The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that more than 246 million children are engaged in labor. Although the incidence of child labor has been falling globally, it is doing so unevenly, and in some areas it appears to be on the rise. 1 In many countries in South Asia and Africa the percentage of working children falls within the 20 to 60 percent range.
The widespread existence of child labor has provoked both popular outrage and legislative initiatives aimed at banning the sale of all prod-ucts made by children. But developing economies, and many econo-mists, have cautioned against universally proscribing child labor. They argue that such bans will be ineffi cient and will hurt poor families and their children. Some economists have voiced concern about paternalis-tic interference with family strategies that may have evolved rationally in the context of poverty and inadequate education systems. Others point out that because child labor is itself heterogeneous, ranging from light work delivering newspapers after school to child prostitution, uniform policies may undermine the ability to target its worst forms.
There is thus considerable debate as to whether establishing and enforc-ing a uniform worldwide set of standards for dealenforc-ing with child labor is desirable.
Against the background of this debate, this chapter explores the nor-mative issues posed by child labor. In the fi rst section I briefl y consider the conceptual problems of defi ning who is a child for the purposes of identifying child labor. The second section explores several consider-ations that make child labor morally problematic, considerconsider-ations that turn on all four of the parameters I presented in chapter 4: weak agency, vulnerability, and extreme harm to the individual child and to society. 2 Guided by these considerations I defend a position distinct from both
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those who argue that all child labor should be abolished immediately and those who argue that we must accommodate it. I argue that the worst forms of child labor, including child prostitution and the use of children as bonded laborers, should be unconditionally prohibited.
Other types of child labor may need to be tolerated under certain cir-cumstances, at least in the near future, even as efforts are made to erad-icate them. Legal toleration, however, does not imply indifference, and states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can protect and promote the interests of children in many ways. In particular they can take broad social measures to improve outcomes for children, especially by ensuring that all working children are educated.
Child labor cannot be addressed without considering our moral and political values; they are implicated in the questions we ask about child labor, in the data we seek, and in our policy design. Moreover whatever policies are adopted will involve trade-offs among different values. Pol-icymakers need to make explicit the values they want to promote and the trade-offs they are willing to accept. In this chapter I take the most important values at stake to be preventing extreme harms to children and to society and I suggest how those values might guide policy and research.
W H AT I S A C H I L D ?
Many countries defi ne childhood in terms of chronological age; others take into account social factors. In some African countries, for example, ten-year-old apprentices and brides are no longer assumed to possess all the characteristics that industrial countries bundle together into the status of “child.” They may be eligible for marriage but not entitled to make decisions independently of their parents. Different countries invoke different age thresholds of adulthood; even within countries such thresholds can diverge: one age for voting, another for employ-ment, another for military service. Finally, the category of child admits for heterogeneity: three-year-olds have dramatically different capabil-ities than fi fteen-year-olds.
What is the normative basis of modern society’s view of childhood?
The concept of a child, implicit in virtually all our moral and legal practices, is that a child is a person who is in some fundamental way
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not developed, but rather developing. 3 Because of this undeveloped condition adult parents or surrogates are needed to act on children’s behalf. Parents or surrogates are thus given special obligations, including the obligations to protect, nurture, and educate children. These obliga-tions are paternalistic, because adults feel bound to fulfi ll them whether or not the children in question consent to be protected, nurtured, or educated.
Adults feel justifi ed in treating children paternalistically because children have not yet developed the cognitive, moral, and affective capacities to deliberate and act competently in their own interests. 4 At the same time children have legitimate claims to have their interests considered; they are not simply tools. Children are not yet full persons, but they are persons.
N O R M AT I V E D I M E N S I O N S O F C H I L D L A B O R
What are the normative dimensions of child labor? Child labor raises moral concerns because of the weak agency of children (and sometimes of their parents), its connections to underlying vulnerabilities, and especially its potential for extremely harmful outcomes for children themselves, and for society.
Weak Agency
Children cannot be assumed to have full agency. They lack the cogni-tive, moral, and affective capacities of adults, and they seldom have the power in the family to make decisions about how to allocate their time. 5 Parents are usually the primary decision makers for children, especially very young children, exercising authority and control over most aspects of their children’s lives.
Consider the contrast with ideal labor markets, in which workers and employers are fully rational agents who transact on their own behalf with perfect information. As Jane Humphries has pointed out, there is no infans economicus responding to market signals; most children are put to work by their parents. 6 This gap between chooser and chosen for in the labor market for child labor opens up the possibility that those
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children’s interests will be discounted. Surrogate decision making is a morally fraught arena, especially in the case of young children, who often cannot even articulate their own interests. Moreover such surro-gate agency sometimes breaks down, as in the case of parents who lose custody of children they have abused, exploited, or neglected. Families are not homogeneous entities but intimate associations whose members have heterogeneous interests. We cannot simply assume that the head of household functions as a benevolent dictator in the interests of the family as a whole.
Child labor also differs from ideal labor markets in that the decision maker may lack important information regarding the consequences of his or her choice. The costs of child labor can extend far into the future, having, for example, long-term adverse effects on the child’s health. It is not clear that these costs are taken into account, even by well-meaning parents. Lack of information may be especially important if the parents are themselves from very poor or despised social groups. As Dreze and Gazdar point out, “The ability of parents to assess the personal and social value of education depends, among other things, on the informa-tion they have at their disposal. If their entire reference group is largely untouched by the experience of being educated, that information might be quite limited.” 7 It is noteworthy that children in bonded labor tend to have parents who were also bonded laborers. 8
In calculating the costs and benefi ts of children’s labor for their fam-ilies, we should note that children are not analogous to other resources that might be exchanged on the market. Children’s market value to their families is not only exogenously determined by supply and demand, but is also determined by the choices parents make. Parents decide how much of their own resources to devote to their children, affecting the skill level and productivity of child laborers. And children affect their own net cost; as adults, they make choices about their commitments to their aging parents.
Agency problems (surrogate decision making, ignorance, uncertainty about the future costs and benefi ts of educating one’s children) may be typically associated with child labor. But even if those choosing child labor were fully informed and chose voluntarily, child labor would not necessarily be morally justifi ed. If the background circumstances and options poor children and their parents face are unjust, the option cho-sen does not by some mysterious process suddenly become just. A key
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input for the moral assessment of an action depends on one’s views about the moral legitimacy of the socially available choices an agent faces. In other words, whether a choice confers legitimacy depends on other conditions besides its being voluntary. I now turn to consider those other conditions.
Asymmetric Vulnerability
Child labor may be particularly objectionable because of the vulnerabil-ities that underlie it. These vulnerabilvulnerabil-ities may be present in exchanges between children and their employers or in the situation of the family itself. The family’s vulnerability is likely to be a factor in child labor markets; the majority of parents of child laborers are in a precarious position, often one step away from destitution. They are also likely to be uneducated and illiterate. Child labor then appears as a symptom of an objectionable degree of vulnerability. In some countries caste and eth-nic divisions may compound these vulnerabilities.
Child labor can also produce, refl ect, and perpetuate unequal vulner-ability within families. Some families may sacrifi ce a working child for the sake of other children or family members. They may, for example, keep girls out of school to care for younger children while the mother works outside the home. 9 This extreme bias in favor of some children within a family over others is morally troublesome.
Child labor may also refl ect power and resource inequalities between mothers and fathers. A growing body of evidence suggests that mothers have a stronger preference than fathers for investing in their children’s welfare, including education. 10
Extremely Harmful Outcomes
The nature of the damage generated by child labor markets depends on the form of child labor. Many international protocols (including the ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention 182 and the Sanders Amendment, considered by the U.S. Senate in 1997) view forced labor as one of the worst forms of child labor. But forced labor is not a useful category for distinguishing the most harmful forms of child labor from others. Parents make paternalistic decisions on behalf of their children
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that can include “forcing” children to go to school. Given the weak agency of children, it follows that almost all child labor (and child edu-cation) is forced. It is therefore not possible to identify what is harmful about child labor without a fuller theory of children’s interests.
Children have two kinds of interests, which, following Amartya Sen, I referred to earlier as welfare interests and agency interests . 11 As I defi ned them in chapter 4, welfare interests concern a person’s overall good;
agency interests concern his ability to set and pursue his own goals and interests. Both children and adults have these interests, but they possess them in different ways and to different degrees.
Consider welfare interests fi rst. A child’s present welfare interests include shelter, food, health, education, bodily integrity, and a stable, loving relationship with his or her parents (or other caregivers). Chil-dren need parents to protect and provide for these interests because they cannot yet provide for them themselves. Because of a child’s vul-nerability and weak agency, the state needs to play a crucial role in serving as a backstop to protect children against parental abuse and neglect. Of course, the state must do more than serve as a backstop against abuse because parents cannot provide all of the things that their children need by themselves, for example, a clean environment. The well-being of children, like that of adults, depends in good measure on the nature of social institutions.
An adult’s welfare interests are different. First, adults are not depen-dent on others in precisely the same way children are. Given appro-priate background conditions and institutions, adults are assumed to have the capacity to make choices that enable them to provide for their own welfare: to obtain nourishment, health, and shelter; to fi nd gainful employment; and to exercise a range of their capabilities. Second, adults’
welfare is shaped by their own values, by what they care about and how they want to live. An adult’s welfare cannot be viewed as completely separable from her conception of value and purpose. An atheistic adult, for example, will likely get little welfare from mandatory religious instruction.
Very young children have few immediate agency interests. 12 But unlike other dependent and vulnerable people (e.g., people with severe cognitive disabilities), in reasonably favorable conditions children will develop the capabilities to set goals for themselves and to choose and act in accordance with their own values. As they develop, children’s interest
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in exercising their agency grows, although given their lack of compe-tency and experience societies still reasonably set legal bounds on it.
Adults, by contrast, have a signifi cant interest in exercising their agency, in being participants in decisions that affect their lives. They reasonably fi nd it offensive to be treated as children. They willingly allow others, such as political leaders, to make decisions on their behalf only with their consent. Corrupt and despotic institutions, which pre-vail in many of the world’s poorest states, are serious obstacles to the achievement and exercise of adult agency.
Although the interests of children and adults differ, children are also developing into adults. Any theory of children’s interests must look at those interests dynamically, as contributing to the development of their interests as adults.
On the individual level, harms can be defi ned in terms of negative effects on a child’s present or future (adult) agency and well-being inter-ests. In particular one can defi ne a level of basic agency and well-being interests, the failure to satisfy which would be abusive to children or stunt the development of crucial adult capabilities. Child labor that violates children’s basic interests would constitute extreme harm.
It is important to distinguish this “basic interests” standard from the
“best interests” standard that some children’s advocates have proposed for judging child labor. The best interests standard suffers from two major problems. First, because there is no widely shared view of exactly what constitutes a child’s best interests, parents can interpret the stan-dard in radically different ways. 13 Broad consensus is much more likely to be reached on a basic interests standard. 14
Second, the best interests standard assumes that parents (which in practice usually means mothers) are mere instruments for optimizing their children’s interests and do not count independently. From a moral point of view, this is just wrong. There is no inherent injustice in family structures that assume that children must make some contribution to the well-being of their families as a whole or to other family members.
Some trade-offs among interests within the family are acceptable and are, at any rate, inevitable. Work performed by children might thus be acceptable under certain conditions and given certain restrictions. 15
On the social level, child labor can also generate extreme harms. No society can be indifferent to how children are raised and educated because these factors affect the nature of its future members. Uneducated,
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illiterate, and passive adults will not be able to contribute much to social development or play a role in responding to social problems. The pres-ence of child labor may inhibit the long-term productive development needed to help the poor move out of their desperate circumstances or to raise up the wealth of a nation.
Child labor can undermine the possibility of a society of equals.
Uneducated, illiterate adults will often form a servile social caste, excluded from participating in society’s main institutions. Indeed Myron Weiner has argued that in India child labor is itself a symptom of objectionable hierarchy and not poverty; because most of India’s labor force come from the lower classes and is involved in performing menial tasks, the upper-class elite has not thought that education for poor children was necessary. Moreover uneducated children grow up to be adults who cannot demand their rights. 16
In the language of chapter 4, the case for viewing child labor as a nox-ious market rests on all four of my parameters: weak agency, vulnera-bility, extreme individual harm, and extreme social harm. Child labor is also likely to have dynamic effects that shape and perpetuate individuals and societies of a certain type where some people are simply used and discarded by others. It is worth underscoring that the children caught up in child labor and who live in extreme poverty around the globe are innocent. They have done nothing to deserve their situation. 17
P O L I C Y I M P L I C AT I O N S
What should be the response to child labor that scores poorly along these normative dimensions, manifesting weak agency on the part of children or their parents, vulnerability within and between families, or extremely harmful outcomes for children or society? One approach, taken by some activists and NGOs, is to defi ne all child labor as a viola-tion of the rights of the child and to call for its immediate aboliviola-tion. In this framework drawing distinctions between kinds of child labor—
hazardous versus nonhazardous, bonded versus non bonded, part time versus full time—is considered pointless because anything short of full-time formal education for children is seen as a threat to children’s basic interests. 18
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Although this approach offers little guidance on how it could be implemented—a serious concern in the context of weak states and a weak global order—it nevertheless has an important policy function.
Rights, especially legal rights, create, legitimate, and reinforce social understandings about what people deserve. 19 Articulating rights for children may thus have positive effects on children’s welfare by rein-forcing the idea that children have a claim on the state, society, and ultimately on the international community for their protection.
Assessing the practicality of abolishing child labor by strictly enforc-ing legal sanctions is diffi cult because we do not really know whether there are cases in which child labor is an unavoidable reality for some poor countries. Debate continues over the extent to which child labor is caused by poverty and underdevelopment or by policy failures,
Assessing the practicality of abolishing child labor by strictly enforc-ing legal sanctions is diffi cult because we do not really know whether there are cases in which child labor is an unavoidable reality for some poor countries. Debate continues over the extent to which child labor is caused by poverty and underdevelopment or by policy failures,