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Joint Letter by Humanity United, Child Labor Coalition, and Valued Partners: Urgent Action Needed to Protect Children from Labor Exploitation

May 4, 2023/in Child Labor - US, Enforcement--US, Federal Laws, State Laws, US Campaigns, Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

May 1, 2023

As organizations working to address human trafficking and labor exploitation, we are appalled by the horrific conditions children experienced after fleeing to the United States for refuge. This series in the New York Times demonstrates our government’s inability, unwillingness, or outright refusal to protect minors from forced labor.

This most recent story reveals that the federal government failed to act on multiple warnings and reports about migrant children being forced to work illegal shifts in auto factories, food packing plants, construction sites, and other poorly-regulated jobs. The Times reports that despite hundreds of calls reporting incidents of abuse, neglect, or trafficking, thousands of migrant children have been forced to work illegally within the U.S. The Biden Administration reportedly “treated these as discrete events, not as signs of a mounting problem.”

Other recent stories, including the Department of Labor’s own statements, reveal that this is a mounting problem, and one that needs urgent action.

Earlier this year, the Labor Department reported that it had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations over the last five years, and that in the most recent fiscal year, more than 800 companies were found to have broken child labor laws.

Across the globe, businesses capitalize on migrant workers’ vulnerability, specifically targeting them for exploitation. Migrant workers already face language, cultural, and social barriers. They suffer from weak legal protections, limited resources, and minimal access to safety net services. For migrant children separated from their families, these factors are compounded by increased risks of food and shelter insecurity, decreased mobility, and a lack of a social support network. This often leaves children with no recourse if they end up in a situation of exploitation.

This practice is sadly commonplace around the world, and we know from our work that the United States is no exception. The Times series proves this once again.

The individuals and businesses that target these children and exploit their vulnerabilities should face serious financial and criminal penalties. Yet this is rarely the case. One of the largest companies caught by the Department of Labor, Packer Sanitation Services, Inc., makes more than $450 million in annual revenue, but it paid only a $1.5 million fine for the violations. The company faced no criminal charges for illegally hiring more than a hundred children to work in hazardous conditions, cleaning meatpacking plants at night.

Federal officials need to do more than report, they need to take swift and meaningful action.

The federal government has failed to provide adequate protections for these children. The children need sustained and meaningful case management services, which are critical to preventing this exploitation. The federal government should provide resources and support to these children. Without adequate support, these children are vulnerable to exploitation. Businesses have targeted these vulnerabilities, profiting from the labor of children as young as 12. We are also horrified to see that many states have passed bills recently to make this exploitation more, not less, likely.

The Department of Labor must increase its targeted child labor investigations, use the tools at its disposal to ensure that states do not weaken child labor laws, and take measures to protect children from dangerous or hazardous conditions. As an example, safety protections for children who work in agriculture have not been updated in four decades.

Employers, including factory owners, must be held accountable and face serious penalties for violating child labor laws. The Labor Department must continuously monitor those companies with multiple infractions and impose even harsher penalties if they commit additional violations. The Department must also penalize companies that benefit from child labor – even if the children are technically forced to work by intermediary or secondary firms.

The government must also act to provide adequate remedy and additional protections, including continuous case management services for the children involved. If children are temporarily held in custody, it must be brief and humane.

Finally, the Biden Administration must accompany this urgent action with meaningful efforts to increase oversight and inter-agency collaboration to protect the children.

At the heart of every single one of these stories is a business that would rather take advantage of children than pay the true cost of labor. This is unacceptable. The U.S. government must use its power and authority to end these abuses.

Sincerely,

Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs
Beyond Borders
Child Labor Coalition (consisting of 39 organizational members)
Economic Policy Institute
First Focus
Global March Against Child Labour
Human Trafficking Legal Center
Humanity United
Iowa Federation of Labor
IRAdvocates
Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation -US
Media Voices for Children
National Consumers league
Phoenix Zones Initiative
Prime International Social Enterprise

My Path from Strawberry and Blueberry Fields to College

August 4, 2022/in Children in Agriculture, Viewpoints/by CLC Contributor

By Alma Hernandez

Imagine being a five-year-old child; happy and carefree. The age where you either attend pre-k or start kindergarten. But can you imagine a five-year-old working in farm fields in hot 90-degree humid weather with her parents? I was that child. I wore a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, closed-toed shoes, and a hat to protect me from the hot sun. At five years old, I was unaware of how difficult agricultural labor is. My mom had enrolled me at the Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA), a Migrant and Seasonal Head Start program, but she also wanted to teach me to value my education.

My mother’s life lesson started during the weekend after I did not want to wake up for school. My mother remembers that I was full of confidence when asked if I wanted to go to work with her and my father. However, I did not know what was in store for me.

Alma Hernandez (far right) is joined by fellow NMSHSA farmworker youth interns Jose Velasquez Castellano and Gizela Gaspar. CLC Coordinator Reid Maki is also in the photo.

Arriving at the fields around 7:30 am, I first saw endless rows of strawberry fields. I felt enthusiastic. My task: collect as many bright red strawberries as I could and place them in my pink Halloween bucket. After filling my bucket, I would give the strawberries to one of my parents. Around 12, I felt the heat. It was around 90 degrees. The humidity made it feel worse. I felt like I was in 100-degree weather; I did not like that at all and wanted to go home. I was already tired and asked if we could leave. My mom said no – I had to stay till they finished and so I kept working.

I do not recall what happened the rest of the time I was there, but I remember what happened afterward. I went home and sat on the stairs of the house with a red face, a headache, and clothes covered in dirt, and reflected on the decision I had made to join my parents in the strawberry fields. I went inside. I was so tired that I ignored dinner and skipped a shower, and went straight to bed just to wake up the next day, to repeat another day of long, hard work. My parents had me help them one more day, and convinced that my lesson was learned, they let stay home where, in the next few years, I could help take care of younger siblings when my parents could not find childcare.

Although my work in the strawberry fields was short-lived, I have much more experience harvesting blueberries. I started working on blueberry farms when I was 12 years old and worked every summer until I was 16. The blueberry season starts in the summer after school ends in Florida.

My family and I would leave Florida near the end of June and start the 17-hour drive to Michigan. Unlike the strawberry season, I liked picking blueberries because I did not have to bend down low to the ground all day; blueberry plants grow higher. My job was to fill up my six buckets. Once they were all filled, I would carry all the buckets to place them into plastic containers and have them weighed. On average, six buckets would be 42-45 pounds, and depending on who we were working for, the average pay was 0.45 to 0.55 cents a pound. I had to pick as many pounds as I could. On good days, I would be able to pick 200 pounds or more; on many other days, I would pick less.

The clothing I wore was also the same: long sleeves, jeans, closed toes shoes, and a hat, to protect myself from the sun. The weather in Michigan is not as humid as it is in Florida, usually, it was in the mid-80s to low 90-degrees however it was still hot being there all day. We would go in each morning at 8:30 or later depending on how wet the blueberry plants were and leave the fields around 8 or 9 at night.

Reflections on the “5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour” in Durban, South Africa, May 15-20, 2022

May 27, 2022/in Child Labor - International, Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

The recently-concluded, week-long “5^th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour” in Durban, South Africa was convened against the backdrop of the announcement last July of an alarming rise in child labor numbers after two decades of steady and significant declines in global child labor totals.

The global conference, which typically comes about every four years, brought together an estimated 1,000 delegates from foreign governments and small number of representatives of NGOs. It also brought together for the first time at one of the quadrennial child labor conferences, dozens of participant youth advocates as well as a number of child labor victims and survivors.

The conference had the difficult mission of righting the ship and trying to reverse the rising child labor numbers, which seem destined to rise further as the COVID pandemic’s impact will continue to be felt for years. Sadly, the pandemic threw 1.6 million children out of school, often for prolonged periods and some of those children entered work and may never return to school.

We would first like to thank the South Africa government for the herculean task of organizing a global conference during a still raging pandemic, all against a backdrop of devastating floods in April that savaged the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Easter Cape and killed nearly 500 people, destroyed 4,000 homes and displaced 40,000 people.

As the conference opened, Guy Ryder, the Director General of the International Labour Organization, which helped advise the government of South Africa on the organization of the conference, suggested that the rise in 8 million child laborers from 152 million to 160 million likely represented complacency and a loss of focus by global governments on the child labor problem and must be rectified. He noted increases in child labor impacting children under age 11 and urged delegates to redouble their efforts. “We need to increase our efforts, and pay particular attention to child labor in agriculture,” said Ryder, who added that child labor advocacy is threatened by a “perfect storm” created by COVID’s enduring impact, rising food insecurity, and debt crises that are expected to impact 60 nations in the coming years.

At the conference opening, President Cyril Ramamphosa linked South Africa’s embrace of child rights to its troubled history of colonialism and apartheid.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramamphosa delivered a stirring welcome. He noted that his country’s embrace of child rights is not just a matter of principle. “The assertion of the rights of children was a direct response to the deprivation, discrimination and deliberate neglect that had been visited on the black children of this country by successive colonial apartheid administrations,” said Ramamphosa. “Child labor perpetuate the cycle of poverty, denying young people the education they need to improve their circumstances. It condemns communities to forms of economic activity and labor that limit any prospect of advancement or progress.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi noted the particular challenge that the sub-Saharan African region is facing with the highest rates of child labor and one in five children are in child labor.

Satyarthi urged listeners to embrace the idea that every single child can be protected from child labor. “Let us march from exploitation to education,” he urged, calling for children to have a “fair share” of resources. The amount needed to ensure all children have access to needed resources is only $53 billion – not much considering the wealth of many nations, said Satyarthi who also noted that the G7, which is about to meet on June 26th, has never focused attention collectively on child labor. “This needs to change,” he urged.

The conference opened with a pledge by European Union (EU) Commissioner Jutta Urpilainen that the EU will create a new $10 million euro initiative to reduce child labor in agriculture. Child labor must return to the political agenda, she urged.

The six-day conference, attended by 1,0000 delegates in person and an estimated 7,000 online, according to organizers, featured workshops and side events, and included three meetings every other day by separate groups of employers, workers, and governments. Readers can find a conference agenda here with video links to many sessions.

Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi said the financial commitments to provide children with needed resources to provide their basic needs are easily within the reach of developed economies.

Twenty-four side events focused on many related topics including child labor in supply chains, a decent work agenda, youth-led activism, small-scale mining, livelihoods skills development, African priorities, partnership in Latin America to end child labor, due diligence legislation, data and research needs, labor inspections, artisanal fisheries and aquaculture, and a child-labor-free zone in Ghana. For a complete list and to view specific side events, please go to agenda, scroll each day’s offerings and click links to the videos.

Attendees learned a lot about specific intervention efforts, and the struggles many nations are engaged in, including Malawi, which has recently been hit by two cyclones and where there is a shortage of 50,000 schools – less than half of the children have access to education, said the nation’s Education Minister Agnes Nyalongje. She pleaded for international help, noting that 12 years of sustained aid could create generational change in Malawi and fix its troubled education system.

It’s difficult to summarize the hundreds of hours of content, but readers may get a sense of the diversity of subjects covered from the CLC’s twitter stream which included four to five dozen original tweets at @ChildLaborCLC.

The conference’s concluding “Call to Action” document emphasizes the need for urgent action, because “the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts, and food, humanitarian and environmental crises threaten to reverse years of progress against child labour”. The document includes commitments in six different areas:

Make decent work a reality for adults and youth above the minimum age for work by accelerating multi-stakeholder efforts to eliminate child labour, with priority given to the worst forms of child labour.
End child labour in agriculture.
Strengthen the prevention and elimination of child labour, including its worst forms, forced labour, modern slavery and trafficking in persons, and the protection of survivors through data-driven and survivor-informed policy and programmatic responses.
Realize children’s right to education and ensuring universal access to free, compulsory, quality, equitable and inclusive education and training.
Achieving universal access to social protection.
Increasing financing and international cooperation for the elimination of child labour and forced labour.

As is often the case at conferences, many of the side conversations are of great interest. We had many great conversations with Simon Steyne, who recently retired from the International Labour Organization but continues his child labor advocacy. Simon is campaigning to bring about a child-labor-in-agriculture conference in the coming year. With 70 percent of global child labor in agriculture and rising child labor rates, a focus on agriculture at this time is absolutely essential, Steyne argued.

ILO Assistant Director-General and Regional Director for Africa Cynthia Samuel-Olonjuwon was one of many advocates around the word to “raise her hand” again child labor during the conference.

What might have been improved at the conference? It seems that a relatively small number of Civil Society participants were invited to the conference, included few from the Americas and Asia. The pandemic and travel distances certainly impacted in-person attendance. And we know a lot of NGO participants were able to join online. We hope that a broader spectrum of Civil Society is invited to future global child labor conferences. NGO delegates often possess in-the-field, grass roots knowledge lacked by government and employer groups and NGO presence is a key element in the fight to reverse accelerating incidence of child labor.

The Civil Society advocates and experts who were there enhanced the conference greatly, mostly through the two dozen side events. We were delighted to be joined at the conference by CLC members Bank Information Center and GoodWeave, which organized the side event “Child Labour Free Supply Chains: Tackling Root Causes from Maker to Market” — included panelist Thea Lee, the deputy undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, who was ubiquitous at the conference. CLC-member Action Against Child Exploitation (ACE) also presented a side event: “Promoting an Integrated Area-based Approach to the Elimination of Child Labour: A Case of the Child Labour Free Zone in Ghana,” with Yuka Iwatsuki, president of ACE among the panelists.

In addition to thanking our gracious South African hosts and the ILO for its organizing role, the CLC also wishes to express appreciation to our valued partners the Global March Against Child Labour and the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation for enhancing the conference significantly through organizing side events and bringing the voices of youth advocates to Durban.

Tara Banjara. 17, was among the youth advocates who appeared as a panelist. Tara said she is from a community in India where there are no schools and “no one had an idea about what education is.” She was four and half when she went to work on roads with her mother. They cleaned garbage and rubble out of potholes. The work was exhausting and difficult and went on till she was rescued by Bachpan Bachao Andolan’s Bal Ashram.

Today, Tara is the first girl to complete grade 12 exams in her entire family. She asked attendance participants gathered in Durban and the thousands on line: “Is this our fault that if we are born in a small village, we do not have the right to live our childhood with freedom?” She asked.

“We want freedom. We want the right to education,” Tara said, sharing her dream of becoming a police officer some day and working at the grassroots level to ensure that all children have equal rights and freedom. In one of the conference’s emotional high points, Tara asked attendees to stand and make a pledge: “Let us all pledge to create a world where every child is free from slavery; every child gets an education and an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.”

Tara Banjara, 17, began working on roads at age 4.Today she dreams of being a policy officer and working to help other children be free.

Opinion: Child labor is on the rise; here’s how to prevent it

February 15, 2022/in Viewpoints/by CLC Contributor

By Kunera Moore

Did you know that some of your favorite foods may be produced with child labor? The U.S. Labor Department, for example, named coffee as a product associated with child labor risk in 17 countries. This risk also remains widespread in cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate: more than 60% of it is grown in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where child labor remains widespread.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 635 million students are affected by full or partial school closures, UNICEF announced last week. And shuttered schools combined with frozen economies means more children are driven into the workforce, according to a recent report by UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank.

A staggering estimate of 160 million children worldwide are involved in child labor, according to a 2021 International Labour Organization report based on data collected before pandemic-induced school closures. This marks an 8.4 million increase since 2016.

Child cocoa workers in West Africa. Photo by Robin Romano.

Yet over the past 20 years, remarkable strides have been made to decrease the number of children involved in child labor worldwide. The Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating all forms of child labor by 2025 gained new momentum for this pressing challenge in 2021, the international year for the elimination of child labor.

We can’t afford to lose this momentum.

“Ensuring all children return to school and stay in school requires urgent investments in education, social security, and poverty reduction.”

Seventy percent of children in child labor are working in agriculture — work that can be dangerous and exhausting with long hours under the hot sun. The problem is particularly acute in the African continent. In Uganda, for instance, 22% of children ages 5 to 14 are involved in child labor and do not attend school. But the situation is also serious in a country such as Mexico, where 4% of children work and from that number, 30% work in agriculture.

Child labor must stop. But while banning child labor is commonly perceived as the silver bullet, it’s not enough.

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

March 12, 2021/in Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

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

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

March 8, 2021/in 10 Facts About..., Child Labor Stats, Fast Facts, Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

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.

152 Million Reasons to End Child Labor by year 2025

February 5, 2021/in Viewpoints/by CLC Member

By CLC-member Timothy Ryan of Solidarity Center

By Timothy Ryan*

An African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child, but one can also say that it takes the whole world to protect one child. Children today are faced with increasing challenges. When children should be playing, studying and enjoying their short yet foundational period of childhood they are instead subjected to exploitation, violence, hunger and various forms of slavery. The international community for decades has been making efforts to reduce inequalities and injustice for children, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) being the most recent global goals that the world has committed to achieve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We urge the governments to continue investing at least 6% of their GDP in children’s education and provide vulnerable families and their children with social protection. –Timothy Ryan, Global March Against Child Labour

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The goal that is closest to my heart and has been the driving force for me and my organization, Global March Against Child Labour is the SDG Target 8.7, which calls upon the world to end all forms of child labor by 2025. With only 5 years to achieve this compelling and challenging goal, today we are faced with yet another obstacle in our progress to end child labor – the COVID-19 pandemic which has brought the whole world to its knees.

When I first became the Chair of the Global March Against Child Labor in 2017, my hope and enthusiasm were spurred by the assurance that together as a world, we would be able to achieve the task of ending child labor by the year 2025. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic now accelerating again, I’m saddened to witness an unforeseen reversal in the progress made so far in our fight against child labor. I’m grateful that the Global March’s Board voiced its support to re-elect me in 2020 as the Chair of the world’s foremost organization fighting to end child labor at a time when all our efforts to address this scourge must be re-doubled.

COVID-19 therefore is just another stumbling block in our struggle to bring all children to school and eliminate child labor. We still have 152 million reasons not to get bogged down, to continue pressing forward and to stand up for each of the 152 million children being exploited in labor and hazardous conditions. Now is the time that we as an international community – the national leader, the district authority, the businessman, the trade union activist, the civil society member, the community representative – all come together to do our bit to ensure every child is able to enjoy his or her childhood and not let it slip away. This is the time for collective action – from moving beyond lengthy commitments and glorious speeches, to targeted, time-bound and measurable efforts, at the global, regional and local levels.

The Global March recently carried out a survey on COVID-19 and child labor with 40 of its civil society members from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The survey confirmed our fears, revealing that the world is likely to face an increase in child labor across sectors not only in the agriculture sector which is the largest employer of child labor, but also in the service sector, which will equally face an unprecedented rise in the number of working children. Girls who already face the double burden of school and household chores are predicted to be worst affected, pushing them out of school, very possibly never to return. Survey findings like these can instill a great uncertainty and concern, but this gives us yet another reason not to be daunted by the obstacles we all face in eliminating child labor.

The ILO is scheduled to issue a new Global Estimate on Child Labor next year. Whatever the numbers may be, history and this moment demand that the year 2021 is the crucial year of serious, concerted action against child laborr and not just a feel-good commemoration of work already done.

At this critical moment, on behalf of the Global March members around the world, I call upon the international community to not only keep the focus on child labor alive but to breathe new life into this effort. We urge the governments to continue investing at least 6% of their GDP in children’s education and provide vulnerable families and their children with social protection. Governments must also continue taking necessary measures to ensure continuity of education for children especially in rural areas, through remote or physical means (as per COVID-19 conditions). All stakeholders must also ensure children involved in child labour in agriculture and the service sector are protected and given their due rights to access to education. Even in normal times it is unconscionable for children to be so exploited; now in the midst of the COVID pandemic, this crisis should never be used to justify existing or increasing child labour.

This moment in time is a test for all of us. When we look back we will want to say we took measure of the daunting task in 2021 to accelerate the elimination of child labour and committed ourselves to use every avenue and tool at hand to do so.

[This article originally appeared at counterview.org. Photos are courtesy of counterview.org].

—
*Timothy Ryan is the Chairperson of the Global March Against Child Labour and the Asia Regional Program Director for Solidarity Center based in Washington D.C, USA.

Report Traces Goods Made with Child Labor to 76 Countries

September 26, 2018/in Gold, U.S. DOL, Viewpoints/by CLC Member

Of the products we use, wear, or consume every day, how many are made with child labor? Perhaps quite a few. A new report from the US Department of Labor identifies 148 different consumer goods produced with child or forced labor around the world. The list includes clothing, beef, sugar, bricks, coffee, and other products originating from 76 countries.

Gold tops the list. The report found that in at least 21 countries, children help mine gold, climbing into unstable shafts, carrying and crushing heavy loads of ore, and often using toxic mercury to process the gold. My colleagues and I have seen how dangerous this work can be, documenting the risks child miners face in Ghana, Philippines, Tanzania, and Mali.

Tobacco produced with child labor originates from at least 16 countries, placing it in the report’s top five. Child tobacco workers often labor in extreme heat, are exposed to dangerous pesticides, and risk nicotine poisoning from handling tobacco plants. In our investigations, children in the United States, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe have described nausea, vomiting, headaches, and dizziness while working in tobacco fields.

Governments, companies, and consumers share responsibility to end child labor. Governments should monitor and enforce their labor laws and provide children with good-quality, free education.

For children old enough to work, both governments and companies should ensure their jobs do not risk anyone’s health or safety. Companies should also monitor their supply chains, report on their efforts, and when child labor is found, transition these children to school or safe alternatives. Our report on the jewelry industry outlines steps companies should take.

Consumers can ask retailers and manufacturers about their child labor policies and practices.

A young girl ties tobacco leaves onto sticks to prepare them for curing in East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.

Ending child labor is possible. Since 2000, the number of children involved in it has dropped by a third ‒ from 245 million to 152 million. In the last two years, the Department of Labor found that 17 governments have made “significant” advancement in ending child labor, and another 60 have made “moderate” advancements. It noted particular progress in ending child labor in Panama’s sugar production, and cotton harvesting in Paraguay and Uzbekistan.

Still, we have a long way to go. Products that are part of our daily lives shouldn’t come at the expense of children’s health, safety, and education.

Jo Becker is the advocacy director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, which is a member of the Child Labor Coalition.

In the context of U.S. child labor, what would fairness look like?

September 7, 2018/in Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

For me fairness would be treating working children the same under US law. Since 1938 and the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the US has discriminated against children who do farm work, allowing them to work unlimited hours at the age of 12.

It’s not uncommon to see migrant farmworker children at 12 working beside the impoverished parents for 12-14 hours a day.

On very small farms kids are allowed to work at even younger ages.

A 12-year-old is not allowed to work in an air-conditioned office, but the law permits them to do back-breaking work on a farm for 14 hours in 100 degree heat.

And loopholes allow children working for wages on farms to do dangerous tasks at 16 when they have to be 18 in all other work places.

To make things worse, the Trump administration has signaled that it is considering trying to remove protections that help keep kids stay safe in dangerous jobs on roofs, in wood-working shops, in machine shops, in meat-processing plants, and at excavation sites.

The administration is even trying to reverse the ban on children applying pesticides on commercial farms.

Let’s fight for fairness and for equitable child labor laws. Let’s fight for regulations that protect all children and don’t expose impoverished children to needless occupational dangers.

A young US farmworker (Photo courtesy of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs)

110 Groups Urge President Obama to Ban Child Labor in US Tobacco

August 3, 2016/in Children in Agriculture, News & Events, Viewpoints/by Reid Maki

August 3, 2016

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

In August 2014, dozens of organizations counting millions of Americans among their members wrote to you, alarmed at reports of acute nicotine poisoning and other health and safety hazards faced by children working in US tobacco fields. We are writing again regarding measures you should take to protect these vulnerable children before you leave office in January 2017.

On May 5, the FDA announced new regulations prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes to children under the age of 18. In announcing the new regulations, the Secretary of Health and Human Services stated, “We’ve agreed for many years that nicotine does not belong in the hands of children.” We agree. Yet US law allows children as young as 12, and in some cases even younger, to work in direct contact with tobacco in US tobacco fields and curing barns. There are no regulations or special provisions in place to protect child tobacco workers from exposure to nicotine and awareness raising efforts have limited effect given that the extreme poverty many tobacco farming families experience is the principle reason these children work in the tobacco fields at all.

201512_crd_us_tobacco_photo_2 The health risks tobacco farm workers face are considerable, leaving workers vulnerable to heat stroke and green tobacco sickness. The majority of these workers are seasonal/migrant workers who have little access to mechanisms that would hold growers accountable for conditions in the fields, and often few options but to bring children to work. The health consequences of tobacco work are worse for children than they are for adults, because children’s smaller bodies absorb proportionately more nicotine than adults. There are long-term developmental repercussions as well. Children who work in direct contact with tobacco leaves risk acute nicotine poisoning, and may experience symptoms including vomiting, nausea, headaches and dizziness. A widely-reported 2014 study by Human Rights Watch found that the majority of the 141 child tobacco workers interviewed had experienced the sudden onset of symptoms consistent with nicotine poisoning while working in fields of tobacco plants and curing barns in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.

Public health research has found that non-smoking adult tobacco workers have similar levels of nicotine in their bodies as smokers in the general population. Although the long-term effects of nicotine absorption through the skin have not been studied, research on smoking finds that nicotine exposure during adolescence has been associated with mood disorders and problems with memory, attention, impulse control, and cognition later in life.

In the last two years, both U.S. tobacco growers’ associations and major companies in the tobacco industry have made some progress in acknowledging that children should not be working on tobacco farms. The Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina and the Council for Burley Tobacco, which collectively represent approximately half of all US tobacco growers, have adopted policies stating that children under age 16 should not be hired to work on tobacco farms. The two largest US-based tobacco companies, Altria Group and Reynolds American, now prohibit their suppliers from employing children under the age of 16. Companies including Philip Morris International have publicly called for US regulatory action to back up these voluntary commitments.

The safety and health of child tobacco workers is just as important as teens who may be tempted by e-cigarettes. We urge you to take immediate action to protect these vulnerable children, through the following:

1) Immediate regulations to ban children from working in direct contact with tobacco: A critical first step the administration can take to protect child tobacco workers is for the Department of Labor (DOL) to issue a hazardous occupation order that specifically prohibits children from working in direct contact with tobacco. In 2011 the DOL issued proposed regulations to update the list of tasks too dangerous for children under age 16 employed in agriculture, including “all work in tobacco production and curing, including, but not limited to such activities as planting, cultivating, topping, harvesting, baling, barning, and curing.” Intense opposition to the regulations mischaracterized them as applying to family farms and focused on specific elements, including the use of tractors and certain tools. In 2012, the administration withdrew the proposed regulations.