[Article] Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Child labor is, without a doubt, a travesty. In a perfect world, no child would ever have to work to help feed his or her family and would be able to go to school happy and well-fed; unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world. Well-meaning activists spend a great deal of time trying to protect children from the horrors of forced labor, but it seems to me that they often neglect to consider that the alternative may be much worse.
According to this New York Times article, wealthy Pakistanis use impoverished children as servants at for little or no wages. This is not forbidden by the law, and yet the child workers don’t even receive moderate protection by the law because they are minors. It is doubtful that outlawing the practice would put a halt to desperate parents renting their children out – it is a sad reality that in many cases the extremely poor simply see no other way out of crushing debt and an inability to feed their families. Wouldn’t these children be better off if, instead of pretending the situation did not exist, these children were granted the protection of the law? The NYT article discusses the death of Shazia, a twelve year old maid, and the public backlash that came as a result. A small quantity of regulation could possibly have prevented Shazia’s untimely death, whether it was from illness or torture. It's possible that some education could help eradicate poverty; as it stands a child who doesn’t get to go to school is unlikely to ever be capable of earning enough money to ever leave them in a position not to have to enter their own children into the labor force at a young age.
An older example of the way child labor has permeated society is the use of child labor in the garment industry. Bangladesh, in particular, had factories employing thousands of children. When Americans discovered that their garments were inexpensive due to the money saved by employing children at slave wages they were outraged. This fury lead to the Harkin Bill – and thousands of children out of work. This may seem like a victory for the good guys, but what it primarily did was to leave children working in even more dangerous conditions. Fortunately, for some of these children, there was some follow up - education programs were put in place. They don’t reach every child with the misfortune of being in the labor force, but at least the former child garment workers received some opportunities.
It is admirable to attempt to prevent the exploitation of children. Ideally, every child would have the opportunity to go to school and realize all of their dreams. Until that is possible, isn’t it better to work with what is already in existence and improve the lives of the children who are trapped? It would take a very small amount of the foreign aid provided by developed countries to provide families with a stipend to send their children to school. It wouldn’t eliminate child labor, but it would give the children an opportunity that many don’t have now.
