Date of publication: November 4, 2010
Source: Business Standard
» Read the original article [1]
By Nayanima Basu
In what could be India’s counter-offensive to US President Barack Obama’s assault against outsourcing, a study conducted by the VV Giri National Labour Institute has said the existing labour laws in the US do not prevent children from working long hours while a large number of them are employed in hazardous jobs.
The study, whose contents have not been made public so far, was conducted at the behest of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the labour ministry. It was done to find out what the labour laws in the developed countries which often cite labour standards as a reason for blocking imports from developing countries.
The study — Status of Child Labour in the United States of America: Legal and Analytical Perspective by Helen R Sekar and Anoop K Satpathy — has said that of the 50 states in the US, only Washington has adopted child labour standards which are stringent.
On the other hand, New York, which also applies federal standards for children within 14-15 years, imposes less restrictive hours and time of work.
According to the study, to be released by the government soon, even though every state in the US has its own Child Labor Law, its implication varies from the number and type of occupations covered and the range of age to which it applies. Sometimes, they also overlap with the larger Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The laws vary in the level of protection provided to the child labour both in agricultural and non-agricultural employment.
FLSA was passed in 1938 to administer and regulate minimum wages, overtime, child labour and record keeping. “FLSA is indeed unfair to a large number of children in the United States of America to those who are toiling in the farms … As per the FLSA, for children in the age of 16 and 17 years, there is no limitation in the number of hours that they can work in a day,” the study noted.
While official data on child labour at macro level has several constraints, there is no specific data that enumerates the magnitude of child labour below 14 years as most of the published official information gives out data on children working between 16 and 19 years.
The study also cited a National Longitudinal Survey conducted in the US in 1997, where it was found out that 57 per cent of the people surveyed have worked when they were 14 years old, a large proportion of which was in the informal sector.
According to the survey estimates, children of 12 years old or more are mostly employed as baby-sitters or yard workers, which are informal in nature. It also showed that about half the American youth engage in some type of economic activity at the age of 12.
Many of the states in southern US such as Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming do not mention agriculture as an exempted occupation for employment of children under their state child labour laws.
According to the study, at present, 16 US states allow children below 16 years to work for more number of hours than stipulated as maximum by FLSA. “FLSA prohibits only some types of employment for children through its regulations and ignores the conditions of work for children in the occupations where they are permitted to work. On the whole, these standards represent an all-or-nothing approach,” the study said.
FLSA exempts children under 16 employed by their parents in various occupations except mining and manufacturing. It also excludes those children who are employed as actors, performers or in theatres, radio and television productions.
In jobs which are not considered hazardous, it has set the minimum age for employment at 14 years for agriculture and 16 years for other types of industries. A study [2] conducted in July by Washington-based International Labor Rights Forum said the ‘current US law allows children to work for long hours in hazardous job,” the study said.
According to their official estimates, around 2.3 million adolescents within the age group of 15-17 worked in all kinds of sectors in the US in 2008. According to data provided by United Farm Workers Union, at least 800,000 children are employed in agriculture, which is lower than the number of children employed in urban sweatshops.
According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics under the US Department of Labor, in 2000, the risk of fatal injuries for all agricultural workers in the age group of 15-17 was 4.4 times higher than workers of the same age group employed in other industries.
The US has also not ratified some vital international conventions related to child labour such as the ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment and Work and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.