What to Think of Child Labor in Different Countries and Eras

Child Labor

The world should be free of the type of child labor that is more akin to slave labor than to "doing one's bit" as Morrow (2010, p. 436) calls it. Morrow points out that in the old days (i.e., during WW1), children were called upon to do their part to help support families, as the world was in dire circumstances, the men were off fighting the war, and women and children had to do more than their fair share to keep the home going. Thus, child labor was a norm and a part of life for a great many people in that era. Yet, after the war and especially after WW2, the quality of life in the West increased and children were not required to "do their part" as much as they had been in the past. They could spend more time playing, or going to school, or exploring the outdoors, or learning skills. However, the rest of the world has not been as fortunate as the West in that their children have not had the same opportunities or the same leisure to enjoy. Especially in developing worlds like Afghanistan, where children "as young as age four" labor to make bricks, which are used to serve the infrastructural needs of communities there. Yet is this the same as children aged 13-15 being "forced to produce electronics in China" (United States Department of Labor, 2014)? The question is made all the more problematic when it is considered that we in the West enjoy those same electronics that these children in China are being forced to make.

One could say that China's infrastructure depends upon the children doing their part there, too, but there is a distinct difference between a child making bricks in Afghanistan and a young teen making electronics in China against his or her will. Western corporations are basically exploiting the child labor systems in Asia, where it is essentially slave labor, while the children in Afghanistan are not really being exploited by the West by making bricks.

In other countries, however, this question of exploitation has to be examined to see who is benefiting from this child labor and what the labor is like -- how impactful it is on the child's life, how rigorous and dangerous, etc. Thus, in some cases, it may be that child labor is more akin to the type of work that kids were required to do in the West during the war times in the early 20th century. However, one could easily say that in such cases, children were still being exploited by the War Party, even in those early days. It is, in other words, a difficult question to answer.

The best way to answer it, however, is, as Ted Koppel (2005) indicates: children "are cheap, hard working, and easy to control" -- and that makes them ripe for exploitation. So the question that needs to be answered is this: are these children being exploited by companies that just want to boost profit margins, or is their work necessary to the life of a family or community? Answering this question, however, may not be as simple as it sounds either. In fact, it could be that the conditions in which exploitation is made possible are also the same conditions that require children to work to support their families and communities.