urgent attention: (1) the scale of the problem – estimates
place the current total of children in hazardous work at 115 million; (2) the recent rise in hazardous
work among older children – an increase of 20 per cent within 4 years; and (3) the growing
evidence that adolescents suffer high rates of injury at work, in comparison with adult workers.
There are also sound reasons to believe that it is in the area of hazardous work that major progress
can be made in eliminating child labour. This report shows that there has been some real
success in removing younger children from hazardous work, as well as in reducing the number
of girls caught in this worst form of child labour. This suggests that efforts are paying off.
Hazardous work of children has been highlighted in recent ILO policy directives, such as the
Global Plan of Action on Child Labour which set 2016 as the target date for elimination of the
worst forms of child labour. The Hague Global Conference on Child Labour in 2010 also called
for more focus on hazardous work.
Against this background the ILO has been reviewing what is known about the problem and
examining “good practices” in dealing with it. This report offers a summary of this knowledge
and practice and proposes how we might move forward.
The report is divided into three parts. The first provides a general overview of the issue. It discusses
hazardous work of children in terms of how it is defined (Chapter 1), how many children
are affected (Chapter 2), and why, from a health and a legal standpoint (Chapters 3 and 4, respectively),
children require special protection.
The second part considers the research evidence regarding the problem and positive initiatives
in addressing it. The research summary (Chapter 5) looks at the scientific data with respect to
seven sectors: crop agriculture, fishing, domestic service, manufacturing, mining and quarrying,
construction, and street and service industries. These were selected not because they are necessarily
the “worst”, but in order to demonstrate the importance of knowing and understanding the
risks inherent in an industry, the importance of conducting a “risk assessment” as to how the risks
manifest themselves in a particular situation or locality, and the importance of using this information
to identify which activities are age appropriate and which are not.
In this part the report warns that children’s lives are being lost or shortened by being exposed to
hazardous work. Many people simply do not realize how vulnerable children are to toxic chemicals,
to extreme temperatures, to repetitive mind-numbing tasks, to isolation or to denigration,
threats and violence.
Also within this part, Chapter 6 presents a sampling of concrete activities that have potential for addressing
hazardous work of children on a wider scale. They are offered for consideration as potential
models because each embodies an approach that has been used successfully in a variety of countries.
They approach the problem of hazardous work of children from different angles and under the
leadership of different parties: the government, trade unions, employers and the community.
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The third and final part gathers the threads from the previous parts together into a conceptual
framework that aims to show what a coordinated, comprehensive effort to stop hazardous work
of children should look like. Instead of seeing child labour as a problem specific to a rather
narrow age group, it urges that we take a life-cycle approach. This involves a stronger focus on
ensuring that education and training policies prepare children for work life so as to achieve an
effective school-to-work transition. It also requires that when adolescents move into the labour
force there are adequate safeguards for their safety and health.
The report stresses that addressing hazardous work by children is not only a technical issue.
Major and sustainable progress requires public policies that address the root causes of child labour:
tackling poverty, ensuring children have access to education and providing a social protection
floor which protects the vulnerable.
Although the number of children in hazardous work is large, some of the most dangerous types
of child work are concentrated in specific localities, specific occupations, specific tasks and specific
age groups. Focusing energies on these pockets could go a long way towards generating
the momentum needed to make progress. However, the report also warns that the scale of the
problem could increase in many countries due to demographic changes, as youthful population
bulges move into adolescence.
Overall, the report makes the case for children in hazardous work being made a priority for action
over the next 5 years. It calls for specific action on three fronts:
Making a renewed effort to ensure that all children are in school, at least until the minimum
age of employment;
Strengthening workplace safety and health for all workers, but with specific safeguards for
youth between the minimum age of employment and the age of 18;
Providing the crucial legal foundation for action against hazardous child work, with the support
of workers and employers.
FACTS
The problem is serious:
Hazardous work is one of the worst forms of child labour.
More than half (53 per cent) of the 215 million child labourers worldwide do hazardous work.
Hazardous work is increasing among older children, aged 15–17. Within four years (2004–08), it
jumped 20 per cent – from 52 million to 62 million. Boys outnumber girls by two to one in this
age group.
Children have higher rates of injury and death at work than adults, as shown by data from industrialized
countries.
But there is a strong basis for hope:
Progress is being made. For younger children (aged 5–14) in hazardous work, rates came down
31 per cent between 2004 and 2008; for girls they are down by 24 per cent.
There are 173 countries that have committed themselves to tackling hazardous work of children
“as a matter of urgency” by ratifying the ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No.
182).
A gold strike, of sorts
There’s a certain gold-mining operation in West Africa where, the local people say, the danger
runs high but the pay is not bad. True, the work is hard and dangerous: the tunnels and shafts
have rickety support structures (if any) and can collapse at any time; no one has ever thought
of a safety plan should poisonous or flammable gases escape from underground pockets; there
is no protective gear, many work in bare feet with bare hands. In short, the working conditions
are deplorable and accidents are a daily occurrence. The living conditions are tough too. Water
is scarce; there is no clinic; there are no toilets; there are no police.
The miners see little sunlight, slipping down narrow shafts before the dawn and surfacing only
occasionally through the course of the long day. Others face quite the opposite, as they work
unprotected under a hot sun, smashing rocks into pebbles and then grinding them down to sand.
The hazard they know about is the stifling dust that you can never seem to get out of your lungs;
the hazard they don’t know so much about is the effect mercury has on the brain. They use mercury
to separate the gold from the crushed ore.
Mines such as this one produce a fifth of the world’s gold according to UN estimates. 1 They also
produce gems for our jewellery and rare minerals for our cell phones. They are generally remote
and unofficial but often highly organized. The doubling of world-market gold prices in recent
years has made such gold prospecting all the more attractive to the abject poor, and all the more
dangerous.
Not unexpectedly, a sizeable percentage of the workers drawn to these gold, gem and mineral
mines and stone quarries are children – both girls and boys: children digging, hauling, crushing,
breathing in dust; children kneading mercury into crushed ore with their bare hands; children negotiating
a meagre price for flecks of gold from gun-toting buyers; children without decent food
or clean water; children losing their chance at an education.
Many of us possess romantic notions of childhood, a time that is to be reserved for innocence,
wonder and discovery. And many others argue from a practical perspective that childhood and
the formal transition to work is a modern social construct that takes on different meanings in different
cultures. Yet, universally, we agree there’s something wrong with the above scenario, be
it in a gold mine, a sugarcane field, a garment factory, a timber operation, a construction site or
a garbage heap. When we allow children to be placed in such a situation, we surrender a bit of
our humanity.
Yes, these children are poor, and what pittance they earn can help support their families. Yes, a
child’s need to work reflects a larger problem of a failed or sometimes corrupt infrastructure that
doesn’t offer affordable schooling. Yes, some children are quite mature for their age and seemingly
can handle the physical and mental stress that manual labour can entail. Yes, some work is
a form of education that can teach valuable life skills. But no child should be rubbing mercury
into gold and vaporizing the resulting amalgam.
Let’s look at the facts. Consider the adverse effects on a young body from working in the aforementioned
goldmine. Mercury, a neurodevelopmental toxicant, impairs cognitive and motor skills.
Acute exposure to mercury – acute, as in breathing in mercury fumes – can result in profound
problems of the central nervous system, leading to delirium and suicide. 2 In the gold-mining
areas, a child can be exposed to mercury in many ways: through the skin when mixing it into the
ore-bearing sand; by inhaling the fumes when it is being burned off over the fire (the most toxic
and easily absorbed form); by ingesting it as residue on hands during meals or from food grown
in contaminated soil. One research study showed that child miners had higher levels of toxic metals
in comparison with adults even when they had less contact with the metals. 3
What does this mean in terms of health? In one study, children working in a gold mine similar to
that described were found to have alarming levels of mercury in their blood, urine and hair. Neurological
tests comparing these children with a non-exposed control group were “striking”, the
study found, with the mercury-exposed children needing twice as long to perform basic cognitive
and reflex tests 4. Moreover, even the children simply living at the mine exhibited higher mercury
body burdens than children living further away, implying the broader, community-wide health
threat imposed by the hazardous work conditions. 5
Gram for gram, children breathe more air, consume more food and drink more water than adults
do, partly as a result of the faster metabolism needed to support their growing bodies. An infant
breathes twice as much air per kilogram of body weight as an adult. Therefore, absorption of toxicants
is proportionally higher. Heavy loads can cause lifelong deformities and handicaps, such
as crippled feet, bent backs or dislocated shoulders. And the heavy but invisible load of being
responsible for supporting the rest of the family has effects still unmeasured on a young person’s
capacity for learning … and for joy.
Until now, the psychological, social and intellectual impact of hazardous work such as mining on
children has not received much attention. We sometimes assume that if children don’t complain,
they are managing alright. Yet children are often unwilling to speak out for fear they will lose
their job or appear stupid, making them vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. When children
work side-by-side with adults in the mines, they are subject to verbal and physical abuse, if not
wholesale fraud and deceit. The freewheeling lifestyle which is so common in remote and unregulated
mines exposes them to alcohol abuse, gambling, prostitution and crime. Schools are
non-existent; the only trade learned is how to survive in a near lawless environment.
If not mercury in this mine, then manganese or lead in a smelter elsewhere. If not armed buyers
of gold, then the beatings by an aggressive factory boss elsewhere. If not mine dust, then silica
from quarry work elsewhere. If not loud and dangerous machines here, then unwieldy tractors
and exposed blades on farm equipment elsewhere.
If not at a workplace where the hazards are easy to see, then in the myriad small-scale industries
such as shoe-making, leather tanning, garment sweatshops, automobile battery recycling, metal
plating or woodworking, where the health impacts may appear only years later.
Often these jobs are so visible – as in selling flowers in the middle of a busy intersection – that
they become invisible, blended into the cacophony of urban life.
The cost is not just to this child’s future, but to the society as a whole. The nation suffers alongside
the worker, as a poorly qualified workforce leads to lower productivity, lower profits, lower
investment, lower wages and the perpetuation of the cycle of poverty.
“There’s nothing that can be done”, some say about the ubiquity of workplace hazards children face.
“It’s just the way things are.” But we know this is not true. It may be the way things are now, but
times are changing. This document is a testament to the fact that there’s plenty that can be done.
Source : International Labour Organization