The term ‘child labour’ is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their mental and physical development… In the most extreme forms, child labour exposes children to serious danger, removes them from their families and involves their active enslavement.”
The global issue of child labour was brought once more to the foreground at the third international Conference on Child Labour, held in Brasilia between 8th and 10th October.
Director General of the ILO, Guy Ryder, mentioned in his opening speech the positive results of the work that has been done in the last six years, since the very first conference in Amsterdam, but also outlined the measures that need to be taken if child labour eradication targets are to be met by the 2016 deadline. The principal target is to eradicate all of the “worst forms of child labour” as set out in The Hague three years earlier (see box below).
Ryder cited the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, both hosted by Brazil, as events that will “grasp the attention of the whole world – raise hopes, provide inspiration, and exhilarate some.” He asked that the child labour conference do the same, and stated that as a group there is no room to be any “less ambitious”.
Holding the conference in Brazil placed the spotlight on child labour in Latin America as a whole. The region’s struggle to remove young people from the workplace was indeed highlighted and it seems devastatingly poignant that Ryder commented how in Latin America and the Caribbean the decline in child labourers has been “relatively small” over the last three years.
Whilst the situation in Argentina is more positive than in many other Latin American countries, much still needs to be done to solve the pressing issue of child labour.
Working Children in Argentina
According to the ILO, 60% of the world’s child labourers between the ages of 5 and 17 work in agriculture, 25.6% in services, 7% in industry, and the remaining 7.4% are undefined.
Child labour is often cited as one of the most complex problems of today’s world. At the turn of the millennium there were a third more people involved in child labour than today, with a drop from 215m to 168m illustrating both the progress made but also signalling the huge amount of work that needs to be done.
Argentina, a country ‘very high on human development’ according to the UN Human Development Index (HDI), however ranks as ‘high risk’ on the Child Labour Index published by Maplecroft (Global Risk Analytics) last year, which evaluates the frequency and severity of child labour.