The AFT and Child Labor

In too many places around the globe, children are making rugs, sewing clothes, mining minerals and tending crops rather than learning to read and write and to add and subtract.  Tens of millions of children work in foul and dangerous workplaces.  In Columbia, they mine coal.  In Egypt, they harvest crops.  In Pakistan, they sew the soccer balls that sell for $50 in the sporting goods stores in America’s malls.

While making bricks, they breathe dangerous quartz dust, which leads to tuberculosis and silicosis.  While making rugs, they develop spinal deformities from crouching at their looms.  While making fireworks, they risk the loss of limbs and death from explosion.

Even under the best of circumstances, these children are being denied the only thing that can give them a future with hopes and dreams -- an education.   The American Federation of Teachers believes that it is not too much to give every child, wherever they live, the right to an education.

AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese serves as co-chair of the Child Labor Coalition, a national group of more than 40 organizations, representing consumers, labor unions, educators, human rights and labor rights groups, child advocacy groups, and religious and women’s groups. In addition, the AFT works with organizations such as the AFL-CIO, Education International, Public Services International, the Global Campaign for Education and other allies to bring an end to the scandal of child labor and ensure that every child, everywhere in the world, is in school.

Even in the United States, child labor continues to be a problem.  Current U.S. law allows children as young as 10 to legally work in commercial agriculture, while children of the same age are prohibited from working in nearly all other industries (with only a few exceptions such as delivering newspapers). An estimated 400,000 to 500,000 children work in America agriculture, often for long hours.  Agriculture comprises 40 percent of child-worker fatalities in the United States.

Every year, 230,000 American teens are injured in the workplace and every five days, a teenager dies on the job.  We are concerned about inadequate enforcement of child labor laws, outdated regulations on hazardous occupations and machinery, and continued exposure of young farm workers to dangerous levels of pesticides.  The AFT supports the Youth Worker Protection Act, sponsored by Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA), which would serve as a comprehensive revision of federal child labor law and strengthen workplace protections for teens.

For more information on child labor, follow the following links:

• General information on why ending child labor should be a priority.
• Resolutions on Child Labor passed by the AFT.
• Read the Resolution 182 of the International Labor
  Organization on the worst forms of child labor.
• Read other international agreements on child labor.
• A list of books on the child labor issue;
• Curriculum modules on issues such as child labor, child trafficking and child soldiers;
• AFT child labor news.