A QUARTER of all children in developing countries work for a living, and in most cases they have no choice, according to the executive director of UNICEF Ireland, Ms Maura Quinn. She was speaking at the initiation of a joint "campaign with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to make people here more aware of the extent and evils of child labour.
Mr Oliver Donohue of the ICTU, said at the start of the campaign in Dublin yesterday that, although child labour was mainly a problem in developing countries, it was also prevalent in Ireland and other modern industrial societies. "If you walk through Dublin you will see children who should be at school, selling smuggled tobacco, selling newspapers or washing windscreens," he said.
"The biggest injustice of child labour is that it takes children out of school and denies them the opportunity of an education and the chance to break out of the cycle of poverty."
UNICEF, the International Labour Organisation and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions are all involved in a worldwide campaign to combat child labour. Recently several ICFTU-affiliated unions signed an agreement with FIFA, the international soccer federation, to boycott the use of footballs produced by child labour.
Ms Quinn said that, despite the pittance paid to children, their income could mean the difference between hunger and bare sufficiency for families. "A review of nine Latin American countries has shown that, without income from working children aged between 13 and 17, the incidence of poverty would rise by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent."
She said that there would be no child labour without employers willing to exploit it. "Children can be paid less, they are more malleable, powerless and they are less likely to argue against oppression and can be physically abused without striking back."
She said that there were many myths about child labour that needed to be corrected. One was that sanctions and boycotts would not work. Another was that child labour could not be eliminated before poverty was eradicated, and that child labour occurred primarily in export-oriented industries.
Child labour could be ended, she said. Free and compulsory education, the outlawing of hazardous and exploitative work by children and other legal protections were a key element in such a strategy. Data collection, birth registration for all children, a code of conduct for employers and new agreements on procurement policies for governments and companies could also help eliminate the problem.