Child labor

This is another Prensa Rural article, on child labor. It cites that 215 million children in the world work, 70% of these in agriculture. The author focuses on the case of the US, where many children are employed as migrant laborers in dangerous jobs involving heavy machinery and toxic agricultural chemicals.

The article correctly differentiates illegal, immoral child labor from a child's helping out his family with planting or other chores in his or her free time. As I understand it, children's work on the farm is not considered child labor if it doesn't take them away from school or play. Since there's no centralized, government-monitored play time in most countries, effectively child labor is defined as when a child works instead of going to school (or if a child works in hazardous conditions). I think this is a fair definition, because it's in fact a good thing, an educational and positive experience, when children help their family in the family business, as long as this help doesn't come at the expense of the child's health or education.

Given this, I often worry when Colombian sources discuss our state, Boyaca, as having high rates of child labor. I know that there do exist legitimate complaints of child labor, like in our neighborhood parking lot where the live-in attendant often has to work at another job, so her daughter misses school to tend the lot. But I also think that there are many examples in our state where children help their families with farm chores, while still attending school full-time (in other cases children don't attend school, but that is sometimes a shortcoming of the State for not providing a public school in a local area). I wouldn't want the healthy participation of children in their parents' farms and small businesses (harvesting potatoes, weighing vegetables for sale, shelling peas, etc.) to be impaired by well-intentioned laws designed by urbanites that don't understand the nature of a provincial family farm or business.

Anyway, I want to reiterate that this post is not an endorsement of child labor, and I'm sure that the majority of the 215 million cited child laborers in the world are indeed in situations that are not appropriate for children. But I wanted to reiterate the difference between child participation in the economic life of a family, which is not always bad, and child labor, which is always inappropriate and illegal.