The Prevelence of Child Labor Yesterday and Today

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Child labor, an illegal course of action that increases work rate, production, and most of all, profit. This method of mass-production began in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. A big cause of child labor was the big business owners needed people to work in their factories; they chose children because of their relatively low level of education, lack of knowledge of their human rights, and accepted low pay. The employers should have a responsibility to tell the children their rights, what they’re doing, and what they’re getting for it. The worst area in the world for child labor is in third world countries, because the children are dropping out of school so they can get some money so they don’t starve to death. Child labor laws were wrong because they force children to work 16 hours or more each day and up to 60 hours a week, and they work these long hours in hazardous, toxic conditions.

There are many reasons why child labor exists today, and why it existed long ago, two of the main reasons being poverty and unemployment. Lots of families will rely on their children for their basic necessities such as food, water, and housing, something they should of thought about before they had a child of their own. The children are recruited because they usually don’t know their human rights, do the hardest, most dangerous work without even knowing it; they also accept low pay. Due to the fact that their parents are unemployed and are unlikely to get a well paying job, children rely on themselves to be able to pay for their education, and their future. Most people accept it because they are too lazy to do anything about it, so they just accept it. Lots of governments don’t provide free education. Also, most employers deman...

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...ply and demand for resources. The supply side is mainly from poverty and unavailability of good, cheap schooling, while the growth low paying informal economy is the demand side.

At the end of the day, I don’t think the few good things surrounding child labor can out weigh all the terrible things that can happen in child labor, and all the conditions they make children work in. Is this still going to be what we do for cheap labor in the future, or are we going to find a more clever, safer way to have cost-effective labor? I’m sure there are many more ways to get the job done other than forcing children to do labor, when adults are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. However, they did create some decent jobs like household enterprises where the children could work with their families inside their home, completely safe.

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