Empty belly life!
Rotten smelly life!
Full of sorrow life!
No tomorrow life!
(It’s a Hard Knock Life – Annie (1976))
The fictitious ‘little orphan Annie’ of comic strip, musical and film fame and her counterpart Oliver from Dickens’s Oliver Twist have long been the poster children for child labour. And although their characters were orphans, there are, unfortunately, many children who could identify with having or having had a hard knock life who are not.
Tomorrow, the world observes World Day Against Child Labour, with a special focus on the plight of girls, who, it is believed, endure additional hardships as victims of child labour. In the ten years since the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Conven-tion 182 on the elimination of the worst forms of child labour was adopted, the worldwide incidence has decreased somewhat. Nevertheless, one in six children in the world between the ages of five and 14 years old (an estimated 158 million of them, according to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report for last year) are still trapped in ‘no tomorrow’ lives. Many of them toil for a mere pittance as domestic servants in homes, in mines, on farms and plantations and manufacturing consumer items in the hidden sweat shops that still exist in many developing and under-developed countries in the world.
The ILO, through its International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, will release a new report tomorrow entitled ‘Give Girls a Chance: Tackling child labour, a key to the future,’ highlighting the exploitation of girls in child labour. According to an ILO press release, the report warns that the current world economic crisis could force more girls out of education and into child labour. It will provide as well, data on the estimated number of girls involved worldwide and detail the exploitative forms of child labour facing them.
Nearly two years ago, EduCare Guyana, a programme funded by the US Department of Labor to help improve the effectiveness of and access to education for children who are exploited in and/or vulnerable to the worst forms of child labour in Guyana had estimated that about 27% of the children in this country work. It also found that a significant number of them were involved in or at risk of becoming involved in the worst forms of child labour. Minister of Labour Manzoor Nadir had lashed out at the report, insisting that it was not the case. He had stated at a public forum in July 2007 that “Guyanese children only work at summer jobs, working in supermarkets packing bags and shelves…”
However, this newspaper had reported in the past – and continues to do so – about children who do not attend school and have jobs earning daily or weekly wages at chicken farms, as domestic help and as minibus and ‘Tapir’ conductors.
The Ministry of Education Schools Welfare Programme has been consistently rounding up children who are doing these jobs or are not attending school not because of poverty. None of these children live in orphanages but with one or in some cases both parents and grandparents and other relatives who their earnings help support. There have been charges in the past about child labour abuse at local orphanages, but these institutions for the most part are conscientious about sending children to school. And since they have been placed under the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security’s monitoring programme, it is unlikely that such abuse will continue to occur.
Clearly, however, there needs to be more attention placed on the plight of children here – girls and boys – who are forced to join the labour force at the ages of ten and 11 years old. They are still very visible around the municipal markets peddling sweets, snacks, limes, plastic bags, combs, thread and other haberdashery, working with stallholders as ‘go-fers’ and labourers or with horse-cart drivers. If the authorities continue to pretend that the problem does not exist then they cannot be serious about arresting the burgeoning ‘dumbing down’ of our society, which brings with it, its own set of problems.
