Child Slavery

The I.L.O. issues a grim report

While 162 countries have been celebrating 1979 as the International Year of the Child with fairs, festivals and concerts, the International Labor Organization has been investigating the use of child labor in ten countries of Africa, Latin America, Asia and southern Europe. Last week the I.L.O. submitted its findings to a United Nations working group on slavery. Its report was chilling. It said that more than 55 million children under 15 are currently being exploited as workers, in violation of the minimum age of 15 set by a 1973 I.L.O. convention that has been ratified by 15 countries. Since most of the children are working illegally, the total number is believed to be "infinitely larger" than the statistics indicate. "In the vast majority of cases," says the report, "working children are either unpaid or receive negligible wages."

The Anti-Slavery Society provided some horrendous examples. A number of match factories in India are employing over 20,000 tots, some as young as five, for 16 hours a day, beginning at 3 a.m. In Colombia the work force includes 3 million children, many of whom labor in ill-ventilated, dangerous coal-mine shafts.

Taiwan toy manufacturers favor 12-to 15-year-olds, while makers of pocket calculators in Hong Kong sweatshops employ nimble-fingered girls who are under 14. Many have lost fingers as a result of accidents at work. In many of the carpet mills of Morocco, female "apprentices" under 13 work for no wages on the ground that they are getting free training. Since Moroccan law stipulates that any worker 13 or over must be salaried as an adult, the carpet industry usually fires its children when they become teenagers and replaces them with younger girls.

Even some of the more advanced European countries exploit child labor. Italy's celebrated shoemakers farm out part of the work to cottage industries that employ children at starvation wages, and Greece still tolerates child labor in industry and construction. The I.L.O.'s most depressing finding in the Year of the Child: the use of child labor has increased by 20% in 1979 and is expected to rise even further in the future. sb

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