Child labour

 Poverty forces one out of three children in Bolivia to work instead of going to school. Parliament has recently passed a law which permits even ten year olds to work under certain conditions, hoping the bill will help fight poverty. Child workers supported the law, but critics argue that parents should be paid decent wages instead of having to send their kids to work.

"Politicians cannot regard child labour as a systematic solution for poverty, not even temporarily," Sabine Weiss, deputy chairperson of the German parliament's Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, said at the time of its passing "We urge President Morales not to sign off on the law but rather search for other alternatives to solving structural poverty"

While the law formally sets the minimum age for employment at 14, it includes a number of caveats permitting some children to begin working at 12 years old, and others as young as 10. The previous version of the law allowed no such exceptions and had drawn criticism from families who relied on their children's incomes for survival in poverty-wracked Bolivia.

Surprisingly, Marx and the First International did not condemn children working.

 “We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production, as a progressive, sound and legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from the age of 9 years, ought to become a productive labourer in the same way that no able-bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz.: to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain but with the hands too.”

However, there is the strongest condemnation of  “the tendencies of a social system which degrades the working man into a mere instrument for the accumulation of capital, and transforms parents by their necessities into slave-holders, sellers of their own children. The right of children and juvenile persons must be vindicated. They are unable to act for themselves. It is, therefore, the duty of society to act on their behalf… We say that no parent and no employer ought to be allowed to use juvenile labour, except when combined with education.”

This month’s Socialist Standard carries an article on child labour.