How awful….
Child labour is right below child soldiering on the won’t-someone-please-think-of-the-children scale of moral outrage. Child labour, everyone agrees, is a Problem. And it is an apparently huge problem: the International Labour Organization counts 5-11 year olds as child labourers if they do one hour of work a week!1 Concerned parents should buy a dishwasher ASAP.
But as long as violence and coercion aren’t involved then I’m not convinced that child labour is such a problem, and it’s certainly not a problem solved by feeling guilty about who sewed your socks together, passing unenforceable laws or making empty Declarations.
The roots of child labour
Despite child labour being forbidden by the constitution and the Children’s Act in Ghana, for example, child labour is still common.2 There is a simple reason for this. The use of child labour is not driven by legislative fiat but by a cost-benefit analysis: can a family – or a whole society – afford its children to be an economic burden rather than an economic asset? That is, do the the long-term benefits of education or carefree innocence outweigh the loss of labour power to the family unit for some or all of childhood? Legislation probably complicates this decision – by adding the threat of prosecution, say, or immediate rewards for schooling – but it doesn’t override it.
One of my research aims is to explore the changing use and usefulness of child labour in colonial Ghana. I suspect it is an uneven process, and that an increase in societal wealth does not necessarily lead to a linear decline in child labour. Instead, the value of children’s labour is determined by numerous economic, technological and demographic shifts.
Historical approaches
Some possible determinants of child labour in African history include:
- The availability of adult labour. Demographic trends and shocks – for example the Atlantic slave trade or the present AIDS epidemic – inevitably alter a society’s reliance on child labour.
- New uses for child labour: tending cash crops (cocoa etc) on family farms might be a relevant historical example, and industrialisation and the factory system a possible future dilemna.
- Childhood choice and ambition based on new economic opportunities. The growth of education and an African staffed colonial bureaucracy, for example, created a growing disdain for manual work. I have found one case from the late-1940s of a boy living vagrant in Accra after running away from his home and apprenticeship because he thought that ‘washerman’ was a dishonourable trade.
- Technical and infrastructural changes. The availability and quality of education affects long-term planning. And the availability of mains water and electricity and kitchen appliances cuts down on demand for child labour within the household. But other trends might increase the need for child labour – there is some intriguing evidence that this was the case in the Gold Coast.
Given the complexity of the topic, it is a bit rich for the West to simply say that you can’t use child labour because it’s morally wrong and all children should be in school. Maybe it is and maybe they should – but maybe not.
References:
1Kaushik Basu and Zafiris Tzannatos, “The Global Child Labor Problem: What Do We Know and What Can We Do?,” World Bank Econ Rev 17, no. 2 (December 1, 2003)
2For example: ‘Child Labour Still Prevalent, LRC Calls for Affirmative Action’, Ghanaian Chronicle, 13th June 2008, http://allafrica.com/stories/200806130975.html