Abstract Child labor is the bane of civilization and is seen in almost all countries around the world.

However it is more rampant in the under developed and the developing countries. The root cause is seen mainly to be poverty. Children of the age group 5 years to 14 years are sent off to work in factories and other dangerous places for a basic minimum wage. They toil daily under extremely harsh, unhygienic and also often in dangerous conditions to earn their meager share of money. Often many children are huddled together in one small room and made to work from dawn till midnight, seven days a week, without any basic facilities for food, water or sanitation. Such terrible exploitations are often accompanied by merciless beatings for one small mistake. Child labor was put to an end in the early 20th century, and the benefit of doing this has been innumerable. Child labor remains one of the major social issues. Children have historically been a part of the labor force; especially, with the advent of industrialization. There are many instances throughout history in which children have been indentured or forced into child slavery within the labor market. Children were viewed as a cheap, manageable and renewable labor resource by individuals and business.

Introduction Child labor is a serious moral issue. There have been many controversial debates over whether it should be legal or not. Two different viewpoints on the subject exist. Many argue that child labor is morally wrong and that the children should not work, no matter how poverty stricken their family might be. Advocates and major corporations that support child labor argue that it is good because it gives poverty-stricken families a source of income. Child labor first appeared with the development of domestic systems when people became civilized. It was widely practiced in England, America, and other countries during the 16th-18th centuries. Children were paid very little for the dangerous conditions and the long hours they were required to work. Many of these children worked in factories, mills, mines, and other horrible places. Some families sold their children into labor for money to pay off debts. These children worked off the debt and were a source of income for the family. Today, child labor is illegal in most developed countries. There are strict laws that monitor the jobs, hours, wages, etc. that children have if they do work. An example of these laws, is one that requires all children to go to school until they are 16 years of age before they can drop out and be employed full time. Most third world and under-developed countries are where the majority of child laborers can be found. Child labor is morally wrong. The children shouldnt be forced to work. Most children who work are little more than slaves to their employers. They put up with abuse, starvation, and sometimes never being paid for their work. One eight year-old Hulbert 2 boy, Munnilal, from Varanasi, India, was freed when a raid was lead on the factory in which he worked and was kept in a slave-like environment. His Master gave him no money for the long hours he worked. He also stated that he was hit again and again.(Kielberger, 6.) Children who are forced to work also miss out on life and their chance for a good education. (Kielberger, 5.) In India, only 64% of males and 39% of females are literate. When children are forced to work at a young age, they can also develop serious health problems. Health problems are compounded for children because they are more susceptible than adults to the types of illnesses and injuries associated with occupational hazards. (Parker) Child labor is necessary in some places because poor families need the extra income this will bring. Poverty is the reason many children go to work. In India, 37% of the urban and 39% of the rural populations live in poverty. Studies have revealed a positive correlation- in some instances, a strong one- between child labor and such factors as poverty. (Melara-Kerpelman, 1996.) Also, a poll taken of child laborers revealed that 63.74% said the
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reason they worked was poverty. Hulbert 3 Many parents make their children work because there are no alternate sources of income. In many economically depressed countries where child labor exists, there arent any welfare systems and easy access to loans. The money for these types of programs isnt readily available. The shortage of money is due to the fact that there are economic problem within the country. Not all of the places where children work in third world countries are dangerous and dirty. Some major corporations move their businesses to places like Pakistan and China because the people there will work for less. Many times the people who work in these factories are children. Not all of these companies pay just a few cents a day though. Mattel, the maker of Barbie, is one of these corporations. In their factory based in Chagnan, China, workers are paid a $1.81 a day. (Holstein.) The factory they work in is also kept up to higher standards than most factories in China are. It is clean and they are very rarely forced to work in dangerous conditions. I feel children should be allowed to work only if they absolutely need to. The conditions in and hours which they work, as well as the pay they receive need to be improved. Governments need to pass laws that will do this. There have been laws passed that limit and reduce the amounts of child labor. An example of this is the Keating-Owen Act passed in 1916. This law barred articles produced by child labor from interstate commerce. Many organizations are working to improve child labor conditions. They are succeeding in some cases. Free The Children (FTC) is one such organization. FTC was created by Craig Kielburger when he was twelve years old. They petitioned for the Hulbert 4 release of a childrens rights advocate, Kailash Satyarthi, from prison. Their petition helped free him. After his release, he led raids on carpet factories that freed some children from bondage labor. .

First Argument Child labor is morally wrong. Children shouldnt be forced to work. Most children who work are like slaves. Children who are forced to work miss out on life and a chance for an education. Children who work can develop serious health problems. Child labor must be eliminated as quickly as possible, before many more children get trapped, like the millions who already have in the past. Child labor is often forced with the child having not much of a choice. Child labor cannot be tackled as a family issue only; it is a societal issue, a cultural issue, and a human rights issue. Put simply, child labor should not exist and no excuses should be made for it. Child labor in not a necessary evil, child labor is not just an issue for poor families; it is something that affects us all. Parents, employers, government officials, teachers, police and other community representatives should all be involved in providing the necessary conditions to ensure that children do not have to work. Families that depend on the income generated by their children should be supported and provision for the education of these children should be made. There is little point in removing a child from work for them to be replaced by another child. When children are no longer available for work, employers have no choice but to hire those who are available to them. The argument that child labor is a necessary evil or an unavoidable by-product of poverty is unfair and does a great disservice to the 218 million children around the world who are denied their rights. We should not accept the exploitation of children under any circumstances and they should not be condemned to a life of poverty and lost opportunity. Instead of accepting child labor, governments must redouble their efforts to eliminate it and ensure that all children, in every country attend full-time formal education. Ending child labor was the best thing to happen to the children in the beginning of the 1900's. It made the world a better place by getting children out of the factory and in to school. When the children worked in the factory they were being killed or seriously injured by the machines. Children need to go to school and get an education so they can get better work when they get older. Nobody wants to buy goods made by children. Child labor was not only killing small children but also the future mothers and fathers of America. Children at young age of 10 worked in factories, canneries and mills. Some of the
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children would say "what are the machines saying...they are saying that they're hungry they have already eaten up the men and women so now they are eating the children." One statistic found 18.2 percent of the country's children between the ages of 10-15 were working. How would you feel if your child was killed when he/she was working with a dangerous machine? Small children need to go to school so they can learn to read and write so in their future they can get a decent job. For any job, even in the 1900's to get a decent job you need to be able to read and write. Also, children grow up and have children of their own, how are they going to provide for their children if they do not have a decent paying job? There is no a reason why a 10-year-old child should be working in a mill or sweatshop. Who wants to buy products made by children, teenagers or any workers that were stripped of their rights? The poor children had to work to make ends meet because their parents couldn't make enough money to support their family. The children were forced to work long hours, from dawn to dusk, and they were paid as little as 10-30 cents a day. Ending child labor made the world a better place, it reduced child deaths and it got the children back in school. Child labor was physically, mentally and morally damaging. It led to the degeneration of hundreds of thousands of future fathers and mothers of this country. Child labor was the worst thing to happen to this country in the 1900's.

Second Argument Poverty is the main reason many children work. Many parents make their children work because there are no alternate sources of income. Many children are too young to realize that what is happening to them is wrong and illegal. It has been seen that these children come from very poor families and more often than not their wages sustain an entire family consisting of aged or handicapped parents and younger siblings. For them going to school is a luxury they cannot afford. From a very young age they are made to understand that time is money and every moment spent at school means less money or wasted labor. Children under the legal age to work in these developing countries, have more important things they should be involved with than labor. Each child deserves a good education, as well as the opportunity to enjoy life, and learn new things. The issue of child labor affects the children that are doing the work. Children are abused physically, mentally and do not get the chance to go to school to learn anything. Sometimes, because of the intensity of the work that they have to do, their growth is stunted or their body becomes deformed in some way or they lose a limb. Child labor also affects the families of the children who are sent off to work. A lot of the times, children are taken away from their parents and siblings and sent off to far away factories to work. These kids, whose parents are told that will come back in a few months, are usually never seen again. Poor parents send their children to work, not out of choice, but for reasons of economic expediency. The hunting grounds for child traffickers are invariably areas of the most extreme poverty where families have exhausted all other strategies for survival.

Poverty is also a symptom of child labor. Denial of education blocks the escape route from poverty for the next generation of the household. Other factors may provoke this cycle; for example, schools in poor countries are often inaccessible or prohibitively expensive, with inadequate teaching and classroom resources.

Many agricultural economies involve seasonal migration for whole families, to the detriment of schooling and inevitable employment of children. Cultural pressures too can undermine perception of the long term value of education, especially for girl children.

Economic setbacks arising from recession, climate disaster, conflict or family bereavement will therefore regenerate the supply side of the child labor equation. This has been one consequence of HIV and AIDS in Africa - household resources have been depleted by prolonged absence from work and by medical expenses.

This supply of child labor is matched by the demand of unscrupulous employers for a cheap and flexible workforce. This attribute appeals especially to small-scale enterprises, including those whose owners exploit their own family members.

There is perceived value in the particular skills that childrens dexterity can offer; for example in weaving or in tasks involving crop seeds. Girl children are in demand for domestic service, the invisible nature of which adds to their vulnerability to abuse. Absence from official statistics is also the fate of those girls kept away from school in order to work for their own families in the home or on the land.

Third Argument Child labor is necessary in some places to give extra income to a family. Many parents make their children work because there are no alternate sources of income. Not all places where children work are disgusting, pay low wages, and force them to work long hours. The case of child labor is an example of the complexity of moral dilemma. In the world today, millions of children works long hours under terrible conditions in order to help their families survive. But while the whole notion of child labor can appear inherently incorrect, there is a much-required economic angle to it such as the elimination of poverty trap. In some places, a child working outside of home to alleviate poverty is not necessarily a child stripped of his rights to education. Therefore a child can help survive the present meanwhile securing a future for him. To prove that legalizing child labor could serve as a solution, the regression result from the article: Is Spatial Inequality Rising in the Philippines? by Arsenio Balisacan and Nobuhiko Fuwa, provides interesting insights about this issue. It is indicated that the number of children of a family is negatively related to the household welfare. Meaning, the more number of children in the family, the less benefit they obtain. However, the study was able to prove that, the two become positively related, meaning even with many household members (more number of children), families could still improve their welfare, only if more household members are employed, including children. Thus, in this case, child labor could be very much beneficial.

From the said arguments, it is logical to conclude that child labor is the most probable and practical way to improve the welfare of below-poverty line households. Although some of you may still disagree, you must also understand that majority of these children struggle each day to maintain daily survival.

If its not possible to prevent child labor absolutely, why not view it on another light and see it as solution. By legalizing child labor, we can even improve the working childs well being by implementing laws that could guarantee their protection. A rights-based approach to child labor, relying on laws and their enforcement, is a necessary but insufficient solution to child labor. Broader human development interventions relevant to the underlying causes must play a role.
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The fight against child labor therefore shares common ground with poverty reduction programmes, and would benefit from greater recognition by them. The connection is most apparent in the strategy of conditional cash transfers (CCT), payments to poor households made on condition that children attend school and health clinics. The success of Brazil in greatly reducing the incidence of child labor is in part attributed toBolsa Familia, recognized as the worlds largest CCT programme.

Progress towards education for all children is the development indicator most closely linked with child labor. Every full-time student is one less potential full-time child worker. There is correlation between those countries lagging behind education targets and those in which child labor thrives, such as Pakistan and Nepal. Unfortunately, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for primary school enrolment aims for a total of only five years of education, far less demanding than implied by the Minimum Age Convention. Countries will be encouraged to follow the example of the Indian government which, in 2009, introduced a law backing the right of children to free and compulsory education from age 6 through to 14. The integration of child labor concerns into national development strategies, backed by effective legislation, is therefore the preferred route to a lasting solution.

Conclusion Thus from the above the discussion one gets the idea that there are two sides of a coin. One side depicts the terrible conditions under which these children work; the other side tells us the story of how often an entire family survives on the wages of this young child. So this is not an easy problem as it appears and needs to be dealt with care and sensitivity. The whole problem is a part of the poverty loop and is quite difficult to deal with. A rights-based approach which relies on laws and their enforcement is therefore insufficient in isolation from broader human development considerations. For example, authorities in India occasionally engineer police raids on suspect factories creating headlines that children have been "rescued". But such actions will be ineffective in the absence of institutional capacity to rehabilitate the children and assist their families in overcoming the loss of income.

Laws need to be complemented with development programmes which recognize the practical difficulties in reintegration of children into formal education. Development agencies are now more likely to acknowledge that children themselves should be consulted. Many children are anxious to find ways of combining education with the economic expediency of helping their families. Formal global development strategies have tended to disregard the child labor agenda. For example, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for school enrolment aims for a total of five years of education, far less than implied by child labor conventions. There is increasing realization that vital MDGs for poverty, education and health will not be achieved whilst child labor thrives.

A cost/benefit analysis carried out by the UN in 2003 convincingly demonstrated the value of eliminating child labor by reference to the long term economic benefit of a more skilled and healthy workforce. As further evidence of interdependence, there is correlation between those countries lagging behind the MDG for education and those in which child labor thrives, such as Pakistan and Nepal. The integration of child labor concerns into national development strategies, backed by effective legislation, is therefore the preferred route to a lasting solution.

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Failure to deal with child labor is an emotive issue in rich countries. Consumers are sensitive to the track record of globalization in driving labor costs and standards to the bottom.

Disclosure of the use of child labor in sweatshops represents a major public relations disaster for both multinational companies and the host countries concerned. One country under the microscope is Uzbekistan. Its economy is very dependent the cotton crop, much of which is harvested by children taken out of school. The country will almost certainly be forced to respond to the 2008 boycott of its cotton products by Wall-mart and other multinational retailers. Another example is the cocoa industry in West Africa which has so far failed to meet deadlines in a longstanding attempt to certify its product. Critics say that international chocolate companies have made insufficient efforts to engage with the countries concerned in poverty reduction programmes. Almost 300,000 children are believed to work on the cocoa farms, many of them in conditions of bonded labor.

There are however doubts over the effectiveness of western-inspired consumer boycotts. These can result in sudden closure of production lines and devastating loss of household incomes, contributing little to address the root causes of child labor. An approach that is not aimed at eliminating all forms of child labor but merely the worst forms often results in ad hoc solutions, the replacement of one group of children by another and continuance of the problem. Such an approach does not result in the protection of all children from economic exploitation, hazardous work and work that impedes with participation to education.

Because poverty is not the main determinant of child labor, it is through an integrated education and child labor policy in developing countries and in donor countries possible to also offer poor children full-time education and to fight all forms of child labor that are detrimental to a childs development and/or are an obstacle to a childs education. Child labor is a problem that can be solved by concerted action, political will and financial resources. The poverty argument can therefore never be an obstacle to each childs right to formal, full-time and quality education.

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List Of References

Kielburger, Craig. It Starts With Me. Guideposts November 1999 Parker, Dr. David. Stolen Dreams: Portraits of Working Children. http://www.busph.bu.edu/Gallery/Introp.html 18 December 1999 Cleland, Hugh G. Child Labor. Encyclopedia Americana. 1991 ed. Holstein, William J. Santas Sweatshop. U.S. News and World Report 16 December 1999. H

Facts about Child Labor in the Early 20th Century. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2011, from http://www.bookrags.com/essay-2005/6/13/18395/2457 ttp://www.geocites.com/CollegePark/Library/9175/inquiryl.html Child Labor. (n.d.). Retrieved April 20, 2011, from http://www.wowessays.com/dbase/ad1/bsw34.shtml

What is child labour? (n.d.). Retrieved April 20, 2011, from http://www.stopchildlabour.eu/ stopchildlabour/English/About-Child-Labour/FAQ

Celestine. (2011, April 20). Legalize Child Labor [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://veiledpad.blogspot.com/2006/03/legalize-child-labor.html

Child Labor . (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2011, from http://www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=58308

Child Labour. (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2011, from http://www.oppapers.com/essays/ChildLabour/ 675542

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Child Labor in the Global Economy. (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2011, from http://www1.american.edu/ TED/rugmark.htm

Development Solutions to Child Labour. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2011, from http://uk.oneworld.net/ guides/childlabour

Harmful work and the worst forms of child labour. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2011, from http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/eyetoeye/childlabour/isitlegal.htm

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