Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America

Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America

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G.K. Lieten Editor

Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America

Editor G.K. Lieten Alberdingk Thijmstraat 62 2106 EM Heemstede Netherlands G.C.M. [email protected]

ISBN 978-94-007-0176-2 e-ISBN 978-94-007-0177-9 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0177-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Preface

The research for this book was carried out between 2007 and 2010 by an enthusiastic team of young researchers who each spent an average of 3 months on location, which varied from a mining district at an altitude of 5,000 m, to brazenly hot plantations in the lowlands, and the inhospitable city streets of three countries of Latin America. To gain access to the different sectors, and to the children and their caretakers, we were thankfully helped by several local NGOs and government departments in Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia. They not only offered us their kind collaboration in making initial contacts, but were also willing to have their initiatives related to child labour scrutinised. We are greatly indebted to them. We would also like to express our gratitude to the working children and their families for their time and sharing of ideas. Their voices are at the core of this project. The recommendations put forth in this report are the result of various meetings held in the research countries, whereby our research data was presented and local feedback was processed. Discussions took place at local presentations, with the working children and their families, at national seminars with policy makers from governmental and non-governmental organisations, and at public meetings. Special thanks go to the local NGOs that helped us prepare these meetings: Childhope in Guatemala, Terre des Hommes Netherlands in Bolivia and GIN in Peru. These workshops enabled us to evaluate our conclusions and recommendations and gave us the very special opportunity to discuss the policy implications of our research results with the most important actors in the field. In this way, we were able to bridge the gap that often exists between scientific research and policy implementation and hopefully the results of our research project will have a direct impact at the local level for our “informants.” We are also thankful to those organisations and institutes that made the research projects possible financially. We are grateful to the Ministry of Social Affairs in The Hague, the ASN Bank, Terre des Hommes Netherlands, Kerk in Actie, ICCO, Kinderpostzegels, Cordaid, Edukans and Plan Netherlands for financing this research, and for their ongoing support and advice.

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An enduring problem with child labour research is that efforts tend to be based on an ideology that questions whether or not child labour is acceptable. Evidence instead needs to be collected on a solid basis and with a comparative perspective, which this study has intended to do. Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America July 2010

G.K. Lieten

Note

The chapters of this book are summaries of reports, all of which are available for download from the IREWOC website (www.irewoc.nl): Child Labour in the Urban Sectors of Peru (Ensing 2008b) Child Labour in Mining and Quarrying in Cajamarca, Peru (Van den Berge 2008) Child Labour and Quarrying in Guatemala (Quiroz 2008b) Child Labour in the Mining Sector of Peru (Ensing 2008a) Child Labour in the Mining Sector of Bolivia (Baas 2008a) Rural Child Labour in Peru. A comparison of child labour in traditional and ­commercial agriculture (Van den Berge 2009) Child Labour in the Coffee Sector of Guatemala (Quiroz 2008a) Child Labour in the Sugar Cane Harvest in Bolivia (Baas 2008b) Child Labour on Sugar Cane Plantations in Bolivia (Baas 2009) Street Children in Peru: A Quantitative Report (Ensing and Strehl 2010, to be published) Project Director: Kristoffel Lieten Copyeditor: Sonja Zweegers Photographs: all photographs in this publication and the reports above were taken by the researchers, and are the property of IREWOC.

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The Foundation for International Research on Working Children (IREWOC) was established in 1992 to conduct anthropological qualitative research on child labour, to raise awareness and influence policy concerning this complex issue. IREWOC research takes a child-centred and holistic approach, exploring children’s own views and opinions within the wider context of poverty and unequal development. Its normative framework is based on established international agreements, particularly the ILO Conventions 138 and 182, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. IREWOC responds to the ever-increasing demand for policy-relevant knowledge. Anthropological research is conducted in close collaboration with governmental and non-governmental organisations active in the field of child labour. Working directly with policy makers is the most effective way to close the gap between scientific research and policy design.

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Contents

  1 Introduction: The Worst Forms of Child Labour in Latin America...................................................................................... G.K. Lieten

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  2 Child Labour in an Urban Setting: Markets and Waste Collection in Lima.................................................................................... Anna Ensing

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  3 The Risks of Becoming a Street Child: Working Children on the Streets of Lima and Cusco........................................................... Talinay Strehl

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  4 Child Miners in Cajamarca, Peru.......................................................... Marten Pieter van den Berge

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  5 Stone Quarries in Guatemala................................................................. Luisa Fernanda Moreno Ruiz

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  6 Ore Mining in Bolivia.............................................................................. 105 Laura Baas   7 Mining at High Altitudes in Peru........................................................... 125 Anna Ensing   8 Children in Traditional and Commercial Agriculture......................... 145 Marten Pieter van den Berge   9 Coffee in Guatemala................................................................................ 165 Luisa Fernanda Moreno Ruiz 10 Children on Bolivian Sugar Cane Plantations...................................... 191 Laura Baas

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11 Concluding Remarks and Recommendations....................................... 211 G.K. Lieten References......................................................................................................... 221 Index.................................................................................................................. 227

Contributors

Laura Baas  Laura Baas studied International Development Issues at the Radboud University Nijmegen, from which she graduated in 2004. She conducted research on urban youth in San Salvador during 2005 and later did research on child labour with the Dutch NGO HIVOS and with IREWOC. Her anthropological field research for this institute mainly focused on the work of children in Bolivia on sugar cane plantations and in the mining sector. Currently, Laura works for Servicio Internacional para la Paz (SIPAZ), an international peace organisation based in Chiapas, Mexico. Marten Pieter van den Berge  Marten Pieter van den Berge studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, where he specialised in Development Sociology. He worked as a research associate and project coordinator at IREWOC for several years, during which time he conducted fieldwork on child labour in urban and rural areas of several Latin America countries, working specifically on the themes of children as agents of change, worst forms of child labour and rural child labour in the Andes. Currently he works in the Knowledge Program on Civil Society Building of the Institute for Social Studies, coordinating a research project on social movement dynamics in Lima. Anna Ensing  Anna Ensing studied Development Studies in Nijmegen and Latin American and Caribbean Studies in Utrecht. She conducted research for Cordaid among urban youths in Peru and worked for a child-focused NGO in Colombia. Later, she joined IREWOC, where she conducted research on children working in gold mining, garbage recycling and at wholesale markets in Peru; on child labour in the leather production in Dhaka, and on working girls in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Anna now works as a project manager at TIE-Netherlands (Transnationals Information Exchange), an organisation that focuses on strengthening independent labour unions in different regions around the world. G.K. Lieten  Kristoffel Lieten is the International Institute of Social History professor of Child Labour studies at the University of Amsterdam and the Director of IREWOC. He has done extensive fieldwork, particularly in South Asia, on various topics related to poverty, rural development, labour relations, and of course child labour. Professor Lieten studied languages in Antwerp (Belgium), political sciences in Reading (UK), history in New Delhi (India) and obtained his PhD for a study on

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the triangular relationship between the colonial state, the Indian entrepreneurial class and the working class in Mumbai in 1928–1929. He spent many years in South Asia where he was a radio correspondent for the Dutch and Belgian radio during the 1970s and at intervals during the 1980s. Luisa Fernanda Moreno Ruiz (née Quiroz)  Luisa Fernanda Moreno Ruiz studied Cultural Anthro­pology at the University of Amsterdam. Her specialisations Development Sociology and Children & Development brought her to Medellín, Colombia to carry out a child centred research on street children and their perceptions on life. Luisa joined the IREWOC Worst Forms of Child Labour Project in Latin America in January 2007. She conducted research on child labour in the coffee plantations and stone quarries in Guatemala. Luisa currently works at SMS (Stichting Mondiale Samenleving) as a staff member in charge of the Voluntary Sustainable Return project. Talinay Strehl  Talinay Strehl studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In addition to her specialisation in Medical Anthropology, she developed a great interest in ethnic and women’s social movements in both Latin America and Asia. She has conducted research on the indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Mexico) and on the rise of an indigenous women’s movement against large-scale open-pit mining in the Cordillera region in the Philippines. In June 2009 Talinay started working for IREWOC and conducted a child centred research on street children and intervention programmes in Peru.



Chapter 1

Introduction: The Worst Forms of Child Labour in Latin America G.K. Lieten

Child labour, despite a broadly accepted understanding that it must be eradicated, and despite the International Conventions, national legislation and various time-bound programmes, lingers on in many parts of the world, including Latin America, which albeit has a much higher GDP than countries in Africa and South Asia. Despite the commitment to include universal primary education leading to the elimination of child labour as one of the millennium development goals, to be achieved by 2015, it has remained difficult to tackle the problem. There are various reasons as to why it continues to be such a tenuous social problem, both on the supply side and on the demand side. And so there is also disagreement on the solutions. In fact, there is even disagreement on the extent of the actual problem of child labour (Lieten 2004, 2005). Since June 1999, a consensus has emerged on the urgency of addressing the worst cases and to work towards an agenda that will eliminate the ‘worst forms of child labour’ by 2016. These worst forms of child labour are listed in the ILO Convention 182, which was swiftly ratified by most governments in the world. Convention 182 defines two categories of worst forms of child labour: • The unconditional worst forms include slave labour, prostitution and pornography, child soldiers and children in illicit activities, particularly drugs trade • Hazardous work that, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morals of children A major problem with the second category is that it needs to be specified, in each country, what it includes and what it excludes. Legislation and regulation will benefit from detailed empirical knowledge about the effects that the work in each specific sector has on children involved and what types of child labour should be classified as a worst form. It is therefore relevant to examine specific sectors and to make a detailed study of working children’s exact activities, and to document the hazards they are exposed to.

G.K. Lieten () Alberdingk Thijmstraat 62, 2106 EM Heemstede, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] G.K. Lieten (ed.), Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0177-9_1, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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New Debates Child labour as a phenomenon actually emerged in Western Europe towards the late eighteenth century, as a ghastly by-product of the industrial revolution. It was a time when families became separated from their own means of production, e.g. a plot of agricultural land or a craft, and parents and children alike had to offer themselves to greedy entrepreneurs, for meagre wages and abysmally bad working conditions (Lieten and Nederveen 2010). In the following century, social and political movements against child labour appeared in the industrialised countries, and later in the decolonised countries, using a series of arguments. These arguments remain valid and form the bottom-line for national anti-child labour legislation in all countries. The arguments against child labour are manifold. For example, in the United States, according to Trattner, in his historical study of the National Child Labor Committee, the movement was inspired by various ideas: Motivated by pity, compassion, and a sense of patriotism, they argued that, for the child, labor was a delusion; for industry it was a fallacy; and for society, a menace. Child labor meant the spread of illiteracy and ignorance, the lowering of the wage scale and hence the standard of living, the perpetuation of poverty, an increase in adult unemployment and crime, the disintegration of the family, and, in the end, racial degeneracy. (Hindman and Smith 1999:27)

These indeed have been some of the arguments taken up by the anti-child labour movement in the past and present. In the recent past, however, the protagonists of child labour have turned these arguments upside down. They have questioned the eradication of child labour on ethical and humanitarian grounds and, particularly in Latin America, have proposed a culturally embedded approach, which defends the rights of the child to work. The issue of child labour can be looked at from different angles. Myers (2001) uses four different perspectives: a labour market perspective, a human capital perspective, a social responsibility perspective and a child-centred perspective; he maintains that each perspective can be used in order to reject child labour, but also to appreciate child labour (see also Judith Ennew et al. 2005). For example, even though child labour leads to adult unemployment, lowering of wages, intergenerational poverty and low efficiency, in many cases the economic contribution of children has forestalled or alleviated family poverty. The arguments do admittedly have validity. Child labour is often indeed the ultimate survival strategy. Scholars, however, use this unfortunate condition to defend child labour as a culturally legitimated right. Since there is no ‘adequately developed theory of why child labour would produce a negative macro-economic impact’ Myers argues, ‘ethnocentric imposition of context-specific North solutions’ would do more harm and ‘the labour market perspective can itself be a threat to children when it places adult economic and political interests before children’s’ (1999:33). Any argument, in this understanding, depending on the ethical position one takes, can be neutralised by the opposite argument. The problem of child labour thus appears to have become intractable. Indeed, the difficulty in the debate on child labour actually starts at the stage of defining the problem. Children are engaged in

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a multiplicity of activities, including playing, leisure, attending school, learning, doing chores and engaging in productive work. Each activity attracts a subjective value, depending on the nature of the work, the age of the child and the socio-cultural context. Frequently, such activities cross boundaries and may simultaneously be work, leisure and education. Indeed, in the process of growing up, children and adults may consider the lighter forms of work as another way of playing and learning. Work thus may be considered as a sensible thing for children to do and need not necessarily be classified as a form of child labour that needs to be abolished. Such part-time work may be a learning experience, which, some have even argued, is superior to what children learn in school. It provides life skills that they shall need later on in life and has a positive effect on self-confidence and practical knowledge. Within that line of thinking, some scholars thus have objected to the principles underlying the anti-child labour movement. They prefer to restrict the concept of child labour to indecent forms of labour, i.e. working conditions which are ‘exploitative’. This, for example, is the position taken by the so-called regulacionistas in Latin America, in stark opposition to the erradicacionistas. It is represented by a powerful group of scholars who oppose the approach of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). They argue that the ‘abolitionist’ agenda was carried to other parts of the world through the colonial system and is still being imposed by Western-dominated international organisations with a basic disrespect for local cultures and the meaning of work within those cultures. They argue that the mainstream agenda assumes children to be ignorant of the world and to be unable to fend off its evils: ‘They are depicted as helpless victims, or potential victims, dependent on protection and rescue by adults. This is primarily a modern Western urban, middle class notion of childhood’ (W.E. Myers 1999:31). In a letter on 7 May 2010, preceding the Global Child Labour Conference in The Hague (10–11 May 2010), jointly organised by the ILO and the Government of The Netherlands, the main scholars supporting the right of the child to work (including, for example: Michael Bourdillon, Deborah Levison, Manfred Liebel, William Myers, Ben White, Martin Woodhead), sent an open letter to Constance Thomas, the Director of IPEC, asserting that there is ‘little or no countervailing evidence that a general ban on work below a given minimum age is protective or helpful’, that the conference overlooks ‘important practical issues increasingly raised by the extensive and accumulating evidence from anthropology, child development, economics, psychology, sociology and other fields’, and calls this a strategic loss of opportunity: Missing this opportunity to engage the fundamental issues means that … some very interesting findings about what actually does work for children are not picked up on and utilized. In the end, it is the children who end up paying the highest price when unaccountable institutions are content merely to promote what they already think and do and ignore the opportunity to avidly search out new facts and fearlessly explore the practical implications of them.

Bourdillon et al. (2009) argue that excluding children from the right to work is a fundamental denial of basic human rights principles. The international covenants, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, do provide for

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children’s protection and such protection ‘might seem to authorise a minimum-age policy’, but, they argue, protection should not take precedence over other rights. Abridging of children’s human rights would be legitimate only if it were demonstrated to be necessary and to be effective: However, Convention 138 meets neither of these conditions; it has demonstrated neither that the minimum-age approach is the uniquely necessary remedy, nor that the approach achieves its protective aims. It is not clear, therefore, that the ILO or its member states can legally exclude children from rights plainly granted to all without exception in the “International Bill of Human Rights”.… Refusing them trade union protection is an egregious violation of their rights that has no defensible basis in human rights law. That such denial is based on an ILO international convention declaring that “underage” children should not be workers at all is inconsequential. The stronger human rights provision prevails.

The academic protagonists of the right to work are associated with the ‘World Movement of Working Children and Adolescents’, which, for example at its 2nd international meeting in Berlin (19 April to 2 May 2004) stated in the Final Declaration: We, the world movement of working children and adolescents from Africa, Asia and Latin America, value our work and view it as an important human right for our personal development. We oppose every kind of exploitation and reject everything that hurts our physical and moral integrity.… We denounce the policies of the ILO that aim at abolishing children’s work. The ILO has failed to understand the realities of working children and the viable alternatives to exploitative labour.

During the Global Child Labour Conference in The Hague, MOLACNATS (Moviemento Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Niňas, Niños y Adolescentes Trabajadores), the pro-child labour movement, issued a number of statements by the child workers and on behalf of the child workers. The statements, while ‘fully rejecting’ ILO Convention 138 (on the minimum age) and ‘remaining critical and opposed’ to Convention 182 (the Convention calling an end to the worst forms of child labour), actually objected to the very concept of child labour: As regards C182, which considers the use, procuring, or offering of a child for prostitution, the production of pornography or for pornographic performances, or the use of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production or trafficking of drugs as the worst forms of child labor, we believe that these are criminal offences and flagrant violations of a child’s human rights. We are clearly against all of these phenomena, but calling them “labor” creates dangerous confusion and leads to purely repressive practices as opposed to truly liberating alternatives.

It agrees that children should not be engaged in certain activities, e.g. prostitution and drugs trafficking, but considers them as illegal activities, rather than ‘worst forms of child labour’. By doing so, it skips the problem of the much more numerous worst forms of child labour, activities which do not fall under the criminal activities, but which nevertheless could be considered as intolerable activities. Those activities are the subject matter of this book. It needs yet to be established that these worst forms (which are 20 times more numerous than the illegal worst forms) are ‘truly liberating activities’.

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The regulacionistas have a strong presence in Latin America, particularly in Peru, where the Jesuit father Cussianovich founded IFEJANT, a Christian organisation for children and youths, and in 1995 created the MOLNAT (Movimiento Latinoamerica de Niňas, Niños y Adolescentes Trabajadores), which is considered to be an independent child labour union. In practice, most of the children in the organisation are in school or have studied up to a minimum level and at most do light forms of work, which even according to ILO standards would be permissible (Van den Berge 2007a, b). A major ideological representative of the movement is Manfred Liebel who has published various books in which he makes a plea for ‘child protagonism’, which expects adults to enter a new relationship with children; not one of authoritarian protectionism, but one that allows children to take responsibility for their own lives. Adults should not exclude children as workers and should start to realise that children also have the right to work and that, accordingly, they could take their lives into their own hands, as adults do. Liebel (2007:284) accordingly argues: The ILO is deaf to the concrete interests and needs of working children. Instead of preaching the elimination of child labour – currently step by step – the ILO should be recommended to ask exactly what could help to improve the situation of these children – while actually listening to working children and their organizations, and beginning a serious dialogue marked by mutual respect.

The debate between the erradicacionistas and the regulacionistas is conducted in different languages, loading different meanings onto child labour. On the one hand, the protagonists of the ‘right to work’ argue that there are multiple, competing definitions of child labour: ‘the term is not an objective, technical description of a single, observable set of human relations, but rather a rhetorical label that blends description with negative value judgments’ (Judith Ennew et  al. 2005:28). They further argue that the ‘worst forms language just adds to an already confusing list of imposed terminology’ and confront what they consider as indigenous Southern cultures with the stigmatising Northern cultural construction of childhood: Current scientific evidence suggests that not one construct of childhood or child-raising merits adoption as a universal model. Yet a Northern cultural construction of childhood and childrearing, which is now globally dominant, is incorrectly assumed to represent a scientific understanding of children valid everywhere and is the driving force behind many universalized social policies, including those governing child work (Judith Ennew et al. 2005:31).

In a subtle change in language, ‘child labour’ in the argument is being replaced by ‘child work’. The protagonists of the right of the child to work and some international organisations like Save the Children, actually hardly ever use the concept of child labour, mainly, as they say, because it has a negative image and they want to highlight the positive aspects of working children. ‘That is why’, argues Alejandro Cussianovich, the founding father of the Latin American child labour unions, ‘we consider it pertinent to emphasize a different paradigm, capable of confronting not only the ethno and adult-centrism, but also the ethics and culture of globalisation, which denies protagonism to all peoples and all cultures’ (Cussianovich 2002:5). The differentiated paradigm hinders a fruitful discussion with the ILO and with the mainstream movement against child labour. It confuses the issue by attributing

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a caricature position to the ILO; yet it is unfortunately mostly overlooked that the ILO is in fact not opposed to children working. On the contrary, it accepts the position that work done by children can be a normal and even beneficial activity: Millions of young people legitimately undertake work, paid or unpaid, that is appropriate for their age and level of maturity. By doing so, they learn to take responsibility, they gain skills and add to their families’ and their own well-being and income, and they contribute to their countries’ economies. (ILO 2002b:9)

For the ILO, and for the mainstream approach to child labour, the salient point is the agreement on dividing lines between child work and child labour, and between child labour and the worst forms of child labour. Children do a variety of work in widely divergent conditions. The work takes place along a continuum. At one end of the continuum, the work can be considered as beneficial, promoting capacities and a sense of responsibility without interfering with schooling and leisure; on the other end, the work done by children takes on the form of child labour and becomes harmful and exploitative. Child work takes many forms and ‘in some cases, such as traditional agricultural or handicraft production, it is carried out under the supervision of parents. Work of this type is often an integral part of the socialisation process’ (ILO 1986:14). It is helpful to refer to the caveat introduced by Alec Fyfe (1989:3–4) who on all counts has a long history of involvement in the struggle against child labour: There is little doubt that many children welcome the opportunity to work, seeing in it the rite de passage to adulthood. Work can be a gradual initiation into adulthood and a positive element in the child’s development. Light work, properly structured and phased, is not child labour. Work which does not detract from the other essential activities of children, namely, leisure, play and education, is not child labour. Child labour is work which impairs the health and development of children.

Indeed, not every kind of activity by children should be considered as ‘child labour’. Actually, a distinction should be made between work and labour. Work refers to any activity that requires physical or intellectual involvement. Labour is work that is applied with a specific purpose to generate products or provide services. Child labour is the subset of children’s work that is detrimental, negative or undesirable to children. Such a distinction between work and labour can be made for adult work as well, but children constitute a special case. Economists have tended to focus on the ‘labour’ aspect and have developed tools to measure the extent of child participation in labour processes. But child labour is not the involvement of children in labour as such (analogous to female labour or male labour), but is to be defined by the effect of the activity on the child. Child labour should be treated as one concept: it is work done by children in a specific context with a specific duration and with a specific potentially harmful impact. It is a concept that looks at the work done by an underage person from the interests of the child rather than from the point of view of economic accounting. Such a usage of child labour as one concept rather than as a combination of two words would include certain activities that until recently had not been included in the statistics, and could possibly exclude many activities that are now included. Child labour is work performed by children under 18, which is exploitative,

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hazardous and inappropriate for their age, and which is detrimental to their schooling and development. That is also how it has been defined in article 32 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989): ‘the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development’. That definition would exclude from the child labour category many instances of work done in and around the household: Child labour does not include activities such as helping out, after school is over and schoolwork has been done, with light household or garden chores, childcare or other light work. To claim otherwise only trivializes the genuine deprivation of childhood faced by the millions of children involved in the child labour that must be effectively abolished. (ILO 2002b:9)

Labour, at least until recently, had been conceived in terms of economic activities only, i.e. activities that could be captured by the System of National Accounts (SNA). Only the work producing values, either through products or services, whether in self-employment or in labour relationship, had been included in the sampling. Not all children who are working are economically active (work in the household, for example). In December 2008, SIMPOC (the statistical bureau of the ILO) agreed to go beyond economic activities and to include children in non-productive activities as well. Henceforth, household chores could also be counted as child labour as long as the work is considered hazardous. The qualifications as to what constitutes child labour are of a general nature and are difficult to translate into exact measurable figures. In short, although the general principles underlying international and national regulation are unambiguous, the concrete application is full of loopholes. Child labourers, it is agreed, are those entering the labour market under hazardous conditions or for long hours, or who work at home for too long and at too early an age. But then, how many hours should one work every day, and under which circumstances, to qualify as hazardous and harmful to the child and therefore as child labour. And child labourers are also those who are involved in household work beyond a certain threshold without producing goods and services that can be added to the national accounting statistics. In 1973, the ILO adopted Convention 138, which set the minimum age of employment at 15 or, in the case of developing countries with an insufficiently developed educational and economic system, at 14. Children, from the age of 13 onwards (age 12 in developing countries) are permitted to engage in light forms of work during a couple of hours per day. However, despite widespread ratification and international attention, the effective abolition of all child labour proved to be a difficult task. Two major considerations became apparent after the ratification of Convention 138. First, research illustrated the massive extent of the child labour problem, which led to an understanding that not all forms of child labour could be done away with instantaneously and that the most intolerable cases should be dealt with on a priority basis. Second, there was a growing understanding that not all forms of child labour are equally harmful. As stated in the 1997 UNICEF report The State of the World’s Children, child

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labour appears in many forms and not all labour is equally destructive or exploitative. The work takes place along a continuum. At one end of the continuum, the work is palpably destructive or exploitative: But to treat all work by children as equally unacceptable is to confuse and trivialize the issue and to make it more difficult to end abuses. This is why it is important to distinguish between beneficial and intolerable work and to recognize that much child labour falls in the grey area between these two extremes. (UNICEF 1997)

This realisation resulted in the decision by the ILO in 1999 to concentrate on the worst forms of child labour, while continuing to pursue the wider goal of reducing child labour in all its forms and adhering to the age limits. Convention 182 explicitly calls for immediate and effective measures to secure the prohibition and elimination of these worst forms. Each state is obliged to discuss, at a tripartite level – government, trade unions and employers – which employment/industrial sectors should be placed on their ‘worst forms’ list, and below which age work by children in that sector should be prohibited. Not all states have as yet fulfilled this obligation.

Worst Forms of Child Labour in Latin America The magnitude of child labour has always been a matter of debate (Lieten 2001, 2005). Children working within the SNA production boundary for at least 1 h a day are referred to as children in employment, but they are not necessarily child labourers. It therefore has not been unproblematic to provide an accurate picture of the extent of child labour. The figures that are presently provided by the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank, thanks to the introduction of new sampling methodologies in stand-alone surveys, are becoming more accurate, but are susceptible to errors. One problem relates to the invisibility of many of the child labour activities, particularly where legislation exists that bans such labour. It is difficult to access the places of work; survey instruments often falter because the information is collected by proxy and by field staff not properly trained; and the determination of the actual age of children is fraught with difficulties. Rapid Assessment surveys are cost-effective, but tend to miss the reality in the field, for which a more intensive stay would be required. As Boyden, Ling and Myers have argued, much research is conducted as a one-off event, providing what is often a fairly static picture of children’s working lives and school participation: Many of the impacts of work are manifested only in the longer term and cannot be captured in a single-stage investigation. Longitudinal research, then, is much more likely to provide an accurate picture of the range, schedules and intensity of work in different seasons or different phases of childhood … In practice, research into issues like child exploitation is often anecdotal and of no statistical validity. (Boyden et al. 1998:162)

A further problem with the collection of reliable information is even more serious. It relates to the very definition of what child labour is. Whereas child labour is a

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concept that actually covers a miscellaneous category of children, the aggregated statistics erroneously suggest a homogeneous category of working children. A problem, as we have seen, also relates to the usage of SNA for delineating child labour. Richard Anker has referred to this problem as the mixed fruit bowl (2000). Recording one figure for the complex category of child labour, and analysing trends, equates putting apples and oranges in one basket; it includes children who do or do not go to school and may do light work in and around the household (e.g. on the family farm), as well as children who are at work most of the day and most of the year and who are impaired in their normal development as a child. The broad categories have a different rationale, a different impact and demand different solutions. The latter group has been referred to as the worst forms of child labour. In the latest aggregate reports and studies, the differentiation between these different forms of child labour is more and more being taken into account. In the latest ILO global reports: The End of Child Labour Within Reach (2006a) and Accelerating Action Against Child Labour (ILO 2010), the ILO is quite positive about the reduction in magnitude of child labour, and especially the worst forms: ‘The global picture that emerges is thus highly encouraging: Child work is declining, and the more harmful the work and the more vulnerable the children involved, the faster the decline’ (ILO 2006c). ‘Given these developments, we are optimistic enough to set the goal of ending the worst forms of child labour by 2016’ (ILO 2010:IX). This positive trend is even more so the case in the Latin American context, where the decline has been the fastest: from 17.4 million economically active children in 2000 to 10 million children working in 2008. Its share in the world child employment declined from 13.7% to 10.5%. This decline puts Latin America on par with some developed and transitional economies. It is well ahead of Asia, the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa. The data in Table 1.1 refer to all children in any economic activity. The size of the child labour problem, however, is distinctly smaller. Economic activity covers all market production, paid or unpaid, and production of goods for own use, i.e. all activities that are included in the SNA. Any child who has been working for 1 h/week is considered to be economically active, but not all this work is equivalent to ‘child labour’. A conceptual line needs to be drawn between acceptable forms

Table 1.1  Global trends in children’s economic activity by region, 2000 and 2008 (5–14 age group) (From ILO 2006c, 2010) Economically Child population active children (million) (million) Activity rate (%) 2008 Region 2000 2008 2000 2008 2000 Asia and the Pacific Latin America and the Caribbean Sub-Saharan Africa Other regions World

  655   108   167   269 1,199

  652   111   205   249 1,217

127.3 17.4 48.0 18.3 211.0

96.4 10.0 58.2 10.7 176.4

19.4 16.1 28.8 6.8 17.6

14.8 9.0 28.4 4.3 14.5

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of work done by children (which may have positive impact on the child) and child labour. The concept of child labour, as we have seen earlier, is based on the minimum age limits as set by ILO Convention 138, the authoritative international agreement. It includes all children in any economic activity below the age of 13 in developed countries and 12 in developing countries, children in the 13–14 age (12–13 age) category engaged in activities that go beyond what can be considered as ‘light work’ and adolescents (>14) engaged in hazardous work. The aggregate data allow for positive conclusions. Child labour continues to decline. The global number of child labourers (age 5–17) stands at 215 million, 30 million less than in 2000. Among 5–14 year olds, the number of children in child labour has declined from 186 million in 2000 to 153 million (−18%) and the number of children in the same age category in the worst forms (the children engaged in hazardous work) declined from 111 million to 53 million (−52%). On the other hand, there has been an alarming increase in the number of adolescents doing hazardous work. The number decreased from 59 million in 2000 to 52 million in 2004 and then increased to 62 million in 2008, representing 16.9% of adolescent boys and girls in the world (ILO 2010:8). Although the child labour data are becoming more accurate, the overlap between economically active children and child labourers in many countries may still not have been identified. That may help to explain why countries in Latin America, in comparison with Asia, on the one hand have a much lower percentage of children in employment and a higher percentage of children in the worst forms of child labour (Table 1.2). Although statistics in the latest global reports are encouraging, national reports on child labour in several Latin American countries tell a different story. Child labour statistics of Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala (the specific countries included in this study) indicate that child labour may actually be on the increase. In Peru, according to the ILO and INEI data, the incidence of working children in the age category 6–11 is said to have increased from 2.5% to 21.7% between 1993 and 2001, and was expected to increase to 32% in 2005 (CPETI and MTPE 2005). The increase is as dramatic as it is questionable. Figures may show wide variations, depending on the sampling organisation. According to the ILO, in the year 2000 there were 248,236 children between 10 and 14 years economically active in Table 1.2  Regional estimates of child labour, 2008 (5–17 age group) (From ILO 2010:10) Children in Children in Children employment Child labourers hazardous work (million) (million) (%) (million) (%) (million) (%) World 1,586 305 19.3 215 13.6 115 7.3 Asia   854 174 20.4 114 13.3   48 5.6 Latin America/   141   19 13.4   14 10.0    9 6.7 Caribbean Sub-Sahara Africa   257   84 32.8   65 25.3   39 15.1 Other regions   334   28 8.4   22 6.7   19 5.7

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Bolivia (ILO 2001), but the national census of 2001 showed 354,742 children between 10 and 14 years to be economically active (INE 2003). In 2002, 22.3% in the 6–14 age category was counted as working (Fassa et al. 2010:30). UCW also estimates that in Guatemala the number of child workers has been on the rise, from 14% in 1999 to 20% in 2000 to 23% in 2003 (2003). These indicators constitute only rough indicators of child labour and need further refinement. In the process of fine-tuning the data, Understanding Child Work (UCW), the joint agency of ILO, World Bank and UNICEF, has recently started to work using different statistical standards. One hour spent on economic activity is used as the threshold for classifying children below the age of 12 as child labourers. The time threshold in the 12–14 age category has been set at 14 h/week, the cut-off frequently used for light work in economic activity. In addition, a higher threshold of 28 h has been introduced for classifying household chores as child labour. The addition of the latter category raises the incidence of girl labour considerably. The data set in Table 1.3 suggest that Guatemala has a child labour incidence (below the age of 15) of, respectively, 28.8% for girls and 27.8% for boys. Excluding household chores, the incidence would have been 12.7% and 23.4%, respectively (Guarcello et al. 2006:21).1 These figures contradict the general view that child labour in Latin America has drastically declined. The explanation is clear: ‘Today, Latin America not only has countries with negligible child labour, including Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, but also has countries with some of the highest incidence: Bolivia, 25%, Peru, 28%, and Ecuador, 34%’ (Orazem et al. 2009:6). Although most countries have signed Convention 182, not all of them have complied with the obligation to identify the worst forms sectors and activities in their

Table 1.3  Child labour incidence according to gender in selected Latin-American and Caribbean countries (5–14 age group) (From Guarcello et al. 2006:21 (Table 5)) 5–14 household Labour 12–14 Economically active (labour) (excluding light labour (>28 h/ % Child labour week) work) 50 ha) in two sugar cane regions in Bolivia: north of the city of Santa Cruz and in the southern part of the Tarija department (Bermejo). In both regions, the sugar cane harvest starts in May and ends in November.

Tents are simple constructions of branches, palm fronds and tarp

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The sugar cane region of Bermejo consists of nine provinces adjacent to the Bermejo River and the Tarija River, which both create borders with Argentina. The sugar cane sector in Bermejo is smaller than in Santa Cruz, in terms of volume, and consists of smaller plantations with a more direct and personalised relationship between harvesters and plantation owners (Garland and Silva-Santisteban 2005). Living conditions, however, are deplorable. In 2004, according to an OASI report, in the whole Bermejo sugar cane region, of the 126 campamentos, or harvesters’ camps, 33 camps were actually inhabitable (Guevara 2004). Sugar is one of the most important export products of the Santa Cruz region (Oostra and Malaver 2003). It is estimated that 4,000 campamentos are located in the 11 municipalities north of the city of Santa Cruz. Whereas in Bermejo, many plantation owners grow sugar cane on even less than 10 ha, many large plantation owners in the Santa Cruz area own several hundreds or even thousands of hectares of sugar cane land. In Santa Cruz as well as in Bermejo, the living conditions of children and their families are precarious. Some plantation owners try to improve the living conditions but others, mostly the ones operating in remote zones and/or having small pieces of land and little financial resources, offer their harvesters only the most basic living conditions. Although conditions appear to have been improving, there still is much to be desired. Campamento Los Limones (Santa Cruz) has around 50 families and some 30 single men (adolescents and adults). For 4–6 months, they sleep in a well-constructed building that separates the families from the solteros (single men). The solteros sleep in bunk beds in a separate wing of the building. A family is allocated about 2 × 2 m by the contractor. The zafrero, his wife and his children all sleep together in one bed. Families try to create some privacy by hanging sheets between their own bed and their neighbours’. But obviously, as all families sleep in the same big room, privacy is rare. The wives of the zafreros cook in a covered kitchen area. The camp has a communal space, the comedor, where people can share their meals. On rainy days and Sundays, families spend time together on their beds or sit in the comedor. As an exception, Los Limones has showers and actual toilets. The primary school closest to the Los Limones camp is about 1.5 km away, and transport of the 30–40 school-going children is arranged by the plantation owner. The children attend the regular school system. In this camp, children don’t fall ill very often; when they do they mostly suffer from diarrhoea. The plantation owner makes sure there are medicines for the people who get sick and medical attention for the ones who get injured. This is an exceptional situation, resulting in the UNICEF representative in Santa Cruz to name the Los Limones camp a ‘model camp’. Campamento Los Elechos (Santa Cruz) is a mobile camp that houses about 40 zafreros. The families and single men construct their own tents; sanitary facilities are lacking. The work in the zafra takes only about 4 weeks. Upon completion, the harvesters leave Los Elechos and rebuild their camp near another plantation. The tents are open at both front and back ends; animals, like cows, can easily enter and plunder the food reserves. During the night, it can get very cold, and, during the day, it is extremely hot. The families construct their own beds. There are no cooking

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facilities and the women build wood fires on the ground. The primary school closest to Los Elechos is also about 1.5 km away from the camp. It actually is not much of a school: it functions only for 2½ days/week. Most families who work here do not have, or do not bring, school-aged children to the camp. Their children are generally much younger. There is no health centre close to the campamento in Los Elechos. The little children contract diseases related to the unhygienic conditions in the camp, like diarrhoea, and are often malnourished, which can lead to anaemia. Campamento El Lapacho (Bermejo) houses about 20 zafreros, most of whom have come with their families. The families sleep in brick structures consisting of 3 × 3 m rooms that are shared by two families, and in which they construct their own beds. The single men and their cuartas (helpers) share rooms with two or three other people. It has about ten school-aged migrant children. The school lies at 1.5 km from the camp. Every morning, the children walk to school and attend classes until lunch time. During the zafra, the teachers become very busy with the extra pupils and their needs; migrant children are at a lower educational level and must do extra work to catch up with the local children. When the males move to another camp, the children of El Lapacho stay in the camp, together with some of the women who stay behind to take care of the children who then can continue in the same school. However, some parents are unwilling to use this solution and take their children along to a next camp where there might be no school. Hygienic conditions are very poor: there is no bathing area, no sanitation and children walk around in dirty clothes and with dirty hands and faces. The area is infested with mosquitoes, and so everyone is covered with bites.

Brick structures in the El Lapacho camp in Bermejo, divided into 3 × 3 m rooms

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Campamento Entre Ríos, in Trementinal (Bermejo), like Los Elechos, generally does not house school-aged children. There were, however, five adolescents of about 15 years old working as zafreros. The families who live in the camp are young couples with small children. The families live in 3 × 3 m wooden structures, in which they construct their own beds. The adolescent singles live separately in similar rooms. The camp has a wooden toilet cabin that consists of a hole in the ground and there is no bathing area; people wash themselves near the well or in the river that passes by the camp a few hundred metres away. None of the young children found in the Entre Ríos campamento go to school. They accompany their mothers the whole day. There are many cases of child malnutrition and anaemia because of the unbalanced diet and all types of insect bites. Diseases that are common among little children are respiratory diseases, and intestinal infections, like diarrhoea.

Work in the Sugar Cane Harvest The year-round maintenance of sugar cane plantations (fertilisation etc.) is usually done by a few permanent labourers. When the crop is fully grown, roughly between April and November, more labour force is required for the harvest. After the sugar cane has been harvested, it is de-topped and stacked into piles; then it is loaded onto a flatbed truck and brought to the ingenio to be further processed into sugar or alcohol. In Bermejo, most of the loading is still done manually, but in Santa Cruz, more and more plantation owners have started using mechanical loaders in recent years. In addition to mechanisation, a new burning technique has also made the zafra less labour intensive. By setting entire plantations alight excess leaves and weeds are burned, leaving just the stalks behind, making cutting a lot easier. It also serves as protection from animals such as snakes, but the smoke caused by the enormous fires has obvious implications for air quality and causes respiratory problems, especially among children. The burning technique also results in less child labour: young children are no longer needed to help peel the leaves from the stalks or to weed between the crops. Adolescent boys of 14 and older already work as contracted harvesters. The work they do is the same as that of adults. They earn a salary of between 1,000 and 4,000 Bolivianos (€100–400) a month, depending on the volume they manage to cut. They engage in setting the plantations alight, cutting down the sugar cane using a machete, de-topping the stalks, then stacking them into piles, which weigh between 40 and 50 kg. The stacks are then lifted onto their shoulder, and walked towards the flatbed truck where the loader has to climb a wooden ladder to the top of the other piles and deposit his own. This work is extremely heavy, and no younger children are involved. In Bermejo, the zafreros often bring their own cuartas. These helpers are normally the zafrero’s own wife, child, neighbour or other relative. Cuartas help with cutting,

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stacking and peeling. They don’t generally participate with loading the sugar cane, which is done manually in Bermejo, as this work is too heavy for them (if it is a woman or child). Cuartas can themselves also hire helpers, often their own children. Children below the age of 14 rarely participate in the sugar cane harvest in Santa Cruz. The burning technique and mechanisation has led to fewer children working on the plantations. Parents try to leave all their children at home in the care of family members, so that home and school life are disturbed as little as possible. Unfortunately, adequate childcare is not always available, and so still too often, the youngest non-school-going children are brought along to the camps and plantations. These children accompany their mothers all day long and help them with some chores, like fetching water and cleaning, or just playing at their side.

In Bermejo, the harvesters still load the trucks manually

Children and adolescents aged 12–17, girls as well as boys who are still in school, in Santa Cruz as well as in Bermejo, help their parents as cuartas in the sugar cane harvest after school, in the weekends and/or during holidays. These children participate in the different harvesting activities according to their age and sex. Schoolgoing children of 11 and 12 years old participate in the same activities as older permanent helpers like cutting, de-topping and stacking sugar cane, after classes or on non-school days. In Bermejo, some of these children (only boys) also participate in the extremely heavy task of manually loading sugar cane onto the flatbed trucks. Eleven-year-old Armando, for example, had recently finished sixth grade in the

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Campo Grande school in Bermejo and then started to help his father as a cuarta on a daily basis. This meant that he helped cutting sugar cane in the morning and sometimes participated in loading sugar cane in the afternoon or evening, together with other young boys, such as 13-year-old Modesto: ‘My parents don’t give me money for the work but they buy me clothes and everything’. Armando’s father emphasised his desire for his son to continue studying next year; he wouldn’t like his son to drop out of school because of the work. Daysi (12 years), who lives in the Porcelana camp in Bermejo, works as a cuarta with her sister: I came here with my sister and I help her and her husband in the harvest; my sister helps my husband and I help my sister. At the end of the harvest she will pay me, she hasn’t paid me anything yet. I don’t know how much it will be, I have no idea. But anyway, I help her to earn money for back home.

Usually children and youths working as cuartas earn a salary between 300 and 800 Bolivianos (€30–80) per month, but especially the ones who work with their family members tend to be unaware of their earnings and might not even earn anything at all. Helping out family members is perceived as family work for which minors don’t need to be rewarded individually. Doña Delia, who also lives in the Porcelana camp in Bermejo, for example, told me that her 14-year-old son Daniel works as a cuarta with his father and doesn’t receive a salary: ‘If he needs anything like clothes or something, he gets it from us, but we don’t pay him. We just don’t have enough money’. In Bermejo, like in Santa Cruz, women and adolescent girls do the household chores in the camps, even though they may work as cuartas too. Girls are never hired as full-time contracted harvesters because the work is considered too heavy for women. Women in the sugar cane harvest are expected to run the household and related activities. Zafreros who are not accompanied by their wives may bring along a female cuarta to cook and wash his clothes, in addition to her tasks in the harvest. Girls usually accompany their brothers to work as cuarta, or both of them work as cuartas, but the sister is the one who cooks and washes. Aminta (14) mentioned: ‘I cook for my brothers and my uncle and for three other guys of their group. I am doing this for the first time and it is okay; I earn a bit of money’. The solteros need someone to cook for them. A pensionista is such a person; she gets money from a group of men to do groceries and cook for them. Girls from 14 years onwards, for example, 15-year-old Nina, are hired to do this work: I work for 10 zafreros; my brother is the contractor so the 10 men also work for my brother. They pay me 150 Bolivianos (1.50 euro) each per 15 days. But I also have to do the shopping with this money so in the end I earn just a little bit, something like 200, 300 or 400 Bolivianos (2, 3 or 4 euro) in that entire period.

The pensionistas’ work is hard; they have to get up early to cook for others, they have to go on errands when others have a day off, they have to cook large amounts on a simple wood fire out in the open, they have to work in a subservient position relative to their male clients and must have a strong character to survive within the machismo environment.

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The zafreros work in clusters of two or four people and are paid as a group, according to the amount of cane that they have cut; this is normally about 17 or 18 Bolivianos (€1.70/1.80) per tonne of cut sugar cane. Experienced, very hard-working zafreros can possibly cut about 8 t/day, but young inexperienced harvesters might cut only 2 t. A 16-year-old zafrero commented: I have just started working here a few days ago; I am still working quite slowly. Last year I also worked in the sugar cane harvest and went home with about 2000 Bolivianos

Eight-year-old girl helping her mother to cut sugar cane on a Saturday morning, Arrozales, Bermejo (200 Euro) at the end of the zafra, that is after they had deducted our advances and other costs. It is not much for working like slaves for 5 months.

Even though many deductions are made from their salary (advance, food costs, travel expenses, etc.), the adolescents earn more than they would at home; unfortunately, it is not enough to last them the rest of the year. The rest of the year they work their own land, or in other sectors such as construction, mining or agriculture, elsewhere in Bolivia or in Argentina. Although a small group of adolescents only works at the plantations during school holidays, most adolescents in Santa Cruz work 6 days a week, throughout the zafra. On working days, they get up at 4:00 am and have a cup of tea and a piece of bread. Around 4:30 am, the group of zafreros heads to the field, either walking

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or driven by their contractor on the wagon behind the tractor, and start cutting the sugar cane at sunrise. The adolescents work all morning without any real breaks; they only stop every once in a while to drink some water, smoke a cigarette, chew coca leaves and sharpen their machetes. At noon, the pensionista will have lunch ready, which she will either bring to the field or serve at the camp. The lunch breaks take an hour to an hour and a half. After the lunch break, the harvesters work the whole afternoon. Around 5/6 pm, they stop working and return to the campamento, have dinner and socialise until 8 or 9 pm, at which point everybody goes to sleep. Sometimes though, the loading machine is available only in the middle of the night and the zafreros will get up to use it. In addition to the long hours and the high workload, the adolescents are exposed to an extreme climate with high temperatures, of which Raul (15) commented: ‘During the first hours, the work is all right, but when it gets later, from around 9 am, it is so hot, it drives me crazy’. All workers try to protect themselves from the heat by wearing hats, drinking a lot of water and starting work very early. However, when a lot of work has to be done, they work through the hottest hours as well. Edwin (17) first worked in the sugar cane harvest in Bermejo when he was 14: ‘It was terrible because the work is bad and it was so hot and the mosquitoes never left us alone and the work makes you totally black because it is so dirty. All my clothes were just never to be worn again after a few months’. Because of the heat the zafreros would prefer to work in sleeveless shirts, but the sugar cane leaves are sharp, thus protective layers are needed. Most adolescent zafreros work on sandals made from car tires, which leave their feet exposed to injuries. Even though cutting sugar cane all day causes hands to blister, none of the adolescent workers use gloves. A 16-year-old boy argued: ‘I think it doesn’t help to put on gloves: they don’t help because they get holes within 1 day’s work. I prefer to just get hard skin on my hands’. Cuartas work 6 days a week. Female cuartas have to get up before the others to prepare breakfast. After breakfast, the zafreros and their cuartas head to the fields. Although most children help on days that they don’t have school – accompanying their parents, combining their work with rest and play – quite a large number work full-time. A young boy in El Lapacho (11) commented: ‘I work every day with my mother. She is a cuarta for my father and I help her because I have nothing else to do’. The youngest children, those under 7, are present on the plantation, but don’t actively participate; however, from 7 onwards, they tend to help their parents, as the research diaries note: This morning we left the camp by tractor at 4:30 to head to the fields. It was extremely cold, especially because we were sitting on top of the wagon in the open air. Everybody was wrapped up in blankets; harvesters, their wives, the cuartas, and all the children. When we arrived at the fields, people started burning the crops to get warm. Then we started cutting the sugar cane at a plot which had been burned the day before. The youngest children, up to 6 years old, stayed at the tractor and played on top of the wagon; parents had to take them with them because their was nobody in the camp who could watch them. Nobody in particular took notice of them although they could easily fall off the wagon. My neighbour girl from the camp, Yasmin, had her 7-month-old baby with her and just left him at the side of the path where she was working. All other children, of 7 years and older were cutting sugar cane alongside their parents, the whole morning.

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The Impact on Children The plantation workers, and their children, live in a very unhealthy environment. Both children who work at the plantations and those who simply accompany their parents, are exposed to leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, scabies and lice, which is mainly on account of the overcrowded accommodations with poor hygiene and sanitation. The heat exacerbates the presence of insects and the general weak state of health and malnourishment make children more vulnerable to infections. According to 20-year-old Valentina, one of the harvester’s wives in Santa Cruz, many accidents and illnesses occur because of the working and living conditions. She thinks women have fewer health problems: We don’t really have health problems but the men and the boys do; they cut themselves with the machete, they faint because of the heat or fall off the truck when they are loading sugar cane. Only yesterday, one of the boys had his eye scratched by a leaf of the sugar cane. That really hurts …it happened to me once too. It may destroy your eyesight.

The work they do is very strenuous and risky, but not many serious incidents were reported. They appear to have become accustomed to serious accidents and do not consider them noteworthy or requiring medical treatment. Many children and adolescents who work as cuartas in the zafra reported machete cuts. As the machetes are sharpened several times a day, the cuts in the hands, arms, feet or legs tend to be deep. Nelson (8), a school-going child in Trementinal who helps his parents at the sugar cane plantations during the afternoon after school, recalls: ‘Once when I was working with my mother, I cut myself in the leg. It wasn’t very bad but it hurt a lot and a lot of blood came out of the wound. They put something around it, but it kept hurting for many days. The machete was very sharp’. Although cuts on hands, arms, feet or legs are common, few children are brought into health centres to seek treatment. Reaching a doctor or a health centre is difficult, and wounds are expected to heal themselves anyway. Roger (13), from the Campo Grande camp in Bermejo, said: ‘I cut my toe about two weeks ago. It hurt and blood came out but I didn’t go to the health centre, I just left it to heal by itself. Now it is okay’. Children also reported falling from the flat-bed wagons, or from the stairs they climb while loading sugar cane. This happened to Ramón (17): When I was 15, I was working in Porcelana, close to Bermejo, where we went loading early in the morning. It was raining quite heavily but we just went to work as usual. The stairs were very slippery because of the rain so I slipped holding this whole stack of sugar cane on my shoulder, and I fell down. My back hurt a lot, I guess something had broken but I didn’t go to a doctor. I just rested for three days and then I went back to work again although it still hurt. Although it happened some years ago, I have continued working and my back is still hurting.

Because cutting, de-topping, stacking and loading sugar cane are heavy tasks, extreme tiredness is the most prevalent consequence of the work. Especially in the last months of the harvest, the workers complain about their bodies becoming weaker and they feel more tired and want to return to their homes. Many acknowledge

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that the work physically wears them out. Francisco (15), from the Okinawa camp in Santa Cruz, complained: ‘I am really tired of the work and I have become much thinner since I came to the harvest; the heavy work really makes one lose weight’. Mesquil (16) commented on how hard he found the work: ‘I didn’t think that the work would be so hard. It is so hot and I am thirsty all the time. The first very day, my arm and my back started hurting’. After a week of work, his hands had been completely rubbed raw and were covered with open blisters. Mesquil considered leaving after a few days, but he changed his mind and tries to ignore health implications for economic reasons: ‘Although the work is exhausting and my hands hurt, I am thinking of staying at least the whole month to earn a bit of money’. The youngest children, under 7, are usually left in the campamentos and stay with their mothers. In some campamentos in Santa Cruz and Bermejo, there are PAN centres close to or even inside the camps. A PAN centre is a governmental child shelter for children of 0–5 years old. Some PAN centres only provide lunch for the children, while others entertain children all day. In the Campo Grande camp, the wife of the contractor, who permanently lives in the camp, gets a small salary to cook lunch for the youngest children in the camp every day, but there is no funding for hiring an educator to keep the children busy. In another camp, Porcelana, also close to Bermejo, two women are hired to take care of the children of the campamento during the day, while another woman cooks for them. The PAN centres are a significant solution for mothers with small children, but the centres are few and poorly equipped. In both sugar cane regions, children are usually put into school at about 7 years old, if there is one available close by. In Arrozales, Porcelana and the Campo Grande in Bermejo, there are schools close to the camps and almost all primary-school-aged children attend classes. The fact that they help their parents after school and in the weekends, however, leaves them little time to do their homework. In the Okinawa 1 and Chorobi camps in Santa Cruz, on the other hand, the children are not in school because the parents consider the schools to be too far away. Although most children of school-going age are enrolled during the zafra and may not actually engage in the labour activities, their education is nevertheless affected. Work in the sugar cane harvest is migratory work. Some families move from camp to camp during the harvest, and so their children move from school to school. The teachers in the sugar cane regions have difficulties with the fluctuating numbers of students. One teacher of the school opposite the Primero de Mayo camp in Arrozales, Bermejo mentioned: We are three teachers throughout the entire year but the number of children attending classes varies all the time. Before the harvest there are 27 pupils from the community [of Arrozales] but when the harvest starts there are 80 to 90 children.

Teachers thus have to cope with varying numbers of pupils; this number varies almost per week as the harvesting families come and go at different moments and children from different camps attend the same schools. Moving around makes school attendance extremely difficult, and the experience can be extremely upsetting. A mother of an 8-year-old boy and a baby girl commented:

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When we leave this place, in about two weeks, we will probably go to Playa Ancha. It is difficult for the children there because we don’t know if there is a school, so maybe we won’t take them with us and leave them in this camp with some mothers. But if we take them with us we will spend some time finding them a new school.

Often parents leave some of their children at home with family members so they can continue going to school. Doña Carla (Okinawa 1 camp in Santa Cruz) explained: My oldest three children are at home. A few days ago I went to my village to go get my youngest daughter; she is four years old and attends a child day care but that finished last week. Now she stays with me here in the camp while the other three are still in school in Gutierrez. They are staying with my brother.

When people don’t have anyone they can leave their children with, they have to take them with them to the harvest. Teachers at home complain that when children return they have fallen behind, whilst teachers in the zafra regions complain of the poor educational levels of the migrant children when they arrive. According to the director of the school in Campo Grande, school-going children start working as half-cuartas from fourth grade onwards, which means from about the age of 9: ‘They attend our school in the morning and work in the afternoon. They come to school with wounds all over their hands’. There are also children who are not enrolled at all during the zafra. In order to be enrolled, parents need to present an official transfer paper from the hometown school, which, for various reasons, they may fail to do, as happened to Nestor (11): ‘I am not in school because my parents didn’t bring the papers from my other school’. Forgetting papers does not automatically lead to work; normally a decision about work will have been made before hand. Modesto (13) claimed: ‘my father took me from school when I was eleven so I could help him growing potatoes, peas and cereals, but also I didn’t want to continue studying myself’. Modesto accompanies his father on the fields in their hometown, as well as in the sugar cane harvest. Adolescent boys working as contracted harvesters, as well as youths working as cuartas, mainly work for economic reasons. They come from poor regions with few job opportunities, and the sugar cane harvest provides a more or less stable income for 4–6 months a year. Héctor (15, from the Campo Grande camp in Bermejo) said: I came here with a neighbour from my community and I work as his cuarta. I earn 600 Bolivianos [60 Euro] per month but usually I only get paid what I need; at the end of the harvest I will get the rest of my money. I am the youngest of 8 brothers and sisters; they are in my village and the money I earn will be very helpful.

When boys are about 14–15 years old, they are considered old enough to contribute to the family income. If they work fulltime, they have usually only finished primary school until the fifth grade. Only some of them have started secondary school, but dropped out before finishing. They usually, like Hector (15), do not perceive further study as a real option because they cannot afford the enrolment fees or book costs: ‘I finished eigth grade last year and then I quit going to school. I would still like to continue studying in high school but there is no money in my family for me to study. Maybe I’ll have to pay for it myself’. Some, however, dislike working in the sugar cane harvest so much that

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their wish of continuing to study has grown stronger. Most adolescents like the fact that they have started to earn money or simply don’t feel like studying anymore. Uriel (15), in the Campo Grande camp in Bermejo, is a good example of many boys who don’t desire going back to school because they have become used to working and earning money for themselves or their families. Uriel explained: In the harvest here, I work with my father. He doesn’t really pay me but just gives me clothes and stuff. I studied until fourth grade: I left when I was eleven. I am not going to study anymore because the higher levels are too far away and I don’t want to go anymore. I just want to work. In my hometown I also work: I grow vegetables and take care of the sheep, the goats, the pigs and the cows.

Earning money, once they have reached a certain age, remains a big attraction. Once that process has started, it is difficult to turn back to the school benches. These adolescents don’t consider themselves children anymore. The work in the zafra adds to their becoming an adult and leaving their childhood behind. Rene (15) in El Lapacho: ‘I stopped going to school when I was in third grade. I have always worked since that time; I just wanted to earn money. Therefore I like to work in the zafra: I can earn much money here in a short time. Going back to school is no option for me: I am too old’. In Bermejo, the use of the cuarta system makes the zafra more like a family business, in which adolescent family members also participate. In Santa Cruz, adolescents participating in the zafra work outside of the family realm. In Santa Cruz, adolescents of 14 years onwards work accompanied by friends or relatives and are part of the group of solteros. In Bermejo, adolescent cuartas of 12 years and older work within or without the family realm; they either assist their parents, or work as cuartas with their uncles, neighbours or other acquaintances. For children of school-going age (6–12), the zafra can be quite impacting. It either means that they travel with their parents to the zafra region where they try to find a school and work outside school hours and in the weekends, or that they stay in their hometowns to continue classes and wait for their parents to come home. This can take as long as 6 months if their parents stay for the whole zafra period. Either option can be emotionally and educationally disrupting. The wife of one of the zafreros in Los Elechos commented: I took my two youngest children with me and left the other three at home, the oldest is 9 years old. They go to school so I don’t want to take them with us to the zafra. I left them with my mother so they are alright, but it hurts me to leave them there for such a long time. But what can we do?

Leaving children behind can be extremely stressful; some of the wives commented that they would return home before their husbands, just to be reunited with their children sooner. Children in the sugar cane harvest, although together with their parents, miss the rest of their family. Like one 13-year-old girl who helps her aunt in cleaning and cooking in the El Rincón campamento mentioned: “I kind of like it here but I prefer to stay at home because there I have lots of family”. Thus, either way, staying in the hometown or travelling with parents to the zafra means a separation from part of the family for a while.

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After the Interventions Fieldwork, carried out in the sugar cane regions of Santa Cruz and Bermejo during October and November 2008, allowed for a comparison with the situation as observed by the ILO during its rapid evaluation in 2002. The places visited in the Santa Cruz sugar cane harvest – Las Gamas and Chira/Nueva Esperanza – are located in the Warnes province. Those visited in Bermejo – Arrozales, Porcelana and Campo Grande – are located in the central sugar cane region. In 2002, the situation was as follows (ILO 2002a): Whereas the acreage under sugar cane was increasing, the number of harvesters, because of a growing mechanisation, was decreasing. In Santa Cruz, 22% of the 32.000 harvesters were children and adolescents; in Bermejo, 25% of the 5500 harvesters were children and adolescents. The youngest children were 9 years old. About 70% of the boys and girls participating in the sugar cane harvest in Bermejo worked as cuartas while the rest of the girls combined their household chores with working as a cuarta and the rest of the boys mostly peeled the leaves off the sugar cane. In the Santa Cruz sugar cane region, 77.8% of the boys cut sugar cane, 11.1% combined this work with household chores, 11.1% did weeding; among the girls, 37.5% did household chores combined with cutting sugar cane, 20.8% cut sugar cane, 4.2% did weeding and 8.3% were only attending school. In Tarija, there was a concentration of youths of 13 to 16 years old working in the harvest, while in Santa Cruz the majority was between 16 and 18 years old.

Those percentages have since gone down, at least when looking at fulltime workers. The harvesters confirmed having noticed a diminishment in the number of youths participating in the harvest compared with a few years ago. According to doña Mercedes from the Campo Grande camp in Bermejo, mother of four children: My daughter didn’t want to come to the harvest. She joined us once but she found the work horrible, “much too heavy and too hot” she said. So she decided that she wants to study; she is in 8th grade now and wants to go to high school. In general there are fewer children in the camp. Last year there were more, but like my daughter other children also want to study. They sometimes just want to go to school so they stay in their homes.

Apparently, the children and their parents have become more aware of the importance of schooling and more children are staying in their hometowns to continue studying or attending classes in the harvest region. Luisiana (15, Campo Grande camp) also stated that there are fewer children on the plantations than before. According to her this primarily has to do with youths wanting to study: ‘Also from my town, some children have stayed there because they want to finish school first’. Luisiana herself also wants to finish eigth grade next year and then move on to high school; she couldn’t finish primary school this year because she had to help her brother in the harvest. Of the fulltime harvesters in Santa Cruz about 10–15% are minors. In Bermejo, the percentage is slightly higher. The current educational situation has, however, improved significantly. According to the ILO, only 8.3% of the girls and none of the boys participating in the sugar cane harvest in Santa Cruz were in school. In Bermejo, neither boys nor girls from the migrant camps were attending classes (Dávalos 2002). Currently, most children under 12 years old are attending primary school. Still, attendance depends very much on whether there is a school close to the camp. In the central sugar cane zone in Bermejo, almost all children under 12

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are in school; in the more remote zones of Santa Cruz, where schools are far away, young children continue to be out-of-school. Although numbers appear to have gone down, youngsters are still present on the plantations, and still run all types of health risks and are actually injured from time to time. In addition, their right to education is hampered because the school-going children who participate in the harvest experience an interruption of their school year while the older ones who work fulltime have no time to attend school at all. In Santa Cruz, LABOR and the Federation of Harvesters carried out a project from August 2006 to July 2008. The awareness-raising activities seem to have had good results, as the leaders are well informed about the topic and seem to entirely agree with the idea of eliminating child labour from the sector. When visiting the harvester camps, the Federation members talk about the issue with the harvesters and their families. The radio program broadcasted by the Federation of Harvesters in Montero, called La voz del zafrero (The Voice of the Harvestor), is quite popular among the harvesters. Many families listen regularly to the program, which is a daily half-hour broadcast. The program seems an effective way to reach many people about issues like child labour. Twenty-year-old Valentina (Chorobi camp) commented: ‘They talk about how we should have good camps, good earnings and that children shouldn’t work in the sugar cane harvest’. Also Manuel (13, Okinawa 1 camp) and his parents listen to the program on their radio. Manuel’s mother, doña Nely, explained that she likes the program and that they learn from it: During the program they talk about children who work in the harvest and that it is prohibited because it is dangerous for them. Then my son tells me “you see mum, I shouldn’t be working: it is prohibited”. But I think there is always a reason why kids are working. It is easy to say that children can’t work in the harvest, but that I had no option because we do not have the money to send him to school.

The ‘Programme to Strengthen the Municipal Schools in the Sugar Cane Harvest’, was started in April 2007. Together with the government, UNICEF employs teachers and establishes schools to educate the children of the zafreros who live in fixed as well as in mobile camps. UNICEF also arranges levelling classes for those children who have fallen behind and psychological assistance is offered at the schools. The main obstacle to this project has been the unwillingness of teachers to work in remote schools, especially mobile ones, because this requires living in the camps. Teachers of mobile schools have to move with the harvesters whenever needed. The levelling classes are said to be doing well, but this year, because of delayed funding, they have not been as active. Workshops about labour rights and child labour were held in a total of 21 harvester camps, with over 1,300 participants, according to internal sources. The former director of LABOR, Carlos Camargo, claimed that levels of child labour in the sugar cane harvest have decreased: ‘There are about 50% fewer children in the harvest than a few years ago; people are more aware that children shouldn’t work’. In practice, however, the effect may have been less significant, as this research indicates, and few people in the camps recalled haven taken part in any workshops. LABOR and the Federation of Harvesters state that they have also visited the harvesters’ places of origin; this allowed the organisations to coordinate activities

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in the regions to raise awareness about the issue of child labour and urge parents to leave their children at home instead of taking them to the camps. The organisations claim that fewer people migrate these days because the initiation of agricultural projects in the region has decreased the need for people to participate in the sugar cane harvest. Agrarian production is said to have improved by, for example, installing an irrigation system and by planting apple and peach trees and cactus fruit plants. Despite the success of the program, the potential resource pool for recruiting migrant labour is huge and recruitment may simply be shifting to other areas. An important aspect of the LABOR project was the tripartite dialogue between sugar cane harvesters, sugar cane producers and authorities on the improvement of labour conditions for adult harvesters, in order to create an adequate environment to decrease the number of children participating in the harvest. This has lead to some agreements. For example, a harvesters’ labour contract was drafted that takes into account international agreements; a collective agreement was signed, which includes a fixed salary for the harvesters and the prohibition of child labour. In Bermejo, the ILO financed the CCIMCAT pilot project ‘Strengthening of Participative Citizenship of Rural Women’1 in 2007, and aimed to eradicate child labour by stimulating the migrant women and other poor women to generate their own income with, for example, the production of marmalade and chancaca (a sweet sauce based on unrefined sugar) and rearing chicken. The pilot project has ended, and although in some places the women continue the new activities, in other places, the women have stopped working. Doña Ruth remarked: ‘I liked it very much when they gave us chickens to breed, but it was a pity when many of them died of pest. [CCIMCAT] did give the chickens some medicine, but still many died’. Selling marmalade turned out to be difficult; according to Doña Mariana from the Porcelana camp, the women only earned about 18 Bolivianos (€1.80) each because not all the marmalade could be sold. The project would have to find sustainability and run for many years before having a significant impact on child labour. The project also organised creative workshops about children’s rights. Some children from the Porcelana camp, for example, recalled decorating sponges, which the CCIMCAT educators used to demonstrate proper hygiene behaviour. One 12-year-old boy mentioned: They explained how we should wash ourselves and then we decorated the sponges. It was fun to make them but I don’t have the sponge anymore. They also told us about child labour and that children shouldn’t work in the sugar cane harvest and that children should go to school. I liked the workshops but I also didn’t like it because there were almost only girls participating.

Financed by UNICEF, the Ministry of Labour implemented extra lessons, called aulas de apoyo, for primary school pupils in various migrant camps, during the harvest of 2007. Four educators organised classes for the pupils in different camps of the central zone in Bermejo. Some children in the Primero de Mayo camp, who

Proyecto de fortalecimiento de participación ciudadana de mujeres rurales.

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had been in the same camp the year before as well, remembered the classes. They commented that for a few months one or two women had come to the camp and that they had spent the day, doing subjects such as mathematics and art. This activity may have been the most direct way to eradicate child labour, as it offers a safe place to pass the time and to study, while their parents are working. This works particularly well for children who are still in school and who would otherwise accompany their parents to the fields on non-school days. Still, other children preferred to help their parents in the fields, especially since they had been accustomed to doing so. The aula de apuyo had to be made attractive by doing many games, drawings and sports activities so that the children wouldn’t get bored and keep coming rather than joining the rest of the neighbourhood in the plantations. During the first months of the sugar cane harvest of 2008, OASI supported the Federation of Harvesters’ negotiations for an increase in the price per tonne of harvested sugar cane. Because the plantation owners were not forthcoming, the harvesters started blockades and held demonstrations. The OASI team supported the harvesters’ actions. After some 6 weeks of actions and negotiations, an agreement was reached. The support of OASI to the Federation of Harvesters in their struggle for a better salary is an example of improving labour conditions for adults, indirectly contributing to the eradication of child labour, because better income for parents diminishes the need for their children to add to the family income.

Conclusion Children who migrate to the sugar cane regions, despite some recent improvements, live with their families in overcrowded camps with generally poor living and hygiene conditions. The conditions in which the children and adolescents work are harsh. The climate is extreme, and the work is exhausting and hazardous. Few zafreros use protective clothing during their work. Adolescents from the age of 14 onwards engage in all harvest related activities, such as burning, cutting, de-topping and (in Bermejo) loading. They work 6 days a week, cutting the sugar cane with a machete, from early in the morning until the end of the afternoon, and earn between €3 and 4 a day. All zafreros and cuartas, including the younger children, suffer from machete cuts, abrasions, blisters, heat exhaustion, insect, spider or snake bites, backaches and even broken bones. Health centres are often far away from the camps, and so wounds or other health problems are left to heal themselves. In Bermejo most of the children under 12 help their parents cut sugar cane with a machete, even if they attend school during the weekdays. Although children under 12 do not work in Santa Cruz, they nevertheless suffer from the miserable living conditions in the camps. Although most school-going children attend school near the camps, the migration is disruptive to their education. Sometimes, children are left at home with relatives, or parents stop travelling to the zafra when their children start attending school, but when parents have no such choice, they bring their young children,

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either school-going or not, with them to the camps. Some families even move to several camps during one zafra season and each time the child has to adapt to a new situation and education suffers. Participation in the zafra familiarises adolescents with earning money and they often drop out of education as a result. A majority of the adolescents do not consider further schooling an option. For many adolescent zafreros, working in the zafra marks a transition period into adulthood. Although most adolescents have finished primary school, they quickly turn to work, as their hometowns rarely offer secondary education. Different strategies have been implemented in the various sugar cane regions of Santa Cruz and Bermejo, aiming to eradicate child labour from the sector. In general, all the separate interventions have their own specific impact on the problem of child labour, and substantial progress has been made, particularly with regards to young children, but the impact on adolescents is still lacking. There is certainly not one type of intervention that would work best; a combination of complementary strategies is needed. The strategy of raising awareness about labour rights appeared to be an important one in stimulating harvesters to struggle for their own rights and understand the importance of education. The reasons for youths to participate in the sugar cane harvest vary among the different age groups, and so interventions have to be tailored to suit the needs of each group. Because school-going children work during non-school days or periods, projects to eradicate child labour among school-going children in the sector should focus on finding other pastimes for children during these periods. The most difficult group to reach directly remains the group of adolescents who work as cuartas or contracted harvesters. Because their motive to work in the harvest is economic, the alternative requires income generation as well. Despite improvements, the harvesters rarely mentioned having been part of a project to improve living and working conditions and/or projects against child labour. Projects may have been in operation, but people may not have been actively involved and they thus do not seem to recollect. Yet, the incidence of child labour seems to have decreased. To what extent the different projects actually have reduced the number of children participating in the sugar cane harvest is hard to measure, because patterns tend to change slowly and projects often lack continuity. A decrease also may have been caused by other intervening factors. As long as children continue to be present at the plantations, there is a danger of them becoming involved in child labour activities or living in an unsuitable environment. In order to make sure that the risks of such involvement are reduced, it would be better if children were not physically present in this sector at all. The following recommendations are advised: • More personnel and financial resources should be made available for inspections in the migrant camps and on the plantations. • The prohibition of child labour should be accompanied by the active exploration and implementation of alternatives for youths, such as free and vocational schooling; because adolescents work in the harvest for economic reasons, interventions

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should offer youths economic alternatives or schooling alternatives that are free of all costs, including opportunity costs. • Projects should be better coordinated, complimentary and of a long-term nature. Because interventions require awareness raising and changes of life patterns of the harvesters, their results might only become apparent after 5 years or more. • It remains important to organise awareness raising activities for the harvesters in the camps about child labour, labour rights and the importance of education, but probably more important is the provision of child-friendly facilities, particularly schools, since the presence of a school has been a crucial factor in reducing child labour.



Chapter 11

Concluding Remarks and Recommendations G.K. Lieten

The evidence from the various cases illustrates encouraging trends in terms of the worst forms of child labour, in line with the optimistic news of the ILO report The End of Child Labour Within Reach (ILO 2006a). Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala have ratified ILO Conventions 138 and 182 and have incorporated the recommendations of these Conventions in their national child labour laws. Peru and Guatemala have, in addition, compiled national lists of specific worst forms of child labour. All three countries have established national commissions for the progressive elimination of child labour. These positive trends, however, were not observed at the local level in all cases. In the research areas, thousands of children were found to still be engaged in activities that form a direct threat to their physical, mental and moral health and jeopardise their education. In some of the research sectors, there was an increase rather than a decrease in the number of children. Beyond statistics, our research took a more qualitative focus and concentrated on the micro-level. It specifically aimed to document the living and working conditions of child labourers, to explore the true reasons why children are (still) working under harmful conditions and to identify and analyse initiatives of governmental and non-governmental organisations to eliminate these worst forms of child labour. Based on our conclusions and analyses of existing projects, we propose several practical recommendations for possible interventions. These recommendations were also discussed at several workshops in the research countries, with the working children and their families, and with policy makers of governmental and non-­governmental organisations, both at regional and national levels.

G.K. Lieten () Alberdingk Thijmstraat 62, 2106 EM Heemstede, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] G.K. Lieten (ed.), Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0177-9_11, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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General Living Conditions Most of the children engaged in the worst forms of child labour, not only work, but also live in very poor conditions. They come from the poorest and most marginalised sections of society, often living in isolated conditions: in mines high up in the mountains, hidden in semi-slavery on plantations in a desert-like environment, moving with entire families to isolated plantations, working on communal land high-up in the mountains, eking out a living in city slums. The children characteristically live in one-parent households – often female-headed – in which the male adult has died, has temporarily or permanently migrated or in which parents are divorced. Or they are members of entire families on the move, seasonally migrating from far-flung places to work on the plantations or recently having moved into the cities in search of a livelihood. The marginalised conditions imply limited state monitoring and the absence of state services. The children involved with the worst forms thus often lack proper housing, live in an unhygienic and polluted environment with a high level of insecurity and delinquency, have limited access to potable water, sanitary services and good quality healthcare. Access to, and quality of, educational facilities are also a serious problem, which, by default, often leads to child labour. Few properly trained teachers are willing to work in these extreme and remote areas. In addition, a lack of quality teaching materials and infrastructure, together with overcrowded classrooms, results in inadequate education.

Worst Forms? Children and adolescents perform a wide variety of activities of which several are harmful to their health, safety and morals and can therefore be classified as a worst form of child labour. Some activities are, by nature, a direct threat to children’s health. These include activities performed in the stone quarries, mining activities related to the extraction (in mine shafts) and processing of ore (quimbaletear), working with machetes (cutting sugar cane, weeding and trimming at the coffee plantations), working on the garbage dumps and working with chemical fertilisers. There are other activities, which are not directly dangerous, but the conditions in which they are carried out determine their harmfulness. For example, work in polluted areas, in unsafe environments, without access to medical care, far away from school premises, at improper times and so forth, has a harmful impact on the child even if the work in itself is not risky and is carried out within reasonable timelimits. Because of their polluted and dangerous context all mine-related activities should of course be categorised as worst forms, but the conditions in which children work at the markets and on sugar cane and coffee plantations also present several physical dangers because of the ambient factors involved. The ambient factors need to be included when assessing the risks. Including those ambient factors in a number of cases will turn apparently ‘light work’ into a worst form of child labour. Besides the physical dangers, several activities put children at risk for psychological harm. Children often feel ashamed of their work and carry this shame, unhappiness

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and inferiority into the school premises, if they attend school. Several of the working activities were also found to have serious consequences for school attendance: many of the young children in the worst forms of child labour are more likely to skip a day of school, perform below their abilities or neglect their homework. This is mostly due to the fact that they are tired from working before and after school hours. Most working adolescents work full time and quit school altogether. Particularly in sectors involving migrant labour (sugar cane and coffee plantations), many young children were found not attending school at all. In all such cases, the children are disadvantaged; they generally perform much worse in school and will be disadvantaged for the rest of their lives. Child labour and equal chances in education are incompatible. Many activities are structured by age and gender. Generally, the older adolescent boys are most involved in hazardous activities (for example, heavy work in mines, working as porters in the markets and working with machetes). Girls mainly perform assisting tasks such as cooking, serving food and cleaning. Sometimes these activities can be classified as worst forms because of the long hours and unprotected circumstances in which they are carried out. Young children performing work that is hazardous by nature were mostly found in the quarrying sector and in the recycling of waste material. In other cases, they become worst forms because of the ambient and collateral factors. For example, a young girl, who together with her brother, sells vegetables at the fruit market from 7 a.m. until 11 a.m. and then attends school, may not be directly classified as a child labourer: she does light work in a relatively safe environment. However, it becomes a worst form of child labour if one includes the ambient factors (getting up very early in the morning and trekking to the market through the dark and dangerous by-lanes of the city slums) and the collateral factors (feeling ashamed and tired in school). In defining the worst forms of child labour, it is useful to include the ambient and collateral factors.

Reasons for Children to Work There are several reasons why children are engaged in the worst forms of child labour, but in general there is a strong correlation between economic development of a country and child labour and between household poverty and child labour. Poverty is a multiple concept, and poor households differ from rich households in many ways. They also differ from other poor households. Thus, although poverty to a high degree accounts for the continuation of child labour, particularly its worst forms, the specific conditions of the household (economic deprivation, spatial distance from schools and good work opportunities, low literacy, numerous children, diseases and mortality) help to trigger the decision to enter the labour market. The non-availability of freely accessible and child-friendly education is an important element in the continuation of child labour. The customisation to the work culture rather than to the school culture is an additional reason, which has been insufficiently paid attention to. It is often found that parents (particularly migrants) take their children with them to work. Many families migrating to the sugar cane and coffee plantations do not want to leave their children behind at home. Eventually, since they are accompanying the working parents and since the

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work often is piecework, children start assisting them in the fields. That also happens when the school-going children accompany their working parents to the site during the weekends. It customises them to the labour environment and lowers the threshold to effective participation, even if it is limited to the weekends for the time being: work rather than school becomes the natural habitat. Some children and adolescents work because of an absence of accessible and good quality education, but many work for mere survival. They are engaged in the only income generating activities available in their region, usually together with the parents, or, when one of the parents has migrated or is incapable of working, instead of the parents. Unfortunately, this work is often hazardous in nature, or is performed under dangerous conditions. Hazardous activities pay better than other, safer, options and earning a better income in combination with scant knowledge and assessment of the possible dangers attracts young children and adolescents. The physical dangers of working in these sectors indeed are not always known by the workers or are not taken seriously. It is often maintained that work is part of traditional childhood, particularly in Andean culture. Cultural explanations are difficult to dismiss for the simple reason that the concept of ‘culture’ is difficult to delineate. The concept often includes ways of behaviour, but ways of behaviour are usually circumscribed by the circumstances one is in and the freedom of choice one has, given the structural constraints. Usually, culture as a pattern of behaviour is confused with culture as a pattern for behaviour. The underlying motives and deliberations (the pattern for behaviour) are often deduced from the actual behaviour and are then used as an explanation for behaviour. For example, Pacherres (2003:186) argues that the factors explaining child labour are basically of an economic character, but that the migratory status of their parents plays an additional role, as well as ‘their view on diligence, their work ethic, and discipline as a cultural value and pattern inherent in Andean migrants.’ Anaclaudia Fassa et al. (2010:255) also argue: The role of social and cultural values in sustaining children’s work is beginning to be recognized in the child labour literature, in policy and in practice. … In some communities, work is an integral part of community identity. In such circumstances, any challenge to the continuation of child labour may be regarded as a challenge to that identity.

Empirical evidence in the case studies has not confirmed the continuing hold of the ‘traditional value system.’ It is true that representatives of the indigenous ‘cultures’ may refer to traditional patterns and traditional values as an initial justification of why the children work, but upon further questioning they all wished that their children could avail of the modern schooling system and not need to work. Our material has indicated that the poor people cannot make autonomous decisions, and that the decisions were not so much influenced by adherence to the traditional culture as by economic necessities. Families that moved from the upland to the plantations in the lowland and who took their children along – children who in the process also worked – did so because they did not have other options for survival, and not because traditional culture expected the children to work. Although some such work was traditional (e.g., children getting up early in the morning and looking after the herd) parents and children realised that times were changing and that ideally

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children should have a proper education and prepare themselves for a future in the modernising society rather than maintaining the patterns of the past. Economic reasons were experienced as fundamental to the phenomena of child labour. In some of the communities, certain traditional norms and beliefs do play more of a role. In rural areas, such as the Andean Altiplano, ‘work’ (as opposed to labour) is seen as an activity that integrates children into the community and educates them about prevailing social customs. It should be added, however, that such work usually applies to light activities and not to the harmful activities. This generally occurs in rural contexts where children are expected to participate in light agricultural activities. It is the way in which children are socialised and it is possibly not so much ‘cultural’ as economic: the mode of production is based on family work and children tend to progressively take on more and more responsibilities. However, as people migrate for work, local customs of helping the family are transferred to labour conditions where labour exploitation takes place and a child thus sells its labour power under non-traditional conditions. Empirical evidence does not allow us to conclude that this was because parents and children preferred to stick to their Andean identity, but that the circumstances constrained them in their freedom of choice. The local ideas about permissible work and harmful child labour were found to be more or less in tune with the ILO norms, but, because of dire economic circumstances or because of a failing school system, could not always be implemented. The lessons for policy are important. If poverty is the basic cause of child labour, mitigating the worst effects of poverty would necessarily be part of the solution. On the other hand, if culture is considered as the cause, working on changing consciousness and introducing a new normative understanding would require foremost attention. If on the demand side, capitalist entrepreneurs are bent on employing as young and cheap a workforce as possible, stringent legislation and a labour inspection system are the solution (Lieten 2009).

Strategies and Recommendations In the countries concerned, legislation has been in place and a list of worst forms has been accepted or is in the process of being accepted. But since the government machinery in many countries has failed to implement its own legislation, it is often suggested that legislation is not an important issue. That, however, would the last conclusion which one should draw. The first and foremost requirement while dealing with child labour is the enactment of legislation and the introduction of a list of hazardous labour. It provides a frame of references, a standard to be implemented and around which all social actors can set policy targets. The difficulties in enforcing the legislation do not constitute an argument against the introduction of legislation on child labour and on the worst forms of child labour in particular. It may be helpful to remember that legislation, which in the developed world had been introduced gradually, most of the time, was more or less

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in line with the emerging reality and thus could be implemented. It codified what was happening in terms of social development anyway. Legislation in developing countries still has a normative function, rather than a codifying function: the legislation establishes new norms and calls upon the state to use the legislative machinery as an instrument for changing social reality. Legislation, rather than being in tune with social and economic developments, gives direction to those developments. But because of poverty, poor educational infrastructure and a weak government machinery to enforce implementation, laws frequently have been disregarded and traditional practices have continued. This should not lead to defeatism and accept traditional ways of childhood as a thing to be respected. Measures to reduce poverty (or rather to reduce deprivation and social vulnerability), to get the children into school through good quality education and material incentives, and to add to the stability and transparency of state governance, are among the requirements for a holistic approach. This has been stated policy for many decades. International organisations, national governments and non-governmental organisations have implemented numerous programmes along these lines and will continue to do so. The success of such policy is difficult to measure though. It indeed has been difficult to filter out the effects of a particular intervention because wider social, political and economic developments may have a deeper and more enduring effect than a project intervention as such. Yet, based on our analysis of these initiatives, we offer the following general conclusions and specific recommendations: • Improving school attendance, improving access, offering good quality education and monitoring the attendance of the working children helps to reduce the number of hours that children work. Conditional cash transfer programmes and midday-meal schemes elsewhere have been shown to work and should be duplicated. It is important to state that the focus should not be on primary education alone. As more adolescents are working in worst forms, it is essential to also focus on improving access to secondary education. The 12–14 age group, when children move into secondary education, is crucial in the quest for a child-labour free world. The commencement of child labour usually takes place around this age, and postponing this by facilitating secondary school enrolment should be the strategy to focus on. Child rights education for children and parents helps because, as some cases have shown, parents are expected to not send their children to work anymore once they fully realise the negative impact of missing out on education. The assumption is that parents already know. Educating parents and children on the dangers of child labour, therefore, has not always been cost-effective. Children are usually prepared to go to school, and parents by and large have come to realise that school is the best place for their child to be, but material circumstances have often put a spanner in the wheels. Out of necessity children may have to continue working in a worst form of labour, even if they attend school. The lesson is that strategies directed at education should be combined with other strategies that solve other structural reasons why children keep working in the worst forms.

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• Many young children become involved in the worst forms because their parents have no alternative child care options, and so choose to take the children with them to the worksite. Being there, children may do a bit of work themselves, but, more importantly, they realise at a young age that working is their life, their present and their future. They gradually become accustomed to work as a life fulfilment. It is what they see the parents doing and what they construct as their own culture. In these cases, offering free day-care can help reduce the number of children becoming involved in the worst forms. Day-centres have been successful in reducing child labour in the mines in Potosí, Bolivia, and in the recycling sector in Carabayllo, Lima. In Santa Filomena, Peru, the women organised a child care system themselves. They work every other day and take care of each other’s children rather than taking them to work. Providing sport and game facilities or homework facilities would go a long way to allow freedom of movement for parents, knowing that their children are provided for during afterschool hours and on weekends. • Mechanising the sectors in which children work has been successful in some cases. Mechanisation replaces manual labour and results in an increase of production and therefore of income, reducing the need for child labour. This has been the case in the Santa Filomena mine, where a machine (a winch) was installed to get the ore out of the mine. Mechanisation of the sector also deserves recommendation for quarrying in Peru and Guatemala, where machines can be installed to produce the gravel children are now making. Also in the case of recycling on the garbage dumps in Lima, mechanisation is recommended. Here machines could clean, cut or sort different materials, which would increase the production and reduce the direct contact that labourers have with harmful materials. There are certain conditions which have to be taken into account before mechanisation of a sector can be successful: the communities have to be relatively small and well organised if they are going to successfully share income and responsibility for the maintenance of the machines. • Many children are involved in the worst forms because of the non-availability of safe, well-paid and stable jobs for parents. Generating alternative employment and decent employment deserves recommendation. This of course is a very complex issue. It has to do with overall development and with a more equitable distribution of the profits and income. As several worst forms sectors concern migrant labour, income generating jobs should be primarily created in the areas of origin, but the problem in those areas is the lack of economic dynamism, which causes small initiatives to falter. Some projects implemented with this objective have seen successes. In the San Marcos Highland in Guatemala, parents received courses and practical means to develop alternative income generating activities (bakeries, rabbit farms, and tailoring). The higher incomes decreased the necessity to migrate to the coffee plantations with their children. In Santa Filomena and Carabayllo, a selected group of women received training and information about the management of a business. Afterwards, micro credits were provided, and administered by the organisation of the women themselves, to set up small stores. Such projects, however, are not always the solution and

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many such projects may not have delivered the desired outcome. It was only successful when the alternative jobs created took the local demands into account and when the people received continued guidance and assistance in the process. Such projects may not be cost-effective. • A relatively successful strategy to end the worst forms of child labour has been the separation of the working and living areas. For example, in Pomarrosal in Guatemala, moving the village away from the worksite helped to reduce child labour. The distance to the place where they used to crush stones is now considered too far for the parents to bring children along. Such an approach is also being realised in Santa Filomena and appears promising. In this way, children are moved away from the often dangerous and unhealthy work environment, and are no longer in touch with the activities in the sector on a daily basis. However, moving entire villages can only be done in cases where it concerns small communities. One also has to take into account that it is not a structural solution to the poverty many of these families live in, and therefore child labour may simply move from one sector to another. Nevertheless, from the perspective of a child, it is better to live near a school than near the work site. • Governmental labour inspection has been effective in some cases. In the mining town of Llallagua, for example, age inspections are carried out by the Mining Federation with the result that very few children or adolescents can be found working inside the mine shafts. However, the state only performs such inspections for a few sectors, usually in the formal economy, especially when it is under public scrutiny. There is a shortage of inspectors, and a lack of means to effectively carry out their tasks. Designating more resources, if necessary with international support, and putting more emphasis on these controls is recommended. However, it is important to note that this strategy of control must be combined with strategies to tackle the structural reasons why children are working in the worst forms. Alternatives need to be provided. • Local self-organisation of workers can contribute to improving the situation of children and adolescents working in the worst forms. Through organisation and collective bargaining, the young children have successfully been removed from the work floor and adolescents have been able to improve the conditions of their work. Improvements have been made to include safety measures, working hours, age limits and compulsory schooling, as seen, for example, in the fruit market in Lima. In Llallagua, Bolivia, adolescents tried to convince fellow workers to stop working inside the mine shafts and to instead opt for safer activities. In this case, the activities that adolescents were performing changed from a worst form of child labour into a regular adolescent job. One has to take into account that these strategies may be helpful to reduce numbers in the worst forms in the short run, but in the long run, this strategy does not offer a structural solution to the reasons why children and adolescents are working in the first place. Yet, unionisation may increase the income of the labouring poor and may make the implementation of measures against child labour more effective. It is a tool which many entrepreneurs may not fancy, but which may, in the end, result in a more orderly industrial climate.

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Most importantly, any and all strategies must be well-coordinated and implemented within an integrated approach, involving all local, regional, national and international actors. Many programmes to date have failed due to conflicting strategies and poor communications. Whatever the approach, in terms of overall structural changes and in terms of specific time-bound programmes, the following principles are useful starting points for a realistic policy: • An agreement has been reached on what constitutes child labour and what should be eradicated as intolerable practice; ILO conventions 138 and 182 have set the minimum standards for a child labour policy, with sufficient flexibility in concrete conditions, and rejecting those standards by either including all work done by children as child labour or by arguing that children should have the intrinsic right to work, will be counterproductive. • Interventions should be collective efforts rather than the unilateral imposition of punitive measures; the implementation of policies requires the involvement of the various stakeholders, including (local) government, workers and employers and civil society at large, and requires external material support. • Eliminating child labourers without putting in place a supportive programme will not be to the benefit of the child: the interest of the child needs to be of primary importance. • Policies should be contextualised; programmes should set targets in accordance with the prevailing socio-economic conditions and devise measures in such a way that the specific target is likely to be achieved; this concession is not related to respect for local cultures and local concepts of childhood. Legislation, schools, awareness raising programmes and community mobilisation are necessary, but they will fail, according to the ILO (1996:116), if they are not supported by a commitment and a programme of action to deal with poverty. That is the challenge: for governments of developing countries to address the needs of the poorest of their poor, and for governments of rich countries to back up their insistence on observation of universal standards with a commensurate commitment for increased resources to attack world poverty.



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Van den Berge M (2009) Rural child labour in Peru: a comparison of child labour in traditional and commercial agriculture. IREWOC, Amsterdam Voces para Latinoamérica & Sinergia por la Infancia (2009) Perfil de Niños-as y Adolescentes en Situacion de Calle (Inhaladores). Lima: Voces para Latinoamérica Volpi E (2002) Street children: promising practices and approaches. World bank Institute Working Papers (26388) Williams C (1993) Who are “street children?” A hierarchy of street use and appropriate responses. Child Abuse Negl 17:831–841 Zender Environmental (2007) Health effects of burning trash. December 2007

Index

A Abuse, 8, 25, 28, 44, 48, 52, 53, 56, 59–61, 64, 65, 74, 84, 106, 116, 122, 127, 137, 139, 155, 159, 176, 178, 188 Accidents, 28, 29, 52, 72, 74, 90–92, 109, 113, 123, 134, 200 Addiction, 23, 59, 61, 62, 64 Adolescents, 4, 23, 43, 68, 90, 106, 127, 145, 180, 191, 212 Africa, 1, 4, 9, 17 Agency, 11, 53 Agriculture, 15, 17, 19, 75, 77, 88, 91, 145–158, 162, 163, 198 Alcohol, 38, 61, 62, 84, 114, 116, 122, 127, 137, 139, 179, 191, 195 Alternative(s), 4, 15, 23, 31, 35, 53, 56, 69, 76, 78, 85, 96, 98–102, 110, 116–120, 141–144, 162, 177, 181, 184, 186, 189, 192, 208, 209, 217, 218 Anthropology, 3, 14, 45, 150 Artisanal mining, 69, 125, 128, 140, 143 Asia, 1, 4, 9, 10 Association, 24, 31, 36, 37, 39, 82, 102 Awareness, 34, 37, 38, 41, 65, 79, 98–100, 103, 118, 120, 122, 141–143, 184, 185, 188, 189, 205, 206, 208, 209, 219 B Boy, 10, 24, 48, 69, 83, 106, 129, 146, 165, 195, 213 C Campaign, 103, 141, 142, 185, 188, 189 Chemicals, 17, 155, 162, 165, 175, 212 Child labour elimination, 1, 5, 98, 99, 118, 140, 183, 184, 211

eradication, 2, 13, 16, 19, 44, 77–79, 96, 98, 100, 102, 117, 121, 123, 124, 186, 188, 207 definition, 5, 7, 8, 16, 137, 159 magnitude, 8, 9 numbers, 16, 17, 69, 118–120, 126, 129, 153, 159, 201, 205, 218 Child work, 4–6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 39, 165, 176, 189 Childcare, 7, 40, 41, 65, 119, 196 Childhood, 3, 5, 7, 8, 43, 56, 61, 76, 122, 162, 203, 214, 216, 219 Code. See Legislation Colonos, 165, 167, 172–174, 179, 188 Commercial agriculture, 151–157, 162, 163 Community, 16, 22, 32, 76, 78, 81–84, 93, 94, 97–100, 102, 103, 105, 117, 127, 141, 142, 146, 150, 151, 159, 160, 166, 170–172, 177–182, 185–188, 201, 202, 214, 215, 219 Contractor, 81, 126, 142, 143, 151, 153, 156, 161, 173, 193, 197, 199, 201 Convention, 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 27, 64, 69, 74, 102, 112, 125, 133, 143, 145, 187, 211, 219 Countryside, 13–15, 18, 22, 35, 40, 41, 46, 47, 53–55, 131, 145, 160, 182 CRC, 15, 18, 145 Crime (criminal), 2, 4, 19, 32, 58, 62, 68, 97, 127, 138, 139. See also Delinquency Cuarta, 191, 194–197, 199, 200, 202–204, 207, 208 Culture, 3, 5, 53, 58, 65, 111, 117, 182, 213–215, 217, 219 Customs, 5 D Debt, 76, 88, 92, 96, 99, 191, 192 Delinquency, 24, 33, 34, 57, 61, 126, 138, 212

G.K. Lieten (ed.), Hazardous Child Labour in Latin America, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0177-9, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

227

228 Developing countries, 7, 10, 216, 219 Discrimination, 58, 59, 61, 64 Disease, 23, 29, 84, 85, 113, 114, 117, 121, 168, 169, 176, 188, 194, 195, 213 Domestic work/chores/tasks, 77, 148–150, 162 Drugs, 1, 4, 19, 24, 28, 32, 33, 38, 50, 52, 54, 57–62, 64, 65 E Economically active, 7, 9–11, 16, 18, 21, 75 Economy (economic), 2, 31, 46, 67, 82, 116, 142, 157, 165, 201, 213 Education primary, 1, 14, 18, 83, 162, 180, 184, 185, 216 secondary, 18, 35, 85, 116, 127, 162, 167, 182, 208, 216 rural, 159, 162, 184, Employers, 8, 13, 78, 118, 139, 140, 189, 191, 192, 219 Employment, 7–10, 12, 21, 54, 101, 111, 116, 123, 133, 137, 144, 182, 217 Erradicacionistas, 3, 5 Exhaustion, 28, 31, 114, 115, 207 Export, 146, 151–153, 161, 193 F Families broken, 23, 40, 48, 106, 157 dysfunctional, 23, 43 large, 22, 33, 40, 42 Family values, 116 Farming, 69, 75, 145, 146 Fees, 52, 78, 156, 157, 202 Female-headed families, 89 Female-headed household, 73, 97, 122, 212 Fertilisers, 162, 170, 212 Fincas. See Plantation G Garbage, 17, 22, 23, 25–27, 29, 30, 36, 40, 78, 127, 141, 147, 212, 217 Gender, 42, 48, 72, 83, 88, 110, 150, 153, 168, 213 Girl, 10, 24, 48, 68, 83, 106, 127, 146, 167, 196, 213 Globalization, 5 Government, 1, 3, 8, 13, 16, 18, 19, 36, 42, 68, 71, 76–79, 87, 101, 105, 119, 122, 123, 145, 153, 186, 189, 205, 215, 216, 219

Index H Harm(ful), 2, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 29, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40–43, 61, 70, 74, 91, 94, 97, 133, 140, 144, 162, 175–178, 185, 188, 189, 211, 212, 215, 217 Harvest, 17, 76, 88, 126, 146, 165, 191 Hazardous work, 1, 10, 12, 18, 130 Health, 1, 23, 44, 70, 85, 107, 128, 151, 165, 192, 211 Health care, 33, 37, 38, 73, 77, 78, 85, 96, 133, 141, 147, 151, 168, 169, 212 Heavy loads, 17, 27, 28, 87, 113, 135, 136, 165, 170, 176, 187, 188 Helping (ayudo), 137 Herding, 145, 147, 148, 150, 162 Highland, 15, 17, 47, 81, 146, 150, 165, 172, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 191, 217 HIV/AIDS, 64 Holidays non-school days, 196, 207, 208 weekends, 26, 31, 34, 51, 53, 72, 89, 90, 94, 97, 101, 109, 111, 116, 131, 132, 134, 146, 152, 156, 157, 162, 170, 173, 196, 201, 203, 214, 217 Household work. See Domestic work/chores/ tasks Hygiene, 15, 23, 29, 63, 169, 200, 206, 207 I IFEJANT, 5 Illegal, 4, 12, 23, 30, 57, 58, 63, 127, 145 Illness, 28, 67, 76, 107, 116, 119, 157, 168, 188, 200 ILO Convention 138, 4, 7, 10, 15, 18, 69, 145, 187, 211, 219 Convention 182, 1, 4, 8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 27, 64, 74, 112 Income, 6, 22, 43, 68, 82, 105, 131, 146, 168, 192, 214 Indigenous, 5, 17–19, 45, 146, 149, 159, 165, 169, 191, 214 Industrial revolution, 2 Inequality, 168 Infection, 23, 29, 63, 64, 73, 74, 84, 92, 121, 128, 168, 169, 176, 195, 200 Informal, 12, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 31, 36, 39–40, 46, 55, 56, 64, 75, 81, 92, 131, 133, 153, 179 Informal sector, 18, 21, 81 Infrastructure, 100, 123, 128, 141, 192, 212, 216

Index Ingenio, 107, 109, 111–113, 115–117, 120–122, 191, 195 Injury, 29, 63, 73, 92, 94, 113, 135, 193, 199, 205 Inspection (inspector), 18, 19, 153, 161, 163, 218 Intervention, 13, 14, 36–39, 41, 42, 95, 100, 101, 106, 120, 140–144, 158–161, 186, 189, 204, 208, 209, 211, 216, 219 IPEC, 3, 16–18, 98, 102, 118, 128, 139–141, 175, 184 K Kindergarten, 127, 146, 147, L Labour, 137 Labour union, 5, 159, 161, 172, 189 Latin America, 1–5, 8–13, 67, 69, 125 Laws. See Legislation Legislation, 1, 2, 8, 27, 36, 39, 69, 94, 102, 118, 123, 133, 143, 145, 160, 163, 175, 192, 211, 215, 216, 219 Literacy, 2, 17, 18, 83, 85, 95, 119, 168 Living conditions, 15, 17, 21–23, 33, 39, 41, 46, 55, 65, 82, 85, 99, 106, 107, 119, 126, 127, 132, 133, 165–167, 174–178, 188, 193, 200, 207, 211 M Machete, 170–172, 175, 176, 195, 199, 200, 207, 212, 213 Malnutrition (malnourishment), 128, 200 Mechanisation, 78, 81, 123, 142, 144, 162, 191, 195, 196, 204, 217 Mercury, 127, 130–133, 136, 144 Micro-credit, 37, 38, 41, 144 Migrant (migration), 22, 35, 41, 45, 46, 55, 67, 75, 76, 105, 127, 142, 146, 151, 157, 159, 160, 179, 207 Millennium development goals (MDG), 1, 14 Minimum age, 3, 4, 7, 10, 15, 109 Modern values, 158 MOLNAT (MOLACNATS), 4 N NGO, 13, 17, 37, 41, 42, 67, 69, 71, 74, 76–78, 98–101, 106, 107, 113, 116, 118–123, 140, 141, 159, 186, 189, 191

229 O One-parent family. See Female-headed household Orphan, 41, 144 Ownership, 139, 143 P Parents, 2, 22, 44, 68, 84, 106, 127, 146, 165, 194, 212 Pension(ista), 153, 156, 172, 197, 199 Plantation, 14, 76, 81, 145, 165, 192, 193, 196, 198–200, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211–214, 217 Poisoning, 30 Police, 32, 45, 50, 51, 58–61, 63, 65, 77, 87, 127, 146, 147 Policy, 4, 12–14, 41, 43, 45, 51, 59, 65, 105, 120, 183, 189, 211, 214–216, 219 Pollution, 23, 24, 42, 52, 63, 67, 140 Poverty, 2, 15, 16, 18, 21, 35, 37–39, 46, 48, 53, 55, 56, 63, 67–69, 79, 81, 84, 95, 96, 116, 120, 125, 134, 137, 138, 151, 156, 157, 160, 163, 168, 179, 182, 185, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219 Privatisation, 105 Production chain, 86–88, 126, 139, 143, 144, 169, Prostitution, 1, 4, 19, 24, 49, 52, 58, 59, 64, 68, 79, 127, 131 Protagonism, 5 Psychological, 23, 31, 61, 63–65, 148, 174, 205, 212 Q Quarry, 72–74, 76, 82, 88, 102 R Recreation, 27, 28, 127 Regulacionista, 3, 5, 36, 160 Rights of the child, 2, 3, 7, 15, 145 Rural, 14–18, 32, 35, 40–42, 45, 54, 55, 68, 69, 105, 106, 119, 145–147, 149, 150, 159, 160, 162, 184, 206, 215, S Safety, 1, 33, 36, 39, 40, 50, 52, 59, 70, 74, 92, 128, 132, 137, 140, 143, 162, 212, 218 Salary, 112, 195, 197, 198, 201, 206, 207 Save the Children, 5

230 Scholarship, 19, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 98, 100, 102, 103, 119, 184, 185, 188, 189 School-going age, 128, 191, 201, 203 Self-subsistence, 95, 146 Sibling, 22, 55, 68, 84, 87, 88, 92, 122, 148, 157, 171, 172 Sickness, 115, 154, 157, 177, 193 Sierra. See Highland SIMPOC, 7 Single mother. See Female-headed families Slums, 45, 212, 213 Small trade (small business), 101, 102, 168 Socialisation, 6, 45, 52, 117, 143, 149, 180 Street child street-living children, 43–46, 48, 52, 56, 59, 61–64, street-working children, 44, 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 61 Survival, 2, 43, 46, 96, 125, 137, 144, 192, 214 Sustainability, 37, 42, 100, 118, 120, 121, 141, 144, 185, 186, 206 System of National Accounts (SNA), 7–9 T Teacher, 23, 26, 30, 34, 74, 76, 83–85, 93, 94, 96–98, 100, 101, 106, 115, 120, 122, 128, 141, 144, 146, 149, 156, 159, 160, 167, 169, 177–182, 184, 185, 194, 201, 202, 205, 215 Tourism (tourists), 45, 46, 49, 55–58, 103, 110, 146 Toxic, 16, 29, 112, 114, 121, 140 Trabajo. See Labour Trade unions. See Labour union Tradition, 41, 83, 102, 105, 109, 144, 182, 183, 188 Traditional agriculture, 15, 145–149, 156, 162 Tripartite, 8, 206

Index Urban, 3, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 36, 41, 42, 45, 145, 146, 159 V Values, 7, 34, 37, 43, 97, 105, 116, 117, 149, 158, 159, 214 Village, 35, 55, 69, 71, 74–76, 82, 84, 87, 90, 100, 126–128, 130–136, 138–144, 146, 147, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166–169, 173, 187, 188, 202, 218 Violence, 23, 24, 28, 38, 45, 52, 59–61, 127, 159, 180 Vulnerable (vulnerability), 59, 216 W Wage labour, 147, 151, 160 Waste, 14, 21–24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37–40, 49, 63, 98, 167, 213 Weekends, 26, 31, 34, 51, 53, 65, 72, 86, 89, 90, 94, 97, 101, 109, 111, 116, 130–132, 134, 138, 146, 152, 156, 157, 162, 166, 170, 173, 180, 196, 201, 203, 214, 217 Western Europe, 2 Working conditions, 2, 3, 15, 17, 23, 33, 36, 38–40, 42, 44, 52, 59, 64, 65, 78, 79, 92, 113, 117, 119, 141, 160–162, 175, 176, 189, 208, 211 Working hours, 16, 25, 27, 31, 37, 40, 79, 88, 89, 91, 101, 111, 120, 132, 155, 173, 218 Workshop, 37, 38, 41, 78, 98, 100, 119, 120, 159, 184, 205, 206, 211 World Bank, 8, 11, 16 Worst forms (of child labour), 1, 33, 64, 68, 94, 113, 140, 165, 211 Y Youth. See Adolescents

U Unconditional worst forms, 1, 12 UNICEF, 7, 8, 11, 16, 18, 19, 46, 191, 193, 205, 206 United States, 2, 117, 156, 181

Z Zafrero (zafra), 19, 191–195, 198, 200–203, 207, 208