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Child Labor’s Prevalence Perception Problem–What the Consumer Surveys Reveal

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The CLC’s Reid Maki

There are a lot of obstacles to ending child labor that the Child Labor Coalition (CLC) and its nearly 40 members confront on a daily basis. Poverty, governmental indifference, educational access issues, and a lack of awareness of the negative, long-term impact of child labor on children are all big factors, but another is lack of knowledge of the scope or prevalence of the problem.

The average American consumer doesn’t understand that child labor is a pervasive problem affecting an estimated 152 million children in the world – and that’s an estimate developed before the pandemic started. We think the number has grown significantly since COVID-19 began, throwing hundreds of millions of families into deeper poverty.

We became aware of the gap between the public’s perception of the problem and the reality of situation seven years ago when the group Child Fund International commissioned a survey of over 1,000 consumers. Only one percent knew that roughly 150 million children were trapped in child labor globally. That number translates to one in 10 children. It’s staggering to think about. Even more disturbing: 73 percent of survey respondents – essentially three out of four—incorrectly guessed that the global total was less the one million. They were off by a factor of 150!

It’s hard to galvanize public and political opinion to confront a pressing social problem when few people realize the massive scope of the problem and instead misperceive it as a tiny, moribund problem. If we want corporations that benefit from child labor to take serious action, we need a better understanding of the problem’s prevalence. Governments are not likely to act or expend financial resources on programs to fix a problem perceived as affecting very few children.

We’ve been wondering if the internet and Twitter and our persistent efforts to educate the public have helped close the perception gap in the several years since Child Fund’s polling. Surveys are expensive and our budget didn’t allow us to conduct a phone-based survey like the 2013 poll.  We decided to use a Survey Monkey internet poll to see where the public’s perception levels were at.

We gave respondents the opportunity to guess how many children were impacted by child labor and we offered them six answer options:

  • 1 in 10
  • 1 in 100
  • 1 in 500
  • 1 in 1,000
  • 1 in 5,000
  • 1 in 50,000

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CLC and Several Members Join 100 Organizations in Asking EPA to Immediately Ban the Pesticide Clorpyrifos which Damages Children’s Neurological Systems

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March 5, 2021

OPP Docket # EPA-HQ-OPP-2008-0850-0750 Environmental Protection Agency Docket Center (EPA/DC) 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Washington, DC 20460-0001

Subject: Letter Urging Expeditious Action to Ban Chlorpyrifos

The undersigned 101 farmworker, public health, environmental, labor, and faith organizations urge the EPA to immediately revoke all food tolerances for chlorpyrifos and initiate the cancellation process to end all uses of this neurotoxic pesticide.

Chlorpyrifos, which belongs to a nerve-agent class of pesticides called organophosphates (OPs), is used on an extensive variety of crops and is acutely toxic and associated with neurodevelopmental harms in children. Yet, in its proposed interim registration review decision, the EPA is proposing to allow 11 food uses of chlorpyrifos to continue at the urging of industry.

Peer-reviewed studies and EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel have demonstrated that chlorpyrifos damages children’s brains; prenatal exposure to very low levels of chlorpyrifos — levels far lower than what EPA used to set regulatory limits — harms babies permanently. Studies show that exposure to chlorpyrifos, and other OP pesticides during pregnancy, is associated with lower birth weight, attention deficit disorders, autism spectrum disorder, reduced IQ, and loss of working memory.1 It is also unsafe for workers even with the most protective equipment.

In 2014, EPA released a risk assessment finding unsafe drinking water contamination from chlorpyrifos and it proposed to ban chlorpyrifos from food in 2015. In 2016, EPA released a revised human health risk assessment, which confirmed that exposures to chlorpyrifos are unsafe whether in food, pesticide drift, or drinking water; toddlers were being exposed to levels 140 times what is considered safe in food and all drinking water exposures were found to be unsafe. But in 2020, EPA released a new risk assessment, which abandoned attempts to protect children from the low-level exposures that damage their brains.

Under the law, EPA must find reasonable certainty of no harm to children from pesticides. It cannot make this finding for any use of chlorpyrifos on food. The only outcome that protects our children and complies with the law is to revoke all food tolerances and end all food uses as soon as possible. The 2015 proposed tolerance revocation would have prohibited chlorpyrifos on food six months after the rule became final. EPA should adhere to that timetable. 2

Ending use of chlorpyrifos on food will protect the farmworkers who grow that food. However, chlorpyrifos is also used in other ways that expose workers to extremely dangerous amounts of the pesticide. For example, chlorpyrifos is used in greenhouses on ornamental plants. The greenhouse workers face unconscionable risks. And under EPA’s 2020 risk assessment and proposed decision, the agency finds that the workers who mix and apply chlorpyrifos will face unsafe exposures from more than 100 tasks; workers who re-enter fields sprayed with chlorpyrifos will be at risk as well.

The EPA is proposing to allow these risks to continue because of the economic benefits of using chlorpyrifos compared to other currently available chemical pesticide alternatives. In making this proposal, EPA is ignoring non-chemical methods of pest control as well as the economic costs and hardships caused by pesticide poisonings, learning disabilities, reduced IQ in children, and environmental harm from chlorpyrifos use; this pesticide also contaminates surface water and harms threatened and endangered species, including birds, Pacific salmon, Southern Resident Killer Whales, and other mammals.

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10 Stats about Women and Girls on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021

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  • Of the 152 million children trapped in child labor, 64 million are girls [source].
  • 73 million children are trapped in hazardous child labor—27.8 million are girls.
  • 29 million women and girls are in modern slavery—71 percent of the overall total of enslaved individuals [source].
  • Women represent 99.4 percent of the victims of forced labor in the commercial sex industry [source].
  • Women and girls represent 84 percent of the victims of forced marriages, now categorized as a form of modern slavery [source]. There are an estimated 15 million individuals in forced marriages.
  • Worldwide, there are an estimated 67 million domestic workers—3/4 are women [source].
  • 132 million girls were out of school in 2016 [source].
  • 9 in 10 girls complete their primary education, but only 3 in 4 complete their lower secondary education [source].
  • In low-income countries, less than 2/3 of girls complete their primary education [source].
  • 42 million people have fled their homes because of armed conflicts; 50 percent are women; 10 million are estimated to be girls and young women. [source]
  • In 2017, there were an estimated 68.5 million forcibly displaced people, including 25.4 million refugees—half are women and girls. [source]

Child sugarcane worker. Photo by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky. Courtesy of Green America.