Child Labour: Burning questions 9789048520992

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Child Labour

CHILD LABOUR Burning Questions

Inaugural Lecture Delivered as the Professor in Child Labour Studies, in particular the historical and social aspects, on behalf of the International Institute of Social History at the University of Amsterdam, on Friday 21 November, 2003. By Georges Kristoffel Lieten

a Amsterdam 2005

isbn 90 5260 185 2 © Copyright 2005 The author. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by photoprint, microfilm or any other means, nor transmitted into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. Omslagontwerp: Jos Hendrix, Groningen Printed in the Netherlands by: A-D Druk BV, Zeist Aksant Academic Publishers, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Sir Rector Magnificus, Highly esteemed colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am standing here at the start of a serious task. I need to make it clear to a diverse audience what I am worth, my vision on the contribution of research, the extent to which I command the problem at hand and whether I can place this question within a scientifically sound paradigm. At the same time, I need to ensure that the paradigmatic discourse is comprehensible to all those who are interested in why this issue is being discussed today, and in seeing academic insights translated back into clear and understandable language. An oration was, perhaps, not meant for the latter, but it seems to me that this bonus is fitting under the current need for civil society to get involved in understanding and solving social issues.

Society from the perspective of the child Why the concern for child labour? I would probably never have become engaged on my own accord. My agenda was much broader. It was, and still is, an agenda that focuses on the macro-story: the story of global inequalities, of political machiavellism, of social discrimination and exclusion, of development assistance and the story of the big narratives, feudalism, capitalism, neo-liberalism and socialism. When I went to India for continuing my studies I saw it all, and my experience there played an important role in my intellectual formation for which I am thankful to the country, my fellow students and my professor gurus of those days. I learned there what in daily practice of the specific discipline may sometimes be threatened with extinction: the knowledge of the historic, the macro-economic and the sociological context. I once received, upon my arrival in Amsterdam, a postcard of thanks from a student in a far off country with the words that she accredited to me, or to Khalil Gibral, but that I accredited to her: ‘ S/he who doesn’t see the part in the whole, doesn’t see the whole’. This points to the academic researcher who in the multistructural and multicausal social system must try to make clear the diverse strings of a social phenomenon. It has to do with the explanations that lie beyond the surface, and those explanations, for example for the phenomena of child labour, are -5-

of a complex nature. Gathering insights into multi-causality is the work-terrain of the academic. I continued to function at this macro-level for a long time; this is what I was educated to do. I must also have seen children that walked around in a desolate state, shabbily clothed children that dragged stones or, in roadside restaurants and tea houses, carried out every kind of task imaginable, and, from morning to night, season by season, didn’t do anything but clean cups in dirty water, rinse dishes and set tea. I saw it, yet it was only a footnote in the larger narrative of poverty and inequality. It is still a footnote, because let us be honest while addressing this issue, what importance does child labour have in the large picture of world events, against the background of a horrible abuse of human rights and devastating crises. Global inequality, I am compelled to keep repeating, has in the last half a century undergone a dramatic increase; at least fifty countries have become poorer not with just a marginal decrease but with tens of percentage points. In terms of statistics, it has been calculated for example that in 1980, 118 million people lived in nine countries where GDP per head was declining. In 1998, there were 60 such countries and 1.3 billion such people. The average overall growth in the period of globalisation has declined, particularly so in the developing countries and social inequalities at world level have widened dramatically, so much so that the richest 50 million people in the world earn as much as the poorest 2.7 billion. Statistics reveal that income inequality has worsened in 33 of 66 developing countries in with data on income distribution is available. 1 The widening gap has also occurred within most countries. The trickle down effect from the winners to the losers is taking so much time to materialize that the assumption of such an effect (and the promises on which the new policies were based) have raised many question marks. James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, in his address to the annual meeting of the World Bank in 1999, came out openly with the message that inequality – as measured with the 1. See Robert Went, 2003. Even many authors with a sympathetic attitude c.q. belief in neo-liberal tenets have a difficult time explaining how something which was supposed to produce a win-win situation (the global free market) has produced more poverty alongside more wealth. Official per capita incomes in 1975 in Sub Sahara Africa, South Asia and the European Union were US $ 670, 405 and 12.600 respectively. In 1995 the per capita incomes for the same regions were US $ 520, 430 and 19.300 respectively.

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Gini coefficient- at world levels and at intra-country levels was increasing. Whereas the median per capita income of the world’s richest 10% of countries was 77 times that of the poorest 10% in 1980, it was 122 times greater in 1999. This is taking place in a world in which interconnectedness, the global village, has become a key word, where growing wealth, economic, technological and military power is radiated from some countries to the furthest corners of the world and is generating spite and resentment amongst Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians alike. Aren’t these, the problems that a development sociologist should rather focus on? That I have focused on child labour is not by chance. Different people have played a role in this. In the first place Sjef Teuns, who as co-founder and chairman of IREWOC in 1991, stood at the crib of numerous initiatives, including the initiative to do academic research into the phenomena of child labour, as the acronym of the Foundation states: International Research on the Exploitation of Working Children. Without him, I wouldn’t be delivering this professorial lecture. Nor would I be standing here without Jan Breman, to whom I also owe a great deal of thanks. It is not by chance that he has taken over the Chairmanship of IREWOC. He has always focussed his research on what he had learned through life experience: the conditions of the working people, the traumas of the social question. He has pointed many of us in the right direction, or kept us on the right track, with the implicitly expressed message that the wealth, the welfare and the knowledge are generated by processes at the bottom layers of society, and that solidarity with these layers assumes an understanding of that world. I am glad that I have made the choice to focus on child labour, also after fruitful discussions with others, to whom I am equally thankful. Macrostructures are about people: social circumstances determine the space in which individual persons live, but on the other hand it is through the knowledge of the individual person, through anthropological insights into the subjective, that the real hold of as well as the legitimacy of social ties and cultural patterns are experienced. The academic in this situation is the nosy parker who tries to understand how the person is part of a larger whole, how the child prepares itself for and forms opinions about the social world, and how it largely assimilates that world, but with the particular view of a child.2

2.

See for example the studies in Lieten, 2004a.

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Society through the eyes of the child, that says a lot about society. The circumstances in which children live say perhaps more than any other variable about the essence of that community. By taking children as entry point, and child labour in particular, a good picture can develop of the levels of justice and injustice in society and of the norms and values that rally matter in daily life.3 How does a child experience the norms and truths in his/her own life and what does it think of the community that for many of its children can not translate the ethical high grounds about children into reality? The work of the academic who looks at the community from the perspective of the child, that to me is a task of great importance. This is especially so if we want to make serious work of the modern slogan of child participation. Such research can give the child recognition and voice. The perceptions of the child, if duly registered, can provide the empirical material for theoretical discussions and they may also serve to ‘ground’ the sometimes esoteric discussions in reality.

Defining childhood In this light, we may look at the discourse around childhood. In the context of child labour, this is a discussion about fundamentals. Childhood, a number of western colleagues believe, is a culturally bound construction.4 The current western concept of the child, according to Zelizer’s (1985), emerged in the course of the nineteenth century: a child was regarded as worthless in economic terms, but to be of inde3. When, at the beginning of the past century, the fierce debate in the United States about child labour was at its high point, John Graham Brookes, the President of the American Social Science Association made the following wise comment: ‘It is always assumed that there is no better indication of civilisation than the way in which women in society are treated, but there is a better indication, and that is how we treat our children’. (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 27, nr. 2, p. 26). 4. A trend setter in this the book edited by James and Prout from 1990 (also James et al., 1998) with authors, writing from a post-modernist point of view, distance themselves from the commonalities, and emphasized the particular: the “socially constructed” child is a local, and not a global phenomena, and has the characteristic of being very particularistic. (James e.a.., 1998, p. 214). The different constructions of childhood have, under this approach, their own value, and normative declarations stemming from universal ways of thought are regarded as unacceptable.

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terminable value emotionally. Philippe Ariés (1964) has dealt with this transition in a long-term perspective, and numerous authors have concluded that what is true of Western countries does not necessary hold true for other countries in the world. This vision is incorporated in a seemingly progressive critique of the universalisation of what are taken to be western values. It is treated as the imposition of western culture on other people’s throughout the world who are thereby denied their right to an own culture and an own construction of childhood. This approach sometimes even leads to an acceptance of child labour in developing countries: children there work because it is part of their culture. It is an approach that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the academic literature. Children in that approach are seen to be wrongly excluded from work by adults, and a plea has been made to extend children’s rights to employment ‘as a way of improving children’s social and economic status’ (James et al., 1998, p. 107). It is argued that a child has the right to work, and that in developing countries, work is supposed to be part and parcel of the everyday existence of most children. James et al. (1998, pp. 112, 109) for this reason denounce the attempts at analytical distinctions between paid employment outside the home and domestic work, for such a distinction ‘may be one that does not make much sense from the point of view of the child.’ It is assumed that ‘children do work’ and it does not make much sense to delineate ‘child labour’ as a specific activity. Such a reduction, in my view, carries the danger of smoothing out child labour as a problem. Like others, James et al. (1998, p. 109) conclude that in many circumstances ‘it is unrealistic and even undesirable that children should be excluded from work which helps their household to survive.’ Jo Boyden (1990, p. 208) has argued that taking Western childhood as a normative basis for remedial action elsewhere, could have potentially damaging effects on poor families and their children. She assumes that the beliefs of ‘welfare and rights practitioners’ differ radically from those of parents and children. From the point of view of the former, children absent from school, children at work or living in the street ‘all signify family or personal dysfunction’, and that the children and their families ‘are considered legitimate targets for state intervention’. She concludes: ‘In this respect, the move to set global standards for childhood and common policies for child welfare may be far from the enlightened steps anticipated by its proponents.’ (Boyden, 1990, p. 208). -9-

Such an argument partially derives from the assumption of a different concept of childhood in the non-Western world (rejecting the universal portent of the ‘western’ idea of childhood). Boyden (1990, p. 186) claims that the images of childhood favoured in the industrial North (‘this ideal of a safe, happy and protected childhood’) belong to a model of childhood ‘which has resulted from the historical interplay of the Judeo-Christian belief system and changes in the productive and demographic base of society corresponding with capitalist development’. As stated, the work by Ariès (1964) is usually taken as the standard reference work for such an analysis.5 This construction is embedded in an Hegelian approach to history according to which established ideas in a culture are the driving forces and the essence of an epoch and of a community. The people’s culture, the norms and values, and not the changes in economic structures, determine the direction of history. The construction of another childhood for communities in the Third World negates the dynamics of history, a history in which people and their cultures have always known interaction, exchange and even assimilation. The construction of the world as a quilt of cultures with separate values and different constructions of childhood negate the ongoing impact of the continuous diffusion of new streams of thought. The essentialisation of cultures and the dismissal of universalism also fails to see the ostentatious similarities in the nature of childhood amongst the rich and the middle class in developing countries, a childhood that is based on the same values as described for western culture. At play has been a dialectical historical evolution, normatively denoted with ethnocentric concepts such as civilization, westernization, modernization and development. 5. What Ariès has actually done is to show, on the basis of visual representations, that in the course of the 18th century, family life, which earlier was a peculiarity only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, progressively extended to the entire society. In the earlier period, the medieval period, life of the popular classes was a social life in the true sense of the word: it occurred more in the public domain than in the private domain, and children grew into that public life, and into the work and apprenticeship associated with it. From the 18th century onwards, the family of the common people started to separate from the public domain. The intimacy of the family, with a separate domain for infants and for children, and with education as the additional element of socialisation, became a feature of modern society. It gradually extended to ordinary people, in the same way as it extended across the globe in the centuries thereafter, first to the elite and then to the ordinary people.

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The theoretical projection of another childhood seems, therefore, more likely to be one that falls together with the existing conditions that poor people in developing countries face: no education and work for a living. The theories about social constructions of childhood put the seal of legitimacy on inequality of children across the globe. What do the children themselves think? During research conducted in Nicaragua we asked children to indicate what they believed the difference was between a child and an adult. The answers were unambiguous: A child doesn’t work likes to play amuses him/herself goes to school doesn’t have many responsibilities can’t reason well

An adult works doesn’t play doesn’t amuse him/herself much doesn’t go to school has many responsibilities reasons well and makes decisions

The dismissal of childhood as a universalisable ideal is probably based on too specific a description of what childhood means in a specific region of the world. If childhood is considered as a period in life during which children grow up in a nuclear family, get pocket money from their parents, attend school and after school go to cultural clubs, engage in sports or play computer games, and in the evening have the freedom to watch television and discuss with parents what should be on the breakfast table next morning, such a vision of childhood could be properly applicable to a North-Atlantic context. If on the other hand, all these contextual specifics are scraped off, childhood could get a universal definition, namely a period in life in which the young person is protected, is surrounded with love and advice, is allowed to experiment and learn while being provided with the necessities for survival. A period of life also in which the young person is guided and sometimes directed by knowing adults and in which the living environment is one in which she or he knows that no harm is meant and that no misuse is intended. John Locke, the philosopher of equality (in The Second Treatise of Civil Government, originally 1690) wrote in the chapter Of Parental Power that adults have to take care of the offspring in their imperfect state of childhood: ‘To inform the mind, and govern the actions of their yet ignorant nonage, till reason shall take its place and ease them out of that trouble, that is what children want, and the parents are bound to’. -11-

Even if children like to assume freedom and like to be heard by the adults – it is a good pedagogical principle to adhere to -, they also want the parents to look after the children in all its facets. In the course of a large project in six countries, while looking at agency, we explored the vision of the children, as we had done earlier in villages in India and Pakistan. In these villages parents and children had been asked what childhood should entail and research was conducted into what it looks like in practice. In countries like Tanzania, Bolivia, Nicaragua and definitely in Vietnam, it was normal for children to go to school and it was only amongst the poorest sectors of society that children also had to work and stayed home following primary school. Particularly in countries such as Burkina Faso and in the countryside in India and Pakistan, it was repeatedly established that many boys and girls don’t attend school and often engage in work around their house and sometimes help to generate income as cow herds and agricultural labourers, as shoe-shiners and street-vendors. There are many indications that children and their parents aspire to the childhood of the better off, namely a childhood of education and leisure. Two examples from two different corners of the world: Tran Van D, a nearly 15 year old boy from a mountain town in the north of Vietnam: ‘life is too heavy here. I still go to school, but I also have to work hard, chop stones and that sort of thing; I want to go soon, to the city. I still need to study hard, but then my life will be better there.’ The 9-year old Luzmaira in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, works at home while her parents earn a meagre income: ‘Some people are so poor that they have to live on the street, they have no clothes and no food. They don’t have work; the bad people don’t give them work. We have a little, but not enough. I can’t go to school.’ A random selection from so many stories.6 On the one hand, these children scream out the desire that the universal ideals of a childhood of education, light-heartedness and play without work should be theirs. In some cases we noted the comment: ‘Ah, what’s the point of going to school for people like us. Later the children will just have to work anyway.’ One of the women who said this to me was Kamala, who lived in a remote village in North-India. Everything there was poverty, 6. These stories are taken from the reports of six countries (Vietnam, India, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Bolivia and Nicaragua) in the IREWOC research project Children as Agents in Development, financed by Plan International. I could supplement this story with material from the poignant story The Children of Kabul (see Jo de Berry e.a., 2003) and in UNICEF, 2003.

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bitter misery: a collapsed hut, garbage scattered around the house, and eight dirty, half naked children between 2-17 years, two deceased and one soon to be delivered. ‘Hard’, ‘difficult’, and ‘setbacks’ were the terms used to summarize life. The children had a childhood of strain, work and non-enrolment. But the intelligence radiated from the mother, and she told me something that is perhaps the key explanation for the other childhood in which her children must live: ‘Whatever we do, many children or few children, school or no school: it will stay like it is, we will never get out of this.’ Perhaps the core of the explanation why so many children in developing countries don’t attend school lies here, a core that could also be found in Europe and the United States of the nineteenth century. For the poor then, there was poverty and pure misery, which, as many chroniclers of those days would argue, they themselves contributed to by having too many children and by alcohol abuse. Consequently, in a circular reasoning, the circumstances in which they lived were used to explain their poverty.

Growing attention for child labour I want to leave behind the discussion about the eurocentric perspective of childhood. The ethical foundation of my work as an academic is the belief that children, wherever they may be in the world, have a right to life, to education, to protection and to freedom from work. From this perspective, it seems evident to support action slogans such as ‘Stop Child Labour, All Children to School’. These and similar slogans and appeals have become common since they were first heard in the 1990s. Child labour as a theme is a hot topic, just as in the 1970s workers, indigenous peoples and then women were a hot topic. Ecology and children nowadays, determine a not unimportant part of the discourse on development. The 1989 UN Child Rights Convention, the ILO Convention 182 of 1999, the sharply increased budgets of child focused and especially child labour focused development organisations and the attention in the media are indicative of the growing interest. It could well be that the increase in attention in the western world for child labour in the Third World is related to the possible threat of unfair competition. The United States of America and the World Bank have engaged in a lot of research on child labour in developing coun-

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tries, with a focus on export sectors.7 Through the Harkin Bill, which has never become law, for example, as well as through the initiatives of a number of Western governments, led by the United States, to take up child labour as a social clause in international trade agreements, child labour has become part of what can be identified as a policy of altruistic self-interest or as self interest tout court.8 The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) supports this initiative.9 I am ready to recognize the possibility that ethical motives underlie the attention for the unjust aspects of child labour, and that the present interest should therefore hold ground, but it is also clear that child labour embodied in export products can disrupt western markets and that international laws to protect the Western countries from ‘unfair’ competition come in handy as an economic measure. A good deal of international attention goes to children working in export-oriented sectors of the economy, such as in the production of carpets, textiles, flowers, games and sporting wear. They are sectors that have already been regulated as a result of consumer movements and the threat of international sanctions. When the share of child labour in these sectors decreases even further, this may slacken international attention for child labour. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. With this discussion about childhood, about ethics and about norms and values I have already come a fair way in the direction of the thickly layered research agenda with which child labour is concerned. Child labour has become a hot item. A hot item bears the burden of simplifications and the use of metaphors. Research can contribute to making apparent the complexities within the simplifications. Child labour is inextricably linked to diverse and important social problems and must be placed within this context. 7. A good example of this is US Department of Labor, 1994. 8. A legislative proposal in Washington (Internationational Child Elimination Act) calls for ending assistance and IMF/World Bank loans to industries that are suspected of using child labour. It is remarkable that the US has such a concern for ‘child labour’ in developing countries: next to Somalia it is the only country in the world that hasn’t signed the 1989 UN Covention on the Rights of the Child. Previously, already in 1994, senator Tom Harkin made a proposal for legislation that was so threatening that exporters in a number of countries, particularly in the textile industries in Bangladesh, cleared their factories of child labour. 9. ICFTU, 1996, p. 2 (introduction by the General Secretary): ‘This clause will punish those that make profits through child labour, slavery, discrimination and the suppression of trade unions and will reward countries that respect basic human rights by providing them with access to international markets’.

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Where children work As I approach my real argument, another problem emerges. When the question ‘what is child labour’ is posed, a cacophony of answers breaks loose. The phenomena related to child labour have something to do with children, but what are children? It also has something to do with work, but what is work? I have suggested, along with others, to make a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘labour’. The distinction between these words cannot be made in all languages – it is more difficult in French, German and Spanish than in English or in Dutch – but that shouldn’t signal the end of the discussion. Work done by children, la besogne des enfants, mitarbeiten, el ayuda del niño y del niña, and, to also bring Hindi into it, bal ka kam, indicate activities that are undertaken as part of the normal process of socialization, in the household, on the farm, in housework tasks after school and even by undertaking a small activity in order to earn some extra pocket money. They are activities that children in, for example, Europe are already allowed to engage in at a young age, or that are at least tolerated. These are also activities that ILO Convention 138 allows for children after the age of 12 in developing countries, as long as it is only light form of work. A strict application of this concept of light work is difficult, and aberrations may always be around the corner.10 Child labour in Europe is fairly widespread. Reports and studies on Western Europe and the United States have indicated the large scale of the phenomenon of child labour.11 Usually the problem is fudged and only in a few cases does it involve intervention by the labour inspectorate and the labour

10. A survey commissioned by the Ministry of Social Affairs in the Netherlands concluded that 74% of school children between 12 and 18 years of age have worked and that in 70% of the cases this even occurred on the basis of activities that are forbidden by law (Neve & Renooy, 1988, p. 111). 11. See amongst others Lavalette, 1999; Hobbs et al., 1996; Hobbs & McKechnie, 1997; Stephen Cunningham, 2001. A report in The Guardian (8 August 1998) claims that in Italy 300.000 children are involved in labour activities: ‘There are hundreds of small family run businesses on the hills of the Vesuvius that produce piracy goods. Staff at a young age work in bars and in shops or as apprentices in repair shops. The use of children as drug traffickers is common place. A recent study for the ministry of labour showed that 30% of the boys in Southern Italy between 10 and 14 years had a job.’

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court.12 Usually, a blind eye is turned to child labour, as long as children do not get injured physically and do not seem to be exploited excessively. Lavalette (1999, p. 138) has convincingly argued that children have not stopped working, but that the regulations have ‘deproblematized’ their labour activities. ‘Out of school’ work increasingly became viewed as a healthy pastime and an embodiment of the work ethic. Herein, it seems to me, lies a big research assignment: a large-scale investigation of child labour in Western countries, which should be conducted for a minimum of three reasons: It will, in the first place, become evident whether the amount and the nature of the work conducted by children are in conflict with the development of what is regarded as childhood. What are the motives and in what context do children in rich countries actually work? If most appear to work in order to earn money as young consumers, in order to buy, for example, cd’s, designer clothes or to go to house parties, including the purchase of XTC-pills, is it not self evident why this type of work should be tolerated while the work of their peers in many developing countries, where the purpose of work is more likely to be to make ends meet and to survive, is regarded as child labour that must be abolished? It might, in the second place, come to light that work is becoming more flexible and that a ‘third-worldization’ of labour relations is occurring within the developed world. In the third place, such research could reveal something about the remarkable distortion in the international statistics regarding child labour. Dutch and other European children have hardly been referred to in the statistics of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and of the World Bank. There, the focus lies almost exclusively on child labour in the Third World. Of all child labour in the world, 60% is stated to occur in Asia, 23% in Sub-Sahara Africa, 8% in Middle and 12. For example: in 2001, two McDonald's restaurants in one of Britain's wealthiest areas have been heavily fined for exploiting child workers. Ten schoolchildren, including a girl who worked 16 hours on a Saturday and another who worked until 2 a.m. on a school day, were found to be illegally employed at a McDonald's in Camberley, Surrey. The officers identified 51 breaches of the regulations involving 10 schoolchildren aged 15 and 16. Children aged 15 and 16 can only work eight hours on a Saturday during the school term. They can only work for two hours at the end of the school day but must stop by 7 p.m. According to the TUC, up to 500,000 schoolchildren could be working illegally (Guardian, August 1, 2001).

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Latin America and 6% in North Africa. In Sub-Sahara Africa, 29% of children are active as child labourers: the participation rate is 19% in Asia, 16% in Latin America, 15% in North Africa and only 2% in developed countries.13

The importance of statistics The premise that child labour is frequent in developing countries but hardly occurs at all in developed countries merits further consideration. In the 1980s, the ILO estimated that there were 50 million child labourers, of which 98% were in developing countries (ILO, 1983). At the start of the 1990s, the estimates were 80 million working children up to 14 years, but this number was adjusted because a much higher percentage didn’t go to school and it was therefore assumed that there were many working children amongst this group (Fallon & Tzannatos, 1998, p.2). In 1995, when the ILO could make use of specific empirical data on 25 countries, most of it from World Bank surveys, a final number was established of 250 million children between 5 and 14 years of age. In 2000, SIMPOC (Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour) of the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) of the ILO used other sources and methods of research to arrive at an end sum of 210 million children, of which 2 million children in developed countries (ILO, 2002a, p. 19). The new estimates cannot be used as evidence of a global reduction in the number of children working – different methods and data sources have been used in the 1995 and the 2000 estimates – but they give a more differentiated overview. Child labour, in the assessment of the ILO, can be divided into three categories: all economically active children in the age group 5-11, all economically active work excluding those in light work in the 12-14 age category and all children in the 15-17 age group involved in hazardous work. In the first two categories, respectively 109.7 and 76.6 million child labourers have been counted. The total number of children involved in the ‘worst forms of child labour’ (186.3 million) is less than the 210.8 million figure of ‘economically active’ children because the ‘light work’ category has been excluded.

13. The statistics and additional information www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/info.

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are

available

on:

Going though the statistics provided by SIMPOC, one has a tough job finding data which are readily useful for an analysis of the real problem of hard core child labour. The elaborate report on Tanzania for example leaves crucial questions unanswered (IPEC Tanzania 2002). The figures cannot be directly transferred to a transparent matrix. For one reason, the age categories (5 to 9 and 10 to 14) do not correspond with the ILO conventions 138 and 182.14 Without further transparency in the reporting, it is impossible to know how many of the children have been classified as child labourers and how many actually are child labourers. In the 5-9 age group, 25.5 % is said to be economically active, but we do not know how many hours they work and whether they go to school. We know that two thirds of all the children work less than 4 hours a day, but we do not know how this applies to the different age categories. Many children of 10-11 may have been included as child labourers because, even although they went to school, they also did ‘some work’ in the reference week. Economic activities, by the way, include activities like fetching water and firewood, and it seems that many young children, even if doing only ‘some work’ for one or two hours a day, have been promoted to the status of child labourer. It is quite possible that the statistical division of SIMPOC has applied formulae in such a way that the extrapolation figures on child labour in the world (210 million) are good approximations, but for lack of transparency it remains unclear. Elsewhere, I have suggested on the bases of statistical reports about Nepal and Pakistan that the outcomes must be approached with the necessary scepticism.15 14. The aggregate findings are interesting: 9 % is idle, 40 % is economically active (96.8 % of them in agricultural and non-agricultural family activities) and 48 % is involved in household activities; only 4 % of the children are in school. These figures include all children from 5 to 17, and this aggregation is not useful to isolate the ‘child labour’ category. As many as 3.9 million of the children in household activities were attending school and 1.8 million were not. If one knows how restricted the entry into secondary education in Tanzania is, one may suggest that many children are not in school for reasons different from the compulsion to do household work. Of the children engaged in economic activities, 2.5 million were attending school and 2.2 million were not attending school. Of these 4.7 million children, 3.8 million were working on the shamba (family farm), 0.9 million were working in other family occupations, 79 thousand were in paid employment and 60 thousand were self-employed outside the family occupation. 15. An ILO investigation (IPEC Pakistan, 1996: 15) came to the conclusion that 22.5% of boys and 7.2% of girls between 10 and 14 years of age worked, that is to say, ‘at least one hour (sic) every day of the week preceding the investigation’. In Europe, this would not qualify as child labour. The majority worked as unpaid

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The more reliable figures, in my view, are lower. I don’t, with this suggestion, want to diminish the enormity and the intolerability of the problem and the big contribution that IPEC is making to the efforts ‘to further improve awareness and understanding of child labour and reinforce efforts to eliminate it’, as Frans Röselaars, the director of IPEC writes in his foreword to Every Child Counts, the report with the new estimates (ILO, 2002b). I simply want to make a plea for realistic proportions and in particular for isolating those forms of child labour that are intolerable. In some publications I have argued that a possible explanation for the ease with which the high figures have been accepted has to do with at least two factors: the tendency to stereotype another society, and the need to use the numbers to wake up the world community.16 In the first place there is a tendency to stigmatise the Other, a tendency embedded in the western cultural-ideological concern of distinguishing oneself from the Other. I hereby mean to indicate that citizens and governments in Western countries would like to make a distinction between one’s own Western countries and developing countries. Where one’s own region performs well with respect to human rights, women rights, democracy, the provision of social services, welfare, income distribution, etc., this allegedly is not the case in developing countries, so goes the stereotype.

assistants on farms. In the cities, only 10.1% of the boys and 1.5% of the girls in the same age group worked (at least one hour a day!). Next to the question as to whether this is actually entails ‘child labour’, one can question the quality of the material gathered: where in the NWFP-region, 39.0% of the boys in the rural areas (10-14 years) was recorded as child labourers, the percentage in the neighbouring province of Baluchistan was only 2.4%, which could suggest that the research contract with local research institutes did not produce very reliable data. One can, consequently, further question whether 13-14 year old children that engage in light work at home should be considered child labourers. The relevant clause in ILO Convention 138, drawn up in 1973, established a minimum age of 15 years for child labour, with exceptions of 14 years (in countries ‘where the economy in educational institutes was insufficiently developed’) and at 13 years for light work or at 12 years in countries where a general minimum of 14 was applicable. The question remains whether one is, even under these strict ILO-standards, speaking of child labour. 16. See Lieten, 2001a and 2001b, where this point has been elaborated and where other factors are also mentioned, such as the questionable purpose of propping up figures in order to legitimize the policy of including child labour as a clause in international trade agreements.

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While the Third World is being diabolized, the virtues of one’s own society are confirmed. Western values (or Western Civilisation as it used to be called) have created societies and identities that distinguishes themselves from a societies in which bad governance, corruption, poverty, hierarchy, religious mania and lack of freedom are a matter of course. This dichotomy is also in force with respect to children: here everyone happily goes to school whilst there a great deal of child labour continues to exist.

Child labour as a metaphor The image ‘child labour’ is thereby a metaphor, an emblem that substitutes for a definition of developing countries. The stories about and the statistics of children in the Third World help to confirm the identity of the Other. The image of ‘child labour’ thereby functions in the stigmatization of developing countries. The sum of the many forms of child labour in developing countries (child prostitutes, street urchins, bonded labour in cacao plantations, carpet weavers, child domestics, children in sweatshops, etc.) creates the image of countries that are held together by child labour. Exaggerating the numbers of child labourers is handy for organizations that also want to legitimize themselves as a charities or development aid organisations, and are aiming for higher financial contributions. Fluffing up numbers and painting as dramatic a picture as possible of the circumstances in which children have to work, generalizing the worst forms, so that they apply to all working children, has led to more money in collection drives as well as to greater financing by institutional funds. The figures have been handy to wake and shake up the world conscience, but they aren’t suitable for drawing up good policy. I will illustrate this bold statement by way of the situation in India and of the Western publications about the extent of child labour in that country and the alleged unwillingness of local leaders to fight it. The numbers regarding child labour in India differ widely. A number of NGOs as well as most western sources state that India has more than 100 million child labourers, which is to say that about half of all children between the age of 6 and 14 engage in child labour. According to government figures on the other hand, the number has decreased over the past twenty years, from approximately 21 million in around 1980 to 9 million in the year 2000, with a workforce participation rate that has de-20-

creased from 11.2% to 4.8%.17 A large proportion of these children are ‘working’ in agriculture and this does not comply with the image that child labour in developing countries generally conjures up. The difference between the estimates of 100 million and that of 9 million has everything to do with problem of definition. With some audacity I isolate the complexities involved in the definition of child labour as the essence of the problem. If we know what the concept means, where the phenomena begin and end, it is possible to act against it and to formulate a suitable policy response.

Detrimental forms of work There are different types of work: full time, part time in combination with school, slave labour, wage labour, housework, assistance in the household and on the farm, vacation work, etc. These different types don’t always have harmful effects upon children; some can even have a useful function in the socialization process. Mixing up the diverse forms of ‘child labour’ is undesirable. The ILO economist Richard Anker (1999; also see Anker, 2000) speaks, in this context, of ‘the proverbial mixing of apples and pears.’ This raises the need for minute research into the exact forms of harmful and unacceptable forms of work undertaken by children. Research conducted on the bases of surveys will, in this case, not suffice. Shortly we hope to start, in a number of countries, a medical-psycho-social project that will look at the effects of different forms of child labour from a longitudinal perspective. The results of this research are expected to provide an answer to the question of what types of labour can absolutely not be tolerated in light of the development of the child. 17. Amongst others Chaudhri et al., 2004. The population statistics of the tenyear population census rely on a strict description of the concept ‘child labour’: participation in an economically productive activity. A number of activities that children engage in will therefore not fall under this category, despite the fact that the activities are a form of work and take place on a regular basis. Children that take care of their siblings, who gather fire wood, and that take care of the milking cow won’t easily, under this census definition, be considered as working, even though their activities do contribute indirectly to the economic survival of the family. The definition used is not water-tight and there will inevitably be children that engage in long and strenuous work in the household, but the definition, in its generality, provides a handle for analytical distinction in that it distinguishes ‘labour’ from social functions within the family.

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When does the work of children become child labour? That is a crucial question that applies to child labour in the Netherlands as well as in Far-offistan. Labour is the application of labour power in a societal production process, or in support of that production process, in order to achieve a specific aim. This can take place against remuneration or within the family business, in, for example, the form of regular assistance on the family farm. The concept of ‘child labour’ can then explicitly be limited to the types of activities that are detrimental to the normal development of the child. This approach is in conformity with the new ILO Convention 182 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the latter Convention, protection against all forms of work is not named as one of the many basic rights of the child. The child does, according to the Convention, have ‘the right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development’. The ILO, with the choice of Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, has taken an important step by making the distinction between not good but somewhat acceptable and absolutely unacceptable: ‘Not all work performed by children is equivalent to “child labour” … The problem is how to draw a (statistical) line between acceptable forms of work by children (which may be regarded as positive) one the one hand, and child labour that needs to be eliminated on the other.’ (ILO, 2002b, p.31; see also ILO, 1998). The aim of developing, in practice, a clearer picture of this distinction, in my mind, requires more than the broad investigations that were conducted by SIMPOC and the World Bank and which has provided the basis for the seemingly convincing figure of 178.9 million children who fall under the category of ‘the worst forms of child labour’ (ILO, 2002b, p.25). Besides these children there is another much larger group of children who, on the basis of many indicators, find themselves in a disadvantaged position, in the first place because they don’t attend school. In India around 80 million children fall under this category. Because these children can’t be found amongst the statistics of working children nor amongst the statistics of school going children, they have come to be referred to as ‘nowhere children’. I have received generous financing from the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development to follow two-thousand of these nowhere children: their activities, the ex-22-

tent to which they are involved in child labour and the reasons why they are not at school. Children that don’t go to school are not necessarily child labourers. They are a large category of deprived children and since the reasons for not attending school are different from those of children who have to work, it is of critical importance that the different categories and mechanisms are separated. Otherwise one shall run the risk of getting the deprived children into school and assuming that the problem of the core category of child labourers is being solved: it is possible to solve the problem of nowhere children without even touching the core problem of child labour. 18 Policies to send these nowhere children to school are having effect. In India approximately 85% of 10-year old children are now attending school. The enrolment drive should be supported. The more children are attending school, the less risk and possibility that they are contracted as child labourers. Children who are sitting behind their desks are not sitting behind workbenches or scavenging at garbage dumps, this is clear.

Historical precedent in western countries Taking concrete measures is, however, not always possible or effective. The historical precedent can serve as a good illustration of the noncongruence of theory and practice. The abolition of child labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the then developing countries in Western Europe and North America was achieved with much difficulty. Hindman (2002, p.5) in his standard work about child labour in the history of the United States has stated: ‘It took a long time before we were aware of the problem, but even longer before we arrived at a solution, and even that was incomplete.’ The abolition of child labour in the industrializing countries in the nineteenth century was, for a long time, not up for discussion, and this continued into the beginning of the twentieth century. It wasn’t until 18. The state of Andhra Pradesh in India is possible a good case. One NGO active there has taken a vociferous stand that all children not in school are child labourers and although it has claimed that it has removed child labour from hundreds of villages, even in 2001, the Census statistics on the core district of influence of that organisation (Ranga Reddy district) still had an 11.01% child labour participation rate, one of the highest in the country.

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1941 that the federal law on child labour was accepted in the United States. There were a number of reasons why this didn’t occur earlier. When president Theodore Roosevelt in the beginning of the 20th century was asked by prominent activists to support a new law, he stated that he was not inclined to do this, but he did readily accept when asked if he would be willing to support research into child labour (Hindman, 2002, p.65). Government funding in the following years has led to a goldmine of information about the working child in the United States. In European countries, it is also possible to make use of richly filled archives, whether in the municipal administration, company archives or official surveys, or through investigations undertaken by engaged citizens. The detailed investigations in that period made, to an important degree, a large contribution to the fact that public opinion was sensitised and that there was a steady development for the better. It was not a matter of a general ‘awakening of consciousness’ as is usually assumed, but a longlasting and uphill struggle. The pioneer labour historian E.P. Thompson (1968, p. 384) has argued that changes did not follow from the awakening but rather from ‘the veritable fury of compassion which moved the few score of northern professional men who took up the cause of the children; the violence of the opposition to them, which drove them on occasions into near-revolutionary courses.’ Conditions in the USA and Europe in the nineteenth century were appalling. In 1842, the average age of the gentry and the labourers in Manchester was 38 years and 17 years respectively (Thompson, 1968, p. 365). It was therefore also normal that 49.9 % of the workers in the cotton factories in that city had started work before the age of 10, and that a further 27.9 % had joined the factory before they were 14 years of age (Galbi, 1997, p. 363). Jacob Ris, who in the late nineteenth century took the American president into the ghettos in order to show him the other America, warned his readers that one might almost be led to believe that one half of the children worked like slaves from toddling infancy, while the other wanders homeless and helpless about the streets. His own report (Ris 1892, p. 5) did not take away that impression: ‘The tenement and the saloon, with the street that does not always divide them, form the environment that is to make or unmake the child.’ The attempts to change this situation were like a prayer without an end. Although some employers and some members of parliament gradually moved to the side of the reform movement, initially child labour was even a cause to be defended for various reasons. One reason un-24-

doubtedly was that work ethics was considered to be superior to the disorder of backstreet ethics. The last half of the nineteenth century, however, marked the protracted transition from the Christian discourse of charity to social policy. In the Netherlands for example, the anti-child labour movement started rather late, but even there, already in 1835 an official report drew attention to the widespread use of child labour and the negative consequences. It took almost 40 years before the first (and inconsequential) act was passed. A prevalent thought a this time was, in the words of Vleggeert (1964, p.17) that people could combat poverty through child labour: ‘poor souls should be helped to obtain work and bread and their children should prematurely – at the age of sevenbecome used to labour and discipline’. This was a general feature in Europe in the eighteenth and a large part of the nineteenth century. The poor houses, orphanages and churches zealously worked to get impoverished children placed in working houses. Factory owners that took on children for absurdly low wages were regarded as benefactors.19 In addition, there was the doctrine of complete state abstinence that came in handy in order to justify non-intervention. This position began to change gradually. The organizations of employers, at least in their public statements, started to see the advantage of keeping children in school, at least up to the age of 10. On the entrepreneurial side in the Netherlands, one of the supporters of government intervention argued that whereas adult labourers could look after their own interests and did not need government protection, children could not defend themselves. Children, according to textile entrepreneur Samuel Le Poole, could become the powerless victims of their parent’s carelessness and greediness, and the government should intervene, ‘not only to protect the unhappy children, but also to protect general well-being, so that a sickly and bestial population doesn’t grow amidst society’ (Vleggeert, 1964, p.64). He supported van Houten, the liberal Member of Parliament, in a bill, but that bill was too radical for the Dutch establishment at that time. The bill was important as a marker but was inconsequential in respect of practical application.20 19. See amongst others Brugmans, 1970, pp. 194-200. 20. The intended prohibition of child labour bill was reduced to a law prohibiting those under 12 years to work in factories; the obligation to attend school was completely removed since it went against the conceptions of the church. Many feared ‘Crossing God’s will’ whenever man interfered in social questions. The fear

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This was also the general conclusion in respect of England, the United States and France (see Lavalette, 1999; Hindman 2002; Caty, 2002): protective legislation played only a limited role in restricting child labour but it was part of a process. Law making did not necessarily lead to its implementation. Labour inspectorates started functioning but the official machinery did not always see the need for drastic intervention. As long as certain industries had difficulties in changing over to a new labour regime and as long as poor families needed an additional income, the government machinery was lenient and child labour dragged on.

Decline and disappearance That child labour gradually disappeared in the developed countries has less to do with legislation than with other factors, factors that indeed can be named but that also lead to a continuing debate and disagreements among historians.21 Was it the rising expanding awareness and the compulsory introduction of education? Was it the growing organizational strength of the workers’ movement that led to higher wages? Was it the long-term increase in welfare that also led to the lower social classes being lifted over the threshold of deprivation? Was it technological developments whereby tasks typically carried out by children were now carried out by adults, and did these technological developments also require a higher degree of schooling? Was it the general process of civilization in the sense of the development of a civil society in which all social classes were brought closer together and in which impoverishment, lawlessness and lack of safety hampered the better off and the national integrity in general? What pattern was most obviously having an impact? It would be worthwhile if we knew. It would make finding the solution to the problem of child labour in developing countries – a solution for which

that compulsory education for all children could imply that they would not go to schools organized on a religious basis, also undeniably lay behind the resistance of religious institutions. See, on the development of this law: Vleggeert, 1951; Brugmans, 1970, pp. 193-213 and 223-245; Postma, 1977. 21. Discussions about the influence of the law and about the influence of other factors can, for example, be found in De Herdt & DeGraeve, 1981, Nardinelli, 1990; Hugh Cunningham, 1991; Cunningham & Viazzo 1996; Lavelette, 1999; Hindman, 2002; Caty, 2002.

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western countries themselves needed almost one century – much easier.22 It is not possible to get historians to agree on a single interpretation. One could suffice by stating that the different aspects mentioned above actually all play an important role. In any case it is evident that the first steps to resolve the social question, of which child labour is an inextricable part, were only taken in the last decennia of the nineteenth century. In most developing countries change has taken place in a relatively short period of time. Governments have become aware of the importance of resolving the social question with an eye to economic development, national integration and social development in general. Policies have been put in place and there is considerable development in, for example, increasing literacy, reducing child mortality and limiting birth rates. Laws have been adopted and international treaties and conventions have been ratified. An increasing number of people seem to be sufficiently aware that labour is a bad option for childhood and large numbers of organizations and movements, national and international, are actively paving the road for new policies and new practice. It nevertheless seems that efforts to abolish child labour aren’t proving particularly successful. Two questions can, in this context, be raised that highlight the importance of research in this area, namely those related to causes and solutions. Causes and solutions are inextricably linked.

Causes There is still a deficient understanding regarding the causes of and the mechanisms behind child labour, and the understanding has not improved despite the fact that the World Bank has a large share in the global research on child labour and has been able to influence the agenda. That type of research has a number of weaknesses: it is purely econometric, it is based on statistical data that are, to say the least, ambiguous, and that looks mono-causally at parent’s motivations. The research, building on the Basu and Van theory (1998) that the issue at 22. I.J. Brugmans (1970, p. 194) formulated it as follows: ‘In respect of the attention to issues concerning the working class before 1850 only one thing can be said: it did not exist. They did not know the social question because they did not know the working class’.

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hand is in essence a luxury dilemma, focuses on the question of which parents make a choice for an income now, and therefore set their children to work, or a choice for later, and therefore allow their children to study. Elsewhere, I have pointed to the fact that in the first place, in view of the conditions in which parents live, a rational choice has totally different connotations,23 and that, in the second place, such research designs place the blame for child labour solely with the parents: the parents are exploiting their own children. This approach also reinforces the dichotomy between Us, who take good care of our children, and the Other, who as a result of tradition, stupidity, egoism and laziness send their children out to work. Child labour occurs relatively frequently amongst broken families and amongst families that are plagued by sickness or alcohol abuse. This is also a constant factor in the history of child labour. However, by looking solely at the social-cultural characteristics of parents, the socalled pull-factors are left out of consideration. The econometric calculations of, amongst others, Fallon & Tzsannatos (1998), Grootaert & Kanbur (1995), and Ravallion & Wodon (2000) are investigations that, as it were, look from the moon at the problem of child labour. Detailed research into parent’s motives to allow their children to work generates more realistic answers.24 Anthropological research says much more about the motives of people. Why, for example, do people have many children? That people in Europe used to have many children – perhaps many more per family than I have ever come across in developing countries – can help us to answer this question. I have asked this question to mothers and fathers in villages in India and Pakistan, and although I received in certain cases and at first instance the answer that it is the will of Allah or of the Bhagwan, just as it was in Europe half a century ago supposedly the will of the Christian God, the final image was that of inadequate access to and knowledge of anticonception pills (Lieten 2004b). The belief that people bore children as future income earners, which is often assumed, is one that can 23. The rational choice is based on an abstract principle. It negates the constraints (and even obstructions) of the economic, cultural, political and social circumstances. See also Theo Engelen, 2002, pp. 459 who has difficulty with the circular element in the explanation of behaviour as the rationally chosen option: ‘In fact we deduce strategies from behaviour and later we use it to explain the behaviour.’ 24. See, for instance, Lieten, 2003, pp. 227-255. The article was previously published in Economic and Political Weekly, volume 35, nr. 24 en 25.

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be set aside as an outsiders’ bias. As Tim Dyson (1991, p. 95) noted: ‘It is more likely that children work because people have children than that people have children because children work’. It is in all likelihood not the culture of poverty and not the egoism of the parents that lies at the basis of child labour, but we need more research into the motives of parents and children, as a counterpart of the particular World Bankled probability research on the basis of statistical variables. Another research approach is to look particularly at poverty as the cause of child labour.25 The results appear to be at hand: the poorer the country and the poorer the family, the more child labour. The lower the rate of literacy, and particularly the lower the rate of female literacy, the higher the level of child labour. This approach is based on the assumption of a push factor: children are pushed into labour as a result of poverty. It seems convincing, but how accurate is this conclusion? I have looked at the regional differences in child labour in India more closely and have come to a rather striking conclusion: child labour is significantly lower in the poorer regions than in other regions. The correlation with literacy levels is also relatively weak. Perhaps the strongest and most striking correlation is between child labour and the general degree of participation in the work force. This correlation is, for example, high in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu but low in the poor states of Bihar, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh. Child labour occurs frequently in the former states, but not in the latter. To explain this, I resurrected a relatively old theory of Rodgers and Standing (1981a; 1981b) that delineates a segmented work force with a relatively high rate of participation of adult men and women and the need for even more cheap labour.26 Less poverty is, consequently, 25. A classic work in which the existing literature is treated in a balanced manner, is Alec Fyfe, (1989). 26. Due to the weak position of the labourer or due to the unequal terms of trade (very low prices for agricultural products or traditional products) compensation for labour can be so low that, in the effort to survive, the whole family is required to contribute. Children must then engage in efforts to earn an income and will have to, as part of the labour process, undergo the same conditions as adults. Employers could have a preference for children, because they are docile and less fearful of dangers but, so argue Rodgers and Standing, in a situation of deprivation and large scale unemployment, adult men and women will also be, as it were, willing to work under circumstances that are comparable to child labour. In a segmented labour market where very low wages are paid to those at the bottom layers of society and where there is a great demand for specific forms of labour (or where poor farmers can earn a small income from agriculture) the

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paired with child labour, purely as a result of a demand for labour. As a result of a low rate of organization and/or of a weak negotiating position, parents are, despite the fact that they themselves work, forced to also put their children to work. Child labour, it follows, has a strong association with pull-factors, with entrepreneurs who, searching for free and at the same time cheap and docile labour, recruit children. Paying advance wages in the form of loans and thereby creating debts is, in this regard, a method that has proved to be effective across the ages.

Solutions In the search for solutions to the problem of child labour one will therefore also have to look, in particular, at the employers’ side and at the implementation of strict laws and the functioning of an inspection apparatus. Putting the question of who is at fault is begging the answer, but the answers are many. As mentioned above, some puts the responsibility with the parents; others place it with the insatiable profit for hunger of entrepreneurs and still others, such as Weiner (1991), with the dominant elite culture that doesn’t concern itself with poor children. Still other academics and policy advisors, and this is an important trend, push the notion of ever resolving the problem of child labour away with the argument that children have to work to survive and that childhood is culturally determined. Economists that are associated with the World Bank also give voice to similar arguments, such as Ranjan Ray (2000, p. 365): ‘Putting an immediate end to child labour is neither possible nor desirable, particularly with regard to the not unimportant contribution that children make to family incomes.’ From this perspective, initiatives have been taken to improve the working and living conditions of children rather than to abolish it. In Africa, Asia, Middle and South America many interesting experiments with child labour unions have begun, for which even a new idiom has been developed, that of protagonismo.27 The argument of this new stream is convincingly progressive: given the fact that these children have to work to survive, it is better to help them in their fight for better working conditions. On the other hand, this implies a policy of circumstances are different. 27. Interesting stories about this approach can be found in Manfred Liebel et al., 1999.

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condoning, of accepting a situation that is in fact unjust. The question is what the child labour unions will lead to. Will they reinforce social marginalisation and exclusion or will they, indeed, contribute to the process of emancipation? Thanks to the support that has been provided by Plan Netherlands, this research in 2004 has gone on steam in three continents. The research may not lead to clear answers that can be blueprinted into ‘policy’ but it stands beyond dispute that financial support by an NGO to allow us to engage in this type of research is of particular importance. It brings academia and project interventions closer together and will, in any event, lead to more reflection and to new insights. Research should not restrict itself to empirical illustrations of best practices and of hiring consultants but must dare to search for unchartered paths: not policy supporting research but policy led by insights arrived at on the basis of autonomous research. Tolerating child labour doesn’t seem to me to belong to the list of solutions. In the list, one would find other types of interventions that should be further analysed as ‘best practices’: good laws, good followup mechanisms, general free education, better working conditions for adults, social safety nets for poor children, steady economic development, reducing social polarization, etc. These types of best-practices cost money and assume the involvement of the strong hand of the law and of the state. Both conditions – financial means and a strong state – have had much to endure under neo-liberal policies. An alternative seems to have been found in social corporate responsibility. After a number of publications against the marketing of garments, sports goods, carpets, toys and furniture made by child labour, companies have taken the initiative themselves to develop a code of conduct against child labour. Ethical and/or social corporate responsibility is a form of self-regulation in freedom. This self-regulation, the ‘just leave it to us and we will implement responsible policies’, is an approach of which many liberals such as Van Houten and Le Poole already in the nineteenth century stated that it would not work. It seems to me that companies are there to make a profit and that governments are there to make and to apply the laws, simple but clear laws, that forbid and punish the soliciting of child labour here and abroad, just like the sex tourist is also pursued for infringing national law while misbehaving overseas. Ethical entrepreneurship works only and as long as international action groups are able to sound the bells. One of the activities of these action groups is the boycott of articles that have been made with the -31-

use of child labour. The threat of a boycott and the public-relations response of companies have been particularly effective in the sector of luxury consumer products. Research into what the effects are and whether the products are truly made ‘child labour free’ has hardly been undertaken. Here too, there is an important task for research,28 without overlooking the simple fact that ‘clean’ clothes, ‘clean’ shoes and ‘clean’ bananas only concern a very small percentage of child labour in developing countries. Keeping one’s own backyard clean is good practice but it will not help to resolve the problem. If I summarise the outline for research, it strikes me that there is still much to investigate. Besides questions that have not been raised here, such as the relation between child labour and education, the impact of the process of globalisation and the role of the government and civil society, I have made a plea to undertake research into a few aspects that I want briefly to reiterate: - a reconsideration of the extent of child labour on the basis of a detailed investigation of intolerable forms of child labour, - the short term and long term consequences of labour on the psychological and physical development of the child, - the causes of child labour which looks, in particular, at the demand side for labour, - a study into the extent and the effects of child labour in western countries and in developing countries, in comparative perspective, - the relevance and effectiveness of labelling and codes of conduct, - the experiments with and the results of radical bans on child labour, - the experiments to improve the working conditions of the working child, amongst others through child labour unions.

Thanks I have already spoken a few words of thanks. I also thank the IREWOC Board Members for their long-term efforts and dedication and Jaap Doek for his advice and his involvement. I also thank Frans Röse28. An investigation into the Indian carpet industry (where four child-labourfree labels compete with one another) has resulted in few positive conclusions (Sharma et al., 2001; zie ook Hilowitz, 1997 and Ravi, 2001). Also see Ans Kolk & Rob van Tulder, 2002a, 2002b.

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laers of IPEC/ILO for his involvement with the work against child labour,as well as the other members of the IREWOC Advisory Council. I would also like, on behalf of IREWOC’s staff, to sincerely thank Plan International in the Netherlands, which I have come to know as an unbiased sponsor of research. A strategic relationship between the world of research and the world of practical development work seems to me a sine qua non, but doesn’t occur frequently in practice, and that is why Plan International’s attitude is so striking. As a researcher I should not embellish a situation in which the funding agency also determines the content of the research, decides on the terms of reference and looks over my shoulder while I write the report. On the other hand, I do want to engage in research that is of social relevance and use, and that helps to take the practice of development cooperation a step forward. I very much wish that international organizations, governments and NGOs would loose their cold-water fear of academia and that they would, just like Plan Netherlands, make funds available for research that goes beyond legitimisation of policy. I also thank my ASIA colleagues and the International Institute for Asian Studies for the opportunities and the support that they have provided. It is a privilege to be able to work at a University and it is definitely a privilege to work at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. I am in this light thankful to the students and the colleagues for the interest that they have displayed. This also applies to my colleagues at the International Institute of Social History where I have, in a short time, found a pleasant working environment and a goldmine of archival material that is relevant to my research. Developing this material further, in particular in the area of child labour throughout the world, means that money will be necessary. In a society that literally and figuratively is bursting out of it seams with wealth and prosperity, this shouldn’t be allowed to be a problem. The problem with a market-based knowledge-oriented economy is, however, that knowledge must be put to a commercial use. That as a rule cannot be expected of the input of social sciences. It can be expected that academic researchers contribute, in the long term, to getting to the bottom of social questions. In the short term, they may be called upon to providing a handle and/or insights into solutions to current conflicts and problems. Such a contribution is of great importance. I hope that I have been able to demonstrate this with a concise overview of the most acute questions in the area of child labour. I have spoken. -33-

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