Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

ILAB Press Release: Secretary Reich To Address World Labor Officials On Eradication Of Child Labor [06/10/1996]

For more information call: (202) 219-6373

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich Wednesday will ask representatives of the 173-member nations of the International Labor Organization (ILO) to keep millions of the world's children from working at dangerous jobs from dawn to dusk for little or no pay.

The ILO estimates that more than 73 million children under the age of 14 daily work at jobs that prevent their education and endanger their health and lives. Labor Department studies have found children working in unventilated glass factories with furnaces fired up several hundred degrees, forced into prostitution in a thriving sex tourism industry, sewing soccer balls and knotting intricate Indian carpets and being held as slaves on fishing platforms for months at a time.

Children are exploited even in industrialized nations including the U.S. where the Labor Department has only 800 inspectors to enforce labor laws covering more than 100 million workers at six million worksites.

"If we are to be measured by how we treat our children, we still have much to answer for," said Reich. "Child poverty, child slavery, the commercial sexual exploitation of children and the abuse of children in work are all problems to be solved."

Reich will propose four steps the ILO member nations can take to eradicate child labor:

• increase global public awareness of the problem;
• insist that international financial institutions such as the world Bank fully integrate the child labor issue into their decisions;
• adopt additional international laws against exploitative child labor;
• provide resources for education and law enforcement.

Reich hopes the outcome of the discussions on child labor will result in the labor ministers' call for a new ILO convention prohibiting the most exploitative forms of child labor. He will address the ministerial meeting on this issue on Wednesday, June 12. The meeting of ministers is part of the ILO's annual conference scheduled for Geneva, June 4-20.

The department has been fighting child labor for several years. Its Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) recently provided an $867,000 grant to the ILO's International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor. That grant will help support a program negotiated by the ILO, UNICEF and the Bangladesh Manufacturers and Exporters Association to remove children from garment factories and place them in school programs. It is one of five projects DOL is funding under an overall $2.1 million grant provided in its fiscal year 1995 appropriation. The other four projects are in Thailand, Africa, Brazil and the Phillippines. In addition, DOL will contribute another $1.5 million from its fiscal year 1996 appropriation for as yet unspecified child labor projects.

ILAB is also working on its third Congressionally mandated report on the use of exploitative child labor in the production of goods imported into the United States. The current project will examine efforts of U.S. companies and nongovernmental agencies to eliminate child labor in the garment industry. Efforts could include codes of conduct, product labeling, consumer information campaigns and guidelines for subcontractors. In particular, the report will identify the top 20 U.S. garment importers and the efforts, if any, those companies undertake to address the use of child labor in the garments those companies import.

The two prior reports ILAB prepared at the behest of Congress, By the Sweat and Toil of Children, volumes I and II, covered the use of child labor in manufactured and mined American imports (1994) and their use in U.S. agricultural imports and forced and bonded child labor (1995). The department has also published the proceedings of a symposium it co-sponsored on forced child prostitution (1996).

Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.