Good practice in combating child labour – experiences from trade unions in Asia

Good practice in combating child labour - experiences from trade unions in Asia

The ILO's Bureau for Workers' Activities and its International Programme for the Elimination of Child labour held a three-day inter-subregional trade union seminar in Chennai, India, in early December to exchange good trade union practice in combating child labour and discuss future strategies. Representatives from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iran and Afghanistan, several IPEC and ACTRAV colleagues from Geneva and the region, and Simon Steyne from the TUC, who is the ILO Governing Body Workers' group spokesperson on child labour and ICFTU representative in the International Council of the Global March against Child Labour, shared their experiences and looked at the valuable lessons of national and local initiatives. The invited colleagues from Pakistan were denied visas by the Indian authorities (just as the Pakistan authorities had denied Indian trade union leaders visas to attend the founding congress of the Pakistan Workers' Federation in September) in a further demonstration of the barriers the two governments continue to place between cooperation of the two countries' trade unions.

Simon Steyne delivered a presentation on the benefits and challenges of building alliances against child labour internationally, nationally and locally - contrasting the great success of the social movement in Andhra Pradesh and the lack of cooperation and wasteful duplication of efforts in others sectors and locations. The ensuing discussion again highlighted the widely varying views and experiences trade unions have of working with NGOs, but did appear to cause some to reconsider their existing relationships (or lack of them) and whether principled cooperation - with NGOs which support the ILO Conventions and recognise the unique representative role of trade unions - could reap greater rewards than some current enmities.

Although the gender balance of the meeting was extremely poor, it was counterbalanced in part by the presence of several women ILO colleagues, among them Susama Varghese of Actrav, who runs a very successful project promoting organisation of rural women. Indeed the mainly male participants nonetheless demonstrated clearly that, on the ground, awareness of the needs of girl children and women workers and their own efforts at self-organisation was increasingly centre stage. A number of examples were showcased of where organising in feminised sectors of the informal economy had succeeded in diminishing child labour - for example among bidi workers, domestic servants, home workers and sex workers. That point, that a key strategy for eliminating child labour was, precisely, workers' self-organisation in the informal economy, where most child labour is to be found, so that disempowered workers could have a collective voice to deal with employers and to demand that public authorities also protected them and their children as equal citizens under the law, was the outstanding conclusion of the meeting.

Apart from the examples of existing good practice, the Indian National TUC's new perspective of building inter-sectoral trade unions in the rural areas where the overwhelming majority of the countries working people live and work, indicated a strong recognition that trade unions needed to reach out wherever workers were in a rapidly restructuring economy. It was also recognised that casualisation and mass migration from rural areas into Asia's cities was increasing the urban informal economy and therefore urban child labour, and was overloading social infrastructure and making planning very difficult. Successful organising in the informal economy, would, of course, promote greater involvement of workers' organisations in combating child labour and greater support, in the broader anti-child labour alliance, for workers' organisation's campaigns for decent work for adults.

The seminar called for further research in that area and better exchange of good practice, and for further examination of the relationship between youth employment of children and young people over the minimum age for entry into employment (in most developing countries set at 14 or 15) in non-hazardous work, child labour in hazardous work of those under 18 years of age, child labour in general and the right to organise of all workers over the minimum age for employment.

The other major area of discussion was the essential relationship between the elimination of child labour and the provision of universal, basic education: free, compulsory, accessible to all and delivered as a quality public service ensuring all children a balanced curriculum rather than education for children of the elites and short-term vocational training for the children of the poor. Almost all the participating countries were making progress, though major constraints remained. While governments increasingly recognised that development in a globalised economy was not achievable without harnessing the human potential of their nations' children, there was still insufficient political will and budget allocations were skewed in some by abhorrent levels of military expenditure. Among many things that the success of the social movement for universal education in Andhra Pradesh had shown was that if education were genuinely free and accessible, even the poorest parents would send their children to school.

There was broad agreement that those who argued that children were better off at work than in poorly resourced schools were playing into the hands of the exploiters. And while poor quality remained a huge challenge to be overcome, there was broad agreement, again demonstrated by the Andhra experience, that the more parents and children became stakeholders in public education, the more the inexorable demand for quality would grow.

The ILO is considering promoting an open internet child labour 'community portal', which would enable the widest range of organisations and individuals involved or interested in the struggle against child labour and for universal education to exchange their views and experience. Meanwhile, learning from existing trade union good practice in the struggle against child labour and using it to support greater trade union capacity everywhere must become a central focus of the ILO's active work in the field.