World Day Against Child Labor
WHAT ARE THE DREAMS OF OUR CHILDREN?
The International Labor Organization launched the World Day Against Child Labor in 2002 to focus attention on the global extent of child labor and the action and efforts needed to eliminate it. Each year on 12 June, the World Day brings together governments, employers and workers organizations, civil society, as well as millions of people from around the world to highlight the plight of child laborers and what can be done to help them.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by world leaders in 2015, include a renewed global commitment to ending child labor. Specifically, target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls on the global community to: "Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labor in all its forms."
2019 theme: Children shouldn’t work in fields,
but on dreams!
Children shouldn’t work in fields, but on dreams. Yet today, 152 million children are still in child labor. Although child labor occurs in almost every sector, seven out of every ten is in agriculture.
In 2019, the International Labor Organization celebrates 100 years of advancing social justice and promoting decent work. The World Day Against Child Labor looks back on progress achieved over a 100 years of ILO support to countries on tackling child labor.
On this World Day, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny support the goals set by the international community calling for an end to child labor in all its forms by 2025.
Child Labor in the United States
Estimates by the Association of Farmworker Opportunity programs, based on figures gathered by the Department of Labor, suggest that there are approximately 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States. Many of these children start working as young as age 8, and 72-hour work weeks (more than 10 hours per day) are not uncommon.
Agricultural work is demanding and dangerous. Children are regularly exposed to pesticides, greatly increasing their risk for cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that children are three times more susceptible to the pesticides' carcinogenic effects than are adults. Environmental conditions (particularly extreme heat) and dangerous farming tools are even more immediate threats. A report by the Government Accountability Office suggests that 100,000 child farmworkers are injured on the job every year and that children account for 20 percent of farming fatalities.
And yet, these abuses are, for the most part, legal under current U.S. law. The United States' Fair Labor Standards Act(link is external) (1938) prohibits those under the age of 14 from working in most industries, restricts hours to no more than three on a school day until 16, and prohibits hazardous work until 18 for most industries. However, these regulations do not apply to agricultural labor because of outdated exemptions based upon an agrarian society largely left to the past. Today’s farmworker children are largely migrant workers who deserve the same protection as other youth working in less dangerous occupations.
How are we Educating and Providing Health Care for our
Children so they can Dream and have a Future?
It is the exploitation of childhood which constitutes the evil… most unbearable to the human heart. Serious work in social legislation begins always with the protection of children.
— Albert Thomas, the first ILO Director
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