Like sweatshops, we should do our best not to support companies that use child labor. Right?
I’ve previously brought up my belief that sweatshops are a positive force for the people that work in them. Similarly, I believe that international activism aimed at ending child labor practices are not only misguided, but actually make the conditions of children even worse off.
Like sweatshops, children work in relatively harsh conditions because their better alternatives stink. If you take away the best alternative, you don’t make those people better off my ‘taking a stand’. You put them into even worse conditions. Such was the case when, as Oxfam documented, a closing of a “sweatshop” caused a large majority of the young women employed to go into prostitution. Sweatshops are horrible, but is prostitution better? (Read the article by Ben Powell to get a full argument in support of sweatshops.)
In America, we like to think that all children have the right to education and that kids shouldn’t have to work, especially in horrible conditions. But picture America 200 years ago (or maybe even more recently than that). Kids were working all around the country. On farms, in factories, in daddy’s blacksmith shop, etc. This was because, at the time, America hadn’t reached a stage of economic development where those families could afford to forfeit their child’s free labor so that they could get an education. Only later, when America experienced tremendous economic growth, did families have the luxury of sending their kids to school instead of using their labor for working. In short, economic growth – though sometimes slower than we have patience for – is the true remedy for improving working conditions, not labor laws.
These arguments might not seem persuasive. You might be saying “sweatshops are just one of those things I know are wrong. How can you justify these cruel practices?”
I bring up this topic because a recent article linking international activism against child labor with decreasing conditions for the people that activism is aiming to help. To sum up, when we lower the demand for the products that these children are producing, their wages and conditions consequently decrease. Why is this, and why is there nothing that we can do through interventions like boycotts and legislation? Again, I suggest reading Ben Powell’s essay.
Upset Patterns 
October 15, 2009 at 10:11 am
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April 1, 2010 at 9:35 pm
You’re right. When you look at two alternatives–allow child labor or ban child labor–it seems like allowing child labor is the better option. This is probably true because child labor is the best available option to these people. If we ban child labor, they’ll probably be forced into worse position. Therefore, we shouldn’t take away their best available option.
However, this analysis only looks at those two possibilities, and assume that’s all we can do. You fail to consider any third option. Instead of saying, “we ought not do anything to take away their best option,” we ought to be saying “we should be working to improve the options available to them.”
That’s a decidedly positive approach; it requires a positive action by others. It does not ask us not to do something, but rather it asks us to do something about it. There are suggestions. The International Labour Organization, for example, suggests that the education of these child laborers be subsidized. Instead of sending these children to work, we should be sending them to school.
Doing this requires money. It needs to be made more beneficial than child labor (otherwise, they’d still prefer to opt for child labor). But even when we consider the cost of taking these children out of labor and putting them in education–both accounting and opportunity costs–the ILO estimates a $4.3461 trillion net economic benefit. In other words, there’s a net benefit to educating rather than working children. The reasons should be obvious enough.
April 2, 2010 at 5:01 pm
No, I don’t consider the third option in the post. The post is about whether anti-child labor movements do what they set out to do. It’s not a “what’s best” post.
I think you’re taking the easy way out by saying education is the answer to everything. Returns to human capital can be a positive force on economic development. But the fact is that a solid education can’t just be bought with x amount of dollars. We can see that in the U.S., where the DC school system is laughably horrible in quality yet gets more money per student than any American state.