As the prevalence of child labour increases around the world, it is time companies rethought prevention strategies

The risk of child labour around the world is on the up. This is not only worrying, but frustrating, given the time and money that’s gone into combating it. 

According to a new report by risk analysis firm Maplecroft – Child Labour Index 2012 – 78 countries now present an “extreme risk” of child labour. That’s up from 68 just a year ago.

The worst performers are depressingly familiar. Burma, North Korea, Somalia and Sudan sit at the bottom of the rankings, confirming the causal link to civil conflict and political oppression. Poverty represents the other big causal factor. Hence, the overwhelming prevalence of sub-Saharan nations in the index’s lower ranks.

The implications for large corporations are not straightforward. Very few of the 215 million children whom the International Labour Organisation identifies as underage workers are directly employed by multinational companies. Technical employment requirements, automated production processes and close regulatory oversight all combine to (typically) keep child workers out.

Where the worst abuses happen is among sub-contractors – “the suppliers of suppliers of suppliers”, as Maplecroft’s chief executive Alyson Warhurst puts it – and in home-working situations, particularly subsistence farming. Labour-intensive sectors also pose a high risk, as the thousands of children working in Congo’s mining industry demonstrate.

Not that large companies are immune from risk – or responsibility. Consumers rarely discriminate between a second- and sixth-tier supplier. Wherever child labour is uncovered in a company’s supply chain, brands get a thrashing.

Multinational companies clearly have a moral imperative and a reputational motivation to act. But how, exactly?

Factory or farm monitoring can get large buyers so far. A decade or more of effort shows this isn’t far enough. Monitoring is a blunt instrument. Not only is it expensive and labour-intensive, but experience shows that it’s also open to abuse and sometimes (as in agricultural sectors dominated by small farmers) simply impossible to execute.  

Solutions and opportunities

Instead, effective solutions must get to the heart of the child labour problem. In practice, that means addressing poverty alleviation and improving educational opportunities, says Désirée Abrahams, director of the human rights non-profit group Day Associates.

One obvious step is to pay adults a living wage, thus reducing the need for their children to augment the family income, Abrahams says. Other measures with proven success rates reflect a similarly simple bent. Providing a hot meal at school, for instance, or separate toilets for boys and girls.

At a more strategic level, companies should work with local stakeholders to identify gaps in local healthcare or education and structure their social investment programmes around solving these.

Such thinking ties in with wider arguments about the rights of children. To date, companies have structured their approaches around the respective ILO conventions that prohibit child labour. Rightly so. But what about similar conventions from the United Nations regarding the children’s rights to education and childhood? An over-zealous compliance approach could feasibly impinge these other rights by, for example, forcing children into even worse working conditions elsewhere.

Amid the urgency to act, companies should resist short-term, compliance-led sticking plasters. Without long-term, partnership-based solutions, child labour statistics will only continue to worsen. 



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