Universal Children’s Day

November 20 is Universal Children’s Day, a day devoted to observing the welfare of the world’s children.

According to the International Labor Office, there are about 168 million child laborers globally, which accounts for approximately one in 10 of the world’s children.

An estimated 13 million children work in India alone, despite laws prohibiting child labor and mandating school attendance. 

About four percent of child laborers are in forced or bonded labor, prostitution, or fighting in armed conflict. The remainder of the world’s child laborers work in family businesses or on family farms, where they often toil as much as 27 hours per week and are, like the child tobacco laborers, exposed to a variety of dangerous chemicals and pesticides.

In the US, there is no minimum age for children to work on small farms, and children as young as 12 can work on tobacco farms with no regulations to protect them from the hazards of the work.

Only the U.S and Somalia have not ratified  the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Globally, one of the obvious primary reasons that children work is because their families need the income. As Charles Kenny wrote recently in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, passing laws alone sometimes makes the situation worse. Economists Prashant Bharadwaj and Leah Lakdawala studied the impact of India’s 1986 child labor law and found that it drove wages for children down and the number of hours they worked up, with the biggest impact felt in poor families.

From here