English Articles Child Labor
According to the INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION (ILO), some 250 million children between the ages of Bonded labor is otherwise known as debt bondage or peonage. It is outlawed by the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of SLAVERY, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Bonded labor involves a business transaction whereby an advance payment is made to a (usually destitute) family, who in exchange hands over their child to an employer. The amount paid may be as little as $15 depending on the type of work and the age and skill of the child. In theory the child can work off his debt, but in practice this almost never occurs; the child is unable to work off the debt, and the family is seldom able to buy the child back. Unscrupulous employers debit a variety of “expenses” or deduct “interest” from their paychecks, effectively keeping them in debt indefinitely. In some cases, bonded labor agreements are multigenerational, meaning that each generation in a family is obliged by the contract to turn over a child to an employer, often for no payment at all. As the child gets older, he or she may be freed but only on condition that another younger child from the family is offered as a replacement.
Millions of children work as bonded child laborers in countries around the world—15 million in India alone, where the practice has a long tradition. (If all forms of child labor in the country are taken into account, as many as 60–115 million children may be employed, the largest number of working children in the world.) These children, some as young as four or five, are put to work in fields, stone quarries, and mills or sent out into the streets to pick rags. Some work as indentured domestic servants. Their fates are grim: old age by 40, death by 50.