While serving as a wide-scale issue during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, child labor is still a threat in the far corners of the world today, and just might hit closer to home than one would think. Minimum working age typically varies depending on the country and line of work at hand, but as we know, laws were practically made to be broken if there’s the chance of profit involved: countries such as Pakistan, North Korea and Latin America still find themselves capitalizing on the fruits of child labor. In these modern times, particularly in the middle eastern side of the world, children ensnared in the line of child labor have no home lives: oftentimes, they are sent away to or even sold to business owners and manufacturers, who promptly take the child with them to personally possess as a worker. The boys and girls of the middle east are primarily forced into the business of crafting rugs, which is considered lucrative as competing countries oftentimes have stricter child labor laws, resulting in a higher profit for those who do employ the children in question. Child labor is also cheaper than hiring regular workers, and for all the effort, work and long hours put in a day, the children are often lucky to receive even one third of what an average adult worker would be paid.
Children are oftentimes traded and exchanged in a highly similar manner as slaves. The male children are beaten regularly to push them into long and brutal work hours, and the female children are often violated and raped by their masters. In Pakistan in particular, add-on laws have been in play for a significant amount of time, but the government is often not too hesitant to turn their heads the other way as these slave-drivers rake in a massive profit from the harsh treatment of children. Moving out of the realm of Pakistan, which is considered one of the worst offenders regarding illegal child labor, conditions don’t get especially better. In the fields of sugarcane and tobacco production over in Latin America, young children often work twelve-hour days with extremely low pay, not to mention in sweltering heat all hours of the year. The children return home to families awash with poverty nightly in which their income is oftentimes the sole monetary source keeping them afloat), their meager pay just barely enough to scrape something together for dinner.
In more dangerous countries such as North Korea, children are shoved into the task forces of construction, agriculture and ceramics, nearly always with the threat of physical abuse and even torture at their backs. While North Korea’s labor laws for all works in general are beyond abusive, the toll falls hardest on the children. The children lack sufficient government-supplied food to operate on whilst being pulled from school to work on government regulated plantations and farms. Child labor is most definitely a problem, but the better question is this: how could we stop an economy itself?
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