International
Labour Organization

Your health and safety at work

HEALTH AND SAFETY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN

V. Taking action to eliminate child labour

Most of the information that is available points to the problem of child labour as mainly a result of the socio-economic conditions in certain countries. The reality for some families is that they would starve without the money brought in by their children. The following points need to be addressed by trade unions, communities and governments together:

• The current international labour standard sets 15 years of age as the basic minimum age for employment. Within this standard, however, countries are permitted to set their own standard of minimum age for employment according to the country's level of economic development. This can be problematic in the case of severely underdeveloped countries, which may allow very young children to work.
• The international standard also allows children under age 15 to perform "light work", as long as the health and education of the children be considered. In general, however, the health and education of these children are not protected, perhaps because most governments have not yet been able to define the concept of "light work".
• Health services as they are traditionally organized are not prepared to serve working children. This must be changed so that child workers can receive basic health care.

Until child labour can be eliminated, the ILO recommends improving the working conditions of child workers as a critical short-term measure. There are a number of actions that can be taken at the community and national levels toward the goal of eliminating child labour.

A. The community level

The most effective way to work towards (1) eliminating child labour and, in the meantime, (2) humanizing work for children may be through decisions made at the community level. It is important that community decisions are based on adequate information and involve the full participation of the community. The following is a list of actions that will help the community to achieve these goals. These are recommendations made by the World Health Organization Study Group on the Special Health Risks of Children at Work:

• Estimate (even a rough estimate will do) how much the children in your community contribute economically to the community.
• Estimate how far the community is from reaching the goal of no longer needing the contribution of children.
• Find out what types of work the children in the community are doing.
• Identify the general and/or specific hazards associated with each job.
• Collect information on methods of controlling the hazards.
• Collect information on the health care of children exposed to the hazards.
• Estimate the cost of protecting the health of the children at work and the cost of treating the children's health problems.

With these pieces of information, the community will be better prepared to decide on types of work that it approves for the children in the community and the services needed to care for the working children.

The following are three essential steps that should be carried out at the community level:

• Ensure that primary health care is provided to working children. Use these services to help the community collect information on the health of the children.
• Organize a workers' health service to support community health care for workers (this can be done through the trade union). With the help of the workers' health service, local health care workers can make work assessments and implement methods of controlling hazards.
• Make a list of jobs that the community does not consider acceptable for children. Make a list of substances and agents to which children should not be exposed at all.

Once the community has begun to take these steps, it will gradually become possible to achieve several other goals:

• provide educational opportunities for working children, including health education;
• provide parents and employers with information on the health hazards facing the working children of the community and the known or suspected health effects;
• make sure that community members are regularly provided with the information that is collected on the health of the working children in the community.

B. The national level

In working towards the elimination of child labour, every individual country should develop its own policy on child labour. National policies should be developed according to the stage of socio-economic development that the country has been able to achieve. A World Health Organization Study Group on the Special Risks of Children at Work has recommended that countries should take the following actions towards the goal of eliminating child labour and humanizing work for children in the meantime:

• monitor socio-economic development in all communities and their efforts towards reaching the goal of eliminating child labour;
• revise the national legislation on child employment so that it is in accordance with the country's overall socio-economic development.  It may be necessary to make special allowances for certain communities and economic sectors that have difficulty keeping up with others;
• give higher priority in the national budget to basic education and vocational training;
• consider modifying the educational system to make it possible for children in some age groups to combine schooling with employment;
• ensure that working children are covered by the national system of social security and workmen's compensation, if these exist;
• make a firm commitment to providing primary health care to child workers and build this approach into the national health care system;
• integrate health care for children at work into the occupational health infrastructure and provide effective support for community health workers in delivering such care;
• provide training courses for health workers in work assessment — in order to ensure the safety of working children, training for health workers should cover both work demand and the working environment;
• promote research on information that would help to identify the special hazards facing working children;
• produce educational material on health and safety for the children themselves, as well as for their employers and parents;
• assist communities in estimating the cost of protecting the health of the children at work and the cost of treating the children's health problems.

Points to remember about taking action to eliminate child labour

VI. Role of the health and safety representative

Your role is to work proactively (to prevent problems before they occur) to ensure that women and child workers are protected from health and safety hazards. Here are some steps to help you reach your goals.

Health and safety representative

1. Encourage women workers to keep a record of their work conditions, as well as the names of any chemicals, biological or physical agents, and potentially hazardous situations to which they may be exposed. They should note any irregularities or abnormalities they notice in their normal physical functioning.

Note: Health and safety representatives need to be aware that these are sensitive areas for many women to discuss.

2. The union can help to protect women workers by ensuring that employers comply with maternity leave policies, if they exist. If there is no national legislation in your country, your union may want to put pressure on the government to adopt legislation.
3. Your union may want to put pressure on the government to ratify the ILO Conventions mentioned in this Module, if they have not done so already. These are Conventions designed to protect women workers and young workers.
4. Work together with the union, employers, community and the government to follow the steps recommended in this Module to improve the working conditions of child workers until child labour can be eliminated completely.
5. Work together with the union and the employer to eliminate exposures which are known or suspected to have negative health effects including reproductive health effects.
6. Work together with the union and the government to completely eliminate the exposure of child workers to certain known extremely toxic chemical substances such as lead, and harmful physical agents such as ionizing radiation.
7. Work together with the union to encourage employers of children to provide health care to child workers. Whenever possible, the employer should contribute to, or arrange health care as well as recreation and educational programmes for child workers. Employers can work cooperatively with the community toward these goals.

VII. Summary

Women and child workers are special categories of workers that require particular attention to ensure that they are protected from occupational hazards. Women and child workers can face a number of work-related risk factors that are not issues for most adult male workers, such as the negative effects that hazards can have on an unborn child, issues related to maternity leave, and the special physical and psychosocial effects that work can have on child workers. Many of the issues discussed in this Module are topics that may require policy-related discussions at the trade union, government or community level. For example, if no national legislation for maternity leave exists in your country, the trade union's first action may be to initiate discussions with the government towards the adoption of a maternity leave policy. Similarly, many of the actions recommended to humanize work for child workers and eventually to eliminate child labour may first require discussions about establishing policies and setting priorities. There are a number of actions suggested in this Module that you, your union, community and government can take towards protecting the health and safety of women workers, and towards humanizing and finally eliminating the existence of child labour in your country.

Exercise. Case-studies on child labour

Source: Health hazards in the electronics industry, International Metalworkers' Federation (Asia Monitor Resource Centre, Hong Kong, 1985). Note to the instructor For this exercise, you may want to have a flipchart (or large pieces of paper) and markers or a chalkboard and chalks. Instructions Read the cases out loud to the participants. You can also ask one or two of the participants to read the cases out loud to the class. These cases are true stories of workplaces using child labour. The purpose in reading these cases is to stimulate discussion. There is one question following the cases. Ask the class this question and allow discussion to follow. There are no right or wrong answers. You may want to write on a flipchart or chalkboard some of the points suggested by the group. You or some of the participants may have other questions to add to the discussion. Case 1 In Company X, a clothing factory, there are 1000 male and female workers in 560 different sweatshops. Many of them are young children. The industrial area where the company is located produces from 70 to 80 per cent of all the ready-made clothing in the country. Piecework is the main incentive for increased production. For a sweater that sells for US$10 in the market, the worker receives about 30 cents. Rooms are divided into double-deckers so more workers can be crammed into the small spaces. An owner or manager sits on a stool and watches. In this factory, one boy worker committed suicide after the government refused the workers' request for a union. After his death the boy's mother lead the young workers' labour movement until she was imprisoned. Case 2 A young girl named Maem spent a short time as a nursemaid, but then was sold to a factory where she and 58 other girls worked 15 hours a day wrapping candy. They were supposed to be paid 50 cents a day, but no one received any money because the owner said they had to pay for bed and board. The girls slept in a roach-infested room above the factory. In the four months Maem was there, two died from lack of medical treatment and six others became lame due to long hours of squatting while they worked. The owner forced the lame girls to work by ordering Maem and the others to carry them up and down the stairs to the factory. Case 3. Several children describe their day working in cotton fields Luis Alfredo, 12 years old: "I get up at four in the morning and help my mother to get breakfast and wash up and then go to work. At midday I come for lunch, then go back to work until five and then to the weighing. You have to wait for them to do the weighing and note it down, and sometimes someone steals a whole bale from you and goes and weighs it and then you have to go and look for it because if you don't, what can you say." José, 14 years old: "It's hard. You kill yourself working all day in the sun. It's hot picking the cotton and you can't cool off with water because if you get wet you get sick. We live on the land so we have to work." Wilmar, 14 years old: "You have to do the work, whether you like it or not. It's not hard but the sun tires you out. The bolls cut your hands to pieces and cut you round the waist. The sun's very strong and you get lots of cuts from the bolls." Discussion question In what ways can trade unions get involved in situations like those described in these case-studies so that such working conditions can be eliminated?

Glossary

conception: the moment at which an ovum is fertilized by a sperm and beings to grow; the beginning of a new life; the beginning of a pregnancy.

congenital: describes a problem present or occurring at birth.

embryo: an unborn child from the time of conception until the end of its eighth week of growth in the womb, after which time it is called a foetus until the time of its birth.

foetus: an unborn child after it has developed from its embryonic stage, that is, following the eighth week from the time of conception.

gene: a sequence of "DNA" which, as a single functional unit, carries a specific code which determines how a cell grows. Thus it is the genes of each cell which transmit hereditary characteristics or "traits". Genes can be damaged (mutated) or destroyed by certain chemicals and by ionizing forms of radiation.

menstrual cycle: a fertility cycle lasting on the average 28 days and controlled by secretion of certain hormones in a woman's body. The cycle begins with a two- to five-day period of menstruation (discharge of blood and uterine lining) followed on the 14th day (midpoint) by the release of an egg (ovulation) which travels from one of the ovaries along the fallopian tube to the womb (uterus) where it remains for about a week. If the ovum has not been fertilized by a man's sperm during the few days following ovulation, hormone changes bring about menstruation and a new cycle.

mutagen: an agent such as certain chemicals or ionizing radiation that can bring about a mutation; there are about 2,000 known or suspected mutagens.

mutation: an irreversible change in a chromosome or a gene structure in a cell caused by a foreign chemical substance or ionizing radiation. This change usually has a negative effect on cell growth and function. Sex cells (sperm or ova) damaged by a mutagen can transmit undesired traits to offspring for an indefinite number of generations.

ova: female reproductive cells present at birth and normally released one at a time monthly by the ovaries; "eggs"; singular, "ovum".

sperm: male reproductive cells produced continuously in the testes; "seed"; spermatozoa.

teratogen: a toxic substance which is capable of being transported across the placenta from the bloodstream of the mother to the bloodstream of the embryo or foetus and causing miscarriage, congenital birth defects or illness.

Appendix I. Chemicals that have toxic effects on reproduction

Sources :
Chemical hazards to human reproduction, Washington, DC, Council on Environmental Quality (US Government), Jan. 1981.
Dapson, et al: "Effect of methyl chloroform on cardiovascular development in rats", in Teratology, Vol. 29, No. 2, Apr. 1984, p. 25A.
1979 Registry of toxic effects of chemical substances, Vols. 1 and 2, DHHS (NIOSH) Publication Nos. 80-111, Cincinnati, Ohio (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, 1980).
Guidelines on pregnancy and work, Publication Nos. 78-118, Cincinnati, Ohio (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, 1978).
PHASE: Factsheet No. 2: "Reproductive hazards in the electronics industry", (Project on Health and Safety in Electronics, Santa Clara, California, 1979).
Plunkett, E.R., et al: Occupational diseases: A syllabus of signs and symptoms, (Barrett Co., Stamford, Connecticut, 1977).
Stellman, J.: "The effects of toxic agents on reproduction", in Occupational Health and Safety, April 1979.
(The above sources are cited in: Health hazards in the electronics industry, International Metal Workers' Federation, Asia Monitor Resource Centre, Hong Kong, 1985.)

The following list is of substances used or occurring in electronics which threaten the ability of both men and women to have a normal sex life and to have normal children. Reproduced by kind courtesy of the Asia Monitor Resource Centre.

H =     evidence for humans
A =     evidence for animals
H/A = evidence for humans and animals
s =     reported to cause sterility
i =     associated with male impotence
? =     known to cause cancer in other parts of the body

Appendix II. Carcinogenic chemicals in electronics manufacturing

Source: Health hazards in the electronics industry, International Metalworkers' Federation (Asia Monitor Resource Centre, Hong Kong, 1985).

This is a partial (not complete) list of chemicals used or occurring in electronics manufacturing which, according to medical experts, are known or suspected to cause cancer in humans or animals.

See also the IARC list of cancer causing chemicals

Yes = sufficient proof of causing cancer. S = SUSPECTED of causing cancer (Note: SUSPECTED means either that there is some evidence but not enough yet for conclusive proof, or that since there is some evidence of cancer in animals we must suspect there is also a cancer risk for humans.)
^* probably due to contaminants which may act as co-carcinogens. ^** by implant only. ^*** manufacture of isopropyl alcohol is a definite cancer risk for humans.

Appendix III. ILO standards on child labour

Minimum age for admission to employment

The General Conference of the ILO adopted Convention No. 138 in 1973 on a minimum age for admission to employment, stating that "the time has come to establish a general instrument on the subject, which would gradually replace the existing ones applicable to limited economic sectors, with a view to achieving the total abolition of child labour". Articles 1 to 9 are quoted in their entirety.

Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138)

Article 1

Each Member for which this Convention is in force undertakes to pursue a national policy designed to ensure the effective abolition of child labour and to raise progressively the minimum age for admission to employment or work to a level consistent with the fullest physical and mental development of young persons.

Article 2

1. Each Member which ratifies this Convention shall specify, in a declaration appended to its ratification, a minimum age for admission to employment or work within its territory and on means of transport registered in its territory; subject to Articles 4 to 8 of this Convention, no one under that age shall be admitted to employment or work in any occupation.

2. Each Member which has ratified this Convention may subsequently notify the Director-General of the International Labour Office, by further declarations, that it specifies a minimum age higher than that previously specified.

3. The minimum age specified in pursuance of paragraph 1 of this Article shall not be less than the age of completion of compulsory schooling and, in any case, shall not be less than 15 years.

4. Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraph 3 of this Article, a Member whose economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed may, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, initially specify a minimum age of 14 years.

5. Each Member which has specified a minimum age of 14 years in pursuance of the provisions of the preceding paragraph shall include in its reports on the application of this Convention submitted under article 22 of the constitution of the International Labour Organisation a statement —

(a) that its reason for doing so subsists; or

(b) that it renounces its right to avail itself of the provisions in question as from a stated date.

Article 3

1. The minimum age for admission to any type of employment or work which by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morals of young persons shall not be less than 18 years.

2. The types of employment or work to which paragraph 1 of this Article applies shall be determined by national laws or regulations or by the competent authority, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist.

3. Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraph 1 of this Article, national laws or regulations or the competent authority may, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, authorise employment or work as from the age of 16 years on condition that the health, safety and morals of the young persons concerned are fully protected and that the young persons have received adequate specific instruction or vocational training in the relevant branch of activity.

Article 4

1. In so far as necessary, the competent authority, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, may exclude from the application of this Convention limited categories of employment or work in respect of which special and substantial problems of application arise.

2. Each Member which ratifies this Convention shall list in its first report on the application of the Convention submitted under article 22 of the Constitution of the International Labour Organisation any categories which may have been excluded in pursuance of paragraph 1 of this Article, giving the reasons for such exclusion, and shall state in subsequent reports the position of its law and practice in respect of the categories excluded and the extent to which effect has been given or is proposed to be given to the Convention in respect of such categories.

3. Employment or work covered by Article 3 of this Convention shall not be excluded from the application of the Convention in pursuance of this Article.

Article 5

1. A Member whose economy and administrative facilities are insufficiently developed may, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, initially limit the scope of application of this Convention.

2. Each Member which avails itself of the provisions of paragraph 1 of this Article shall specify, in a declaration appended to its ratification, the branches of economic activity or types of undertakings to which it will apply the provisions of the Convention.

3. The provisions of the Convention shall be applicable as a minimum to the following: mining and quarrying; manufacturing; construction; electricity, gas and water; sanitary services; transport, storage and communication; and plantations and other agricultural undertakings mainly producing for commercial purposes, but excluding family and small-scale holdings producing for local consumption and not regularly employing hired workers.

4. Any Member which has limited the scope of application of this Convention in pursuance of this Article —

(a) shall indicate in its reports under article 22 of the Constitution of the International Labour Organisation the general position as regards the employment or work of young persons and children in the branches of activity which are excluded from the scope of application of this Convention and any progress which may have been made towards wider application of the provisions of the Convention;

(b) may at any time formally extend the scope of application by a declaration addressed to the Director-General of the International Labour Office.

Article 6

This Convention does not apply to work done by children and young persons in schools for general, vocational or technical education or in other training institutions, or to work done by persons at least 14 years of age in undertakings, where such work is carried out in accordance with conditions prescribed by the competent authority, after consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, and is an integral part of —

(a) a course of education or training for which a school or training institution is primarily responsible;

(b) a programme of training mainly or entirely in an undertaking, which programme has been approved by the competent authority; or

(c) a programme of guidance or orientation designed to facilitate the choice of an occupation or of a line of training.

Article 7

1. National laws or regulations may permit the employment or work of persons 13 to 15 years of age on light work which is —

(a) not likely to be harmful to their health or development; and

(b) not such as to prejudice their attendance at school, their participation in vocational orientation or training programmes approved by the competent authority or their capacity to benefit from the instruction received.

2. National laws or regulations may also permit the employment or work of persons who are at least 15 years of age but have not yet completed their compulsory schooling on work which meets the requirements set forth in subparagraphs (a) and (b) of paragraph 1 of this Article.

3. The competent authority shall determine the activities in which employment or work may be permitted under paragraphs 1 and 2 of this Article and shall prescribe the number of hours during which and the conditions in which such employment or work may be undertaken.

4. Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraphs 1 and 2 of this Article, a Member which has availed itself of the provisions of paragraph 4 of Article 2 may, for as long as it continues to do so, substitute the ages 12 and 14 for the ages 13 and 15 in paragraph 1 and the age 14 for the age 15 in paragraph 2 of this Article.

Article 8

1. After consultation with the organisations of employers and workers concerned, where such exist, the competent authority may, by permits granted in individual cases, allow exceptions to the prohibition of employment or work provided for in Article 2 of this Convention, for such purposes as participation in artistic performances.

2. Permits so granted shall limit the number of hours during which and prescribe the conditions in which employment or work is allowed.

Article 9

1. All necessary measures, including the provision of appropriate penalties, shall be taken by the competent authority to ensure the effective enforcement of the provisions of this Convention.

2. National laws or regulations or the competent authority shall define the persons responsible for compliance with the provisions giving effect to the Convention.

3. National laws or regulations or the competent authority shall prescribe the registers or other documents which shall be kept and made available by the employer; such registers or documents shall contain the names and ages or dates of birth, duly certified wherever possible, of persons whom he employs or who work for him and who are less than 18 years of age.

Source: Official Bulletin (Geneva, ILO), 1973, Vol. LVI, No. I, pp. 21-27

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