Combating child labour must focus on the well-being and rights of each and every child. Humane work for all is necessary so that children and adults can enjoy a life in dignity. Banning child labour must not mean that children are pushed into illegality and have to suffer even worse working conditions; nor should they have to fear additional repression or punishment. On the same note, child trafficking and using children for illegal activities must be prohibited by law and those involved must be prosecuted by law. Employers in the formal and informal sectors are not allowed to exploit children in any form and must keep to the laws and regulations with regard to child rights. In particular, they must pay adult workers at least minimum wages and even better, a living wage that will take care of their needs. They must grant at least fundamental labour rights and keep to the fundamental regulations of industrial health measures and safety schemes. Governments therefore must invest in the educational sector and see to it that all children receive at least a good primary education, which is the basis of all. Governments are responsible for effective measures and procedures for labour inspection in their countries and must implement them to the letters. They must on no account break the ban on child labour or forced labour. Governments are obliged therefore, to implement human right laws that protect children.105 Together with trade union, consumer associations and other aid agencies therefore, Terre des Hommes concludes by calling “for binding rules for companies operating at the multinational level. Voluntary initiatives from industry, fair trade, social labels or the introduction of codes of conduct may lead to a faster implementation of at least the fundamental rights of workers in some industries or locations. They are no substitute for internationally binding rules. On this issue therefore, Terre des Hommes supports fair trade and promotes the devising and implementation of social standards for individual sectors or products. Terre des Hommes calls on commercial enterprises to implement at least fundamental working conditions in their value chain. Terre
104 Cf. Ibid.Terre des Hommes urges that public authorities also pay attention to the adherence to core labour
standards when buying goods and services. Terre des Hommes rejects boycotts of products produced by children or products from countries in which child labour is a problem. Boycotts would make thousands of workers adults and children jobless and intensify the situation. Boycotts would hit equally all enterprises of an industry irrespective of whether a company really violates core labour standards.
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des Hommes therefore calls upon consumers to use their purchasing power to assert the fundamental rights of workers.”106
2.4 Evaluation and Conclusion
Child labour from our studies so far has shown the very many abuses and exploitation the child had experienced through this practice of child labour despite the fact that it has also helped many in the history of humankind. So many children who are victims of this practice have ended up as drug addicts, prostitutes, kidnappers, thieves etc. On another note, child labour is a problem of immense social and economic proportions throughout the developing world. While there are encouraging trends in a number of nations, child work rates remain persistently high in many countries of the world. Millions of children are stuck in utterly intolerable situations, and many millions more are forced by necessity or circumstance to work too much, at too young an age, robbed of both their childhoods and their futures. In the now developed nations of the world, millions of children once worked in mines, mills, factories, farms, street sellers, often in situations strikingly similar to those observed in the developing world today. Child labour has long been recognized as a common practice in developing countries including the United States and Europe as late as the early twentieth century. It is important to reiterate that there are many examples of abominable exploitation of children: bonded labour, prostitution, child soldiering or other extremely hazardous, unhealthy, or personally dehumanizing forms of child work. Because of the devastating effects of child labour, some scholars have suggested that any job for children aged eighteen years or less is wrong since this encourages the illiteracy, inhumane work and lower investment in human capital. Child labour so to say, also leads to reduced labour standards for adults, depresses the wages of adults in developing countries as well as the developed countries, and dooms the third world economies to low-skill jobs only capable of producing poor quality cheap exports. More children that work in poor countries, the fewer and worse- paid are the jobs for adults in these countries. In other words, there are no moral, social and economic reasons that justify child labour especially the ones that affect the child negatively.
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Chapter 3: Child Labour: A Threat to the Child’s Healthy Development and an