Paragraphe II :
A phenomenon not being limited to the poor
countries
Even if the large majority of the children who work finds in
Asia, Africa or Latin America, the child work is not limited to the developing
countries. Indeed, the industrialized countries also use this labor but it is
then the nature of the child work which determines if it is prejudicial for
them and not the simple fact of having an employment. Few inhabitants of the
industrialized areas think that to employ a young person to deliver newspapers
during one hour or two before the school is a form of exploitation, although it
is paid certainly less than an adult for a similar work. Often, the child will
be even encouraged to take this kind of employment in order to rub in the world
of work. All the confused forms of work, the percentage of childish labor can
be surprisingly high : in the United Kingdom it appears that the
phenomenon concerns from 15 to 26% of the 11 years old children and 36 to 66%
of the 15 year old young people10(*). An investigation carried out at the local level in
Great Britain noted that 40% of the questioned children had, in a form or
another, « a trade or an occupation exerted at lucrative
ends », i.e. a work other than the baby-sitting or the races. Other
studies showed the existence of a bond between the unemployment of the parents
and work children and that, in London, four children out of five who work make
it illegally, either because they do not have the age, or because their work
was not appropriate for a child. The number of families with low incomes not
ceasing increasing, more and more children will be put in the search of an
employment, often clandestine and illegal. It should not be believed that these
children work under conditions protected than in the developing countries since
one belongs unfortunately sometimes to the very serious accidents : a 14
year old child who worked for wages of a book per hour in a factory of bed
linen is made grab the arm in a machine deprived of protection. In England two
large firms were recently prosecuted to have employed children in lower part of
the minimum age !
In Italy, the problem of the child work is also growing, and
one estimates at several hundreds of thousands the number of children who work
in one way or another in this country, mainly in the large cities. Many
children make the school buissonnière to go to work. The domestic
industry is the very widespread shape of exploitation of the children and the
industry of the shoe is a great sector of the clandestine economy which
functions with thousands of small workshops dispersed a little everywhere,
which returns the intervention of the authorities almost impossible.
The child work also gains ground in Portugal where more and
more of children are employed in small companies which want to be ensured of
the profits of competitiveness on the European market. The children are
exploited in the metallurgy, the trade, tourism, the textile, the construction
industry, the pottery but also the shoe, the services domestic and the clothes
industry. 11(*)
However, in the industrialized countries like the United
Kingdom, the majority of the young workers also attend the school. But, it
would be completely naive to believe that in the Western countries, the child
work is always of the type « pocket money ». The
industrialized nations would have tendency according to the UNICEF with
« to think that they completely abolished the hardest shapes of work
children and thus push the poor countries to follow their
example »12(*).
One still frequently finds the shapes dangerous of work children in the
majority of the rich countries. Usually, the exploited children would come from
minorities ethnic or groups of immigrants, like the communities Tziganes and
Albanian in Greece. It is also the case in the United States, for the majority
of the hard-working children employed in agriculture. A study carried out in
1990 by the countable general Agency showed an increase of 250% of the
infringements to the legislation on the child work between 1983 and 1990. In
1990, an operation carried out by the Ministry of Labor during three days
revealed that 11.000 children worked clandestinely13(*). The same year, an
investigation into the children Mexico City-American occupied in the farms of
the State of New York revealed that about half had worked in still wet fields
of pesticides and that more than one third had been touched by direct or
indirect pulverizations.
It is thus seen that the child work is not the unhappy
privilege of the developing countries, but which there also exists with our
doors. Nevertheless, that should not prevent us from wanting at all costs that
this one ceases quickly in the poor countries, because it is all the same in
these areas that it is generalized the most and that the working conditions are
most deplorable.
* 10 «Child Ploughing
in Britain», Carryforward to the International Working Group one
Child Ploughing, September 1995, p.34.
* 11 All these examples are
drawn from the report/ratio « Not time to play. Child
work in the world economy. » report/ratio of the CISL June
1996.
* 12 UNICEF 1997
* 13 « Work in
the world » 1992, the ILO, Geneva, 1992, P.14
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