A recent review of the impact of the global economic and financial crisis on labour markets in Latin America and the Caribbean prepared jointly by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) has raised the spectre of a possible increased resort to child labour as a means of shoring up reduced incomes in poor families in the face of the global economic and financial crisis.
The pronouncement by the two agencies coincides with a local lobby by state agencies and non governmental organizations to bring an end to what is widely believed to be the increasing scourge of child labour in Guyana.
The ECLAC/ILO report says that the continued steep rises in unemployment in Latin America and the Caribbean could witness a worsening of the child labour trend.
“In many low-income households the crisis will probably lead family members who were not economically active to search for a job or begin some sort of labour activity, including children, teenagers, women and the elderly,” the report says.
While child labour in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean Community is far less commonplace than in Latin America, local child care agencies and social organizations have been voicing increasing concern over the number of children who work either part time or full time to help support their families and see themselves through school. Most of these jobs are with family businesses as helpers or else as itinerant sellers or labourers.
The ECLAC/ILO report says that an additional one million people became unemployed in Latin America and the Caribbean during the first quarter of this year pushing unemployment up by 0.6 per cent to 7.9 per cent.
According to the report job losses could force some segments of the economically active population to “resort to informal activities from home or independent low-productivity, low income work as a way to subsist.”
Additionally, the report says that in order to reduce labour costs the formal labour market “is expected to tend towards more informal work contracts” increasing the risk of “precarious employment and less social protection.”
Tougher times yet could still be ahead according to ECLAC which predicts in its 2008-2009 Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean that unemployment rates in the region are expected to increase further this year leaving a further 3 million people out of work. This, the report says, “will be accompanied by greater labour informality which will aggravate poverty levels and make compliance of the Millennium Development Goals more difficult.”
Meanwhile an independent ECLAC economic survey of Latin America and the Caribbean has said that external demand for goods and services produced in the region fell by 7 per cent between January and March this year. The report also alludes to a drop in remittances to the region by between 5 and 10 per cent during the same period.
