According to Mexico: Child labour and the perils of a lost education.” by Al Jazeera America, 2.5 million kids are working in Mexico and 870,000 of those kids are under the age of 13. The global number of children in child labor has declined by one third since 2000, from 246 million to 168 million children. More than half however, 85 million, are in hazardous work as quoted by the International Labour Organization . Asia and the Pacific still have the largest numbers of almost 78 million or 9.3% of child population, but Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region with the highest incidence of child labor (59 million, over 21%). There are 13 million (8.8%) of children in child labor in Latin America and the Caribbean and in the Middle East and North Africa there are 9.2 million (8.4%). Agriculture remains as the most important sector where child laborers are found which totals to 98 million, or 59%. Child labor is also prevalent in the United States, especially on tobacco fields in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia as cited by Human Rights Watch. Children working in these fields are susceptible to contracting ‘Green Tobacco Sickness’ which happens when workers absorb the nicotine through their skin when handling tobacco. While the long term effects of this sickness and conditions is unknown, research on smoking suggests that the effects will deal with mood disorders, problems with memory, learning, impulse control, and attention. These in combination with pesticide exposure, can lead to reproductive health problems, cancer, neurological problems, and other issues.
Child labor is a huge problem, one that has even existed in our nation’s history. We’re making progress to decrease child labor and need to continue the work.
This is a great piece of writing, its very informative and delves deep into a widespread problem that must be fixed around the world. What are some steps that countries can take to decrease the amount of child labor? Im excited to keep on reading your posts because it is something that needs to stop.
This is a great writing that gets deep into the facts behind child labor. I was wondering what your opinion on the matter is? How do you think our nation can help fix this problem? I think that stopping the support of products that use these means to produce is the main way people can team up together to get these companies to stop their means of production. Let me know what you think and if you have any other ideas about how this problem could be solved because honestly it has to start with consumers in my opinion as most business owners are mainly worried about their profit. If the way they are getting profit is by going about things this way, they probably don’t have much empathy for the workers or they would stop. But by cutting off their profit and not buying their merchandise, things could be changed because they would want to get that profit back. This is hard though because it would have to be a lot of people joining in and not all people feel the same about this topic.