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Child Labour

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CHILD LABOUR 1.The best way to reduce child labor for multinational corporations?
Child labor offers perhaps the best example that big improvements in the workplace are always driven from pressure from within. Banning imports of products made by minors might make the people of San Francisco happy, but it has done very little to improve the lot of poor children overseas.
“There is very little evidence supporting any connection between trade and child time allocation other than through the impact of trade on the living standards of the very poor,” writes Eric V. Edmunds, an economist at Dartmouth College who directs the Child Labor Network at the Institute for the Study of Labor.

Most child laborers do not work in trade-related industries but in more backward areas of the economy — mainly in agriculture and retail trade. Some 300,000 children weave carpets in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, often for export. But this number pales next to the 8.4 million children ages 10 to 14 in India’s work force alone.
The good news is that child labor has declined sharply. In 2008, 176.4 million children under 15 around the world held a job, about 35 million fewer than in 2000. But the main reason for that is industrialization and economic growth. Income growth is the one dynamic that we know can persuade parents to take their children out of the work force and put them in school.
Unfortunately, campaigners in the West often ignore this finding. Garment manufacturers in Bangladesh fired tens of thousands of children in the early 1990s after Senator Tom Harkin proposed banning all imports of industries in which children worked. But Unicef later reported that some had ended up in even worse jobs, as families had to make up for the lost income. A decade later, the International Labor Organization reported that 4.7 million Bangladeshi children under 15 worked, 2.6 million of

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