CHILD LABOUR: Perpetuating exploitation

Most children work. At the age of six or seven they start helping parents in the house by running errands and doing small chores.

In traditional societies involved in agriculture and handicraft production, they work under their parents’ supervision, learning family trade. In other developed societies, children work in their spare time to earn extra money, at the same time learning the value of work.

Child labour, however, implies something different as it entails children being exploited or overworked, or deprived of their right to health or education or just childhood. These children, apart from working at a very young age, work long hours, at little or no pay; and work in hazardous and slave-like conditions. These children are compelled to work on a regular basis to earn a living for themselves or for their families, and as a result are disadvantaged educationally and socially. Their places of work are exploitative and damaging to their health and to their physical and mental development. Separated from their families and often deprived of educational and training opportunities; these children are forced to lead prematurely adult lives, and condemned to a cruel present and a bleak future.

Many justify the existence of child labour on grounds of poverty, without realising that child labour itself may become a cause of poverty. A sizeable number of Pakistan’s population lives in abject poverty; and their children have to work for the survival of their families. This situation deprives them of choice and increases the employers’ hold over them; enabling the employer to pay meagre wages to these child workers.

The rise in employment of children at low wages creates a cycle in which already inadequate adult wages are further depressed to a point where a single adult salary is not sufficient to sustain a family. Hence child labour leads adult under-employment and unemployment.

As long as children are put to work, poverty will spread and living standards will continue to decline. It should, however, be appreciated that not all children work to support their families. Some enter the workforce due to lack of opportunities for free, quality and compulsory education.

The quality of available education remains irrelevant and unsuited to the needs of the child. Even if compulsory education were made available, it will not be considered by many parents as a worthwhile investment because the system does not impart relevant, marketable skills and knowledge. Competent, caring and qualified teachers are missing and the quality of curriculum is poor.

This, coupled with growing urbanisation, and its accompanying pattern of social transition, rapid population growth, resource constraints, commercialisation of agriculture and growth of landless peasantry, traditional hesitation in educating females, unemployment of adults and low income makes Pakistan one of the few countries in the world with child labour on the increase.

The magnitude of the problem is immense due to the numbers involved, although the government, regardless of who is in power, always denies the magnitude of the problem, insisting that it is blown out of proportion.




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Child labour in Pakistan cannot be abolished by projects that cover only a few hundred child workers at a time. Something more concrete has to be done.




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Millions of child workers continue to suffer, while society and bureaucracy dwells on a solution to the problem. Employers believe that they are doing a favour to poor families by employing their children, saving them from starvation and deprivation. The truth is that children provide cheap and easily controlled labour with other advantages like flexibility in situations of fluctuating or unstable market forces. They take less space, are obedient and easy to exploit through fear.

Widespread societal acceptance of child labour has obscured the fact that most of it is exploitative and that many of its forms place the child’s health and development in jeopardy.

Child labour in Pakistan is found in innumerable occupations and patterns, classified into children working for wages and without any.

The latter involves children working for parents, mostly in rural as well as urban areas. The agricultural sector continues to be the biggest employer of children.

In feudal regions bonded labour is found in agriculture and brick kilns, despite the enactment of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act in 1992. It is also known as pledging of children to landlords as workers for part repayment of loans taken by parents.

The other category is of children working for wages which may involve children working as a part of family labour group in agricultural fields, or brick kilns, or as individual wage earners generally found in small establishments not covered by laws protecting children. This sector is the largest employer of children in the urban and semi urban areas.

According to the ILO, it is the fastest growing area of child labour in developing countries, fed by rural to urban migration and the break down of production into decentralised units.

Domestic child workers are invisible and at high risk of exploitation and abuse. Being cheaper, they are more in demand and easier to control compared to adult servants.

The most visible ones are street workers who are usually self employed, while some work under adult supervision. Their activities involve shoe shining, selling miscellaneous articles like newspapers, sweets and flowers. Some of them are rag-pickers rummaging through garbage bins. Their working hours are long and tedious because the profit margin is low and work is poorly organised.

Since all these children are growing up without education, Pakistan will soon have an even larger adult illiterate population.

The government has plans and programmes for the prevention of polio, malnutrition and iodine deficiencies but the same approach must be applied to the problem of child labour.

Instead of regulation and rehabilitation, the emphasis should be on the abolition of child labour which is the cause of poverty as it perpetuates exploitation. Prevention is both cheaper and works better. Education should be made compulsory for all.

The problem is not of lack of resources but of poverty of will. All labour laws, and the Constitution, fixes the minimum age for admission to employment at 14 years, which conflicts with Convention on the Rights of the Child, with customary international law and other international instruments, and the age generally accepted internationally for permitting child labour.

Ideally, child labour should not be permitted below the age of 18. However, due to reasons beyond the control of the government, the age may be lowered. It should not be in any case less than 16 years by which age a child should at least have completed secondary education.

Child labour in Pakistan cannot be abolished by projects that cover only a few hundred child workers at a time. Something more concrete has to be done. Let us all remember that a child employed is a future destroyed.By Anees Jillani