Child labor common during economic recession, Labor Department says

The U.S. Labor Department this week announced a list of the worst countries for abuses of child labor but held out only meager hope for improvement soon.

India, Bangladesh and the Philippines are at the top. Several Latin American countries also made the list.

“We believe that we all have God-given potential … and every child should be given the right to fulfill their dreams,” U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said at a press conference.

Nearly every country in the world signed the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child in the 1990s that forbids child labor.

However, diplomats in the countries where it is common say they find child labor difficult to control in areas with high poverty rates.

Many of the children work for little or no money in countries that have no minimum wage laws, the report said. Employers use them as cheap alternatives at a time of worldwide economic struggles that started in 2008 with the recession.

“We expect that some more children have fallen back into child labor,” Sandra Polaski, deputy undersecretary for international affairs at the Department of Labor, told news agency Agence France Presse. “As households have been pushed in some countries below the poverty line, they’ve made up the difference (in income) with child labor.”

The Labor Department report, “Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor,” says children produce about 130 kinds of products in 71 countries throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their work commonly includes mining, manufacturing and sometimes pornography.

The International Labor Organization estimates 215 million children are forced into labor. About a third of the countries that tolerate child labor have no job safety standards to protect the children from hazards.

Among the child workers, 115 million are exposed to hazardous conditions such as handling toxic substances, using dangerous machinery, mining of ores or working underwater.

The largest number of child workers in a single country are in India, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Between 70 million and 80 million Indian children are believed to work making products such as garments, shoes, soccer balls and incense.

In the Philippines, child laborers are more commonly involved in agricultural production.

Fourteen Latin American countries are on the list for allowing child labor.

Brazilian children produce the greatest number of products in Latin America, which consisted of 13 items, the report said. Most of them are agricultural.

The Labor Department said a few signs of improvement are evident, such as in India and Brazil.

Last year, the Indian government made elementary school attendance mandatory for children, which is taking them away from their forced labor jobs.

In Brazil, the government is using new policy to fight poverty in low-income areas where child labor is common.

The latest U.S. Labor Department effort to fight child labor is a $15 million grant to prevent exploitation of children in Philippine sugar cane harvesting.

The grant to the nonprofit organization World Vision is supposed to promote education for the children and incomes for their families.

About 4 million Philippine children between 5 years old and 17 years old are working in hazardous conditions or are sexually exploited, the Labor Department reported.

Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Cuisia said in a statement, “The Philippine government welcomes the innovative initiative of the U.S. government, through the Department of Labor, in fighting exploitative child labor, in terms of programmatic interventions and policy recommendations.”

Although rare, child labor also has been reported in the United States.

One widely reported case occurred in Iowa in 2008, when Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that meatpacking company Agriprocessors in Postville, IA, employed 57 minors, some as young as 14 years old. The company’s chief executive officer was put on trial on 57 charges but acquitted by a jury.