> Munira, 15, is one of those children. [...] Last year, her family harvested only one bag of decent-quality cocoa. A 140-pound bag of the product fetches only about $115.
Sounds like "child labor" is downstream of the actual problem.
Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.
If (as the article states) the total value of the cocoa that Murina's entire family managed to harvest, in an entire year, was $115 - that sounds like destitute, desperate poverty to me. If actually living in such circumstances, ~all humans put their kids to work, and lie as needed to survive.
And if the "child labor certification" inspectors you send are anything resembling decent human beings, then they will send back endless lies in their reports, saying "no child labor here" - because they prefer lying to seeing yet more farm family members die of starvation, because the families could not afford luxuries like food.
Yeah, exactly. Under these types of conditions most kids will be starving and living in dangerous conditions. Not working doesn't mean they get to go to school or to a playground, it means their family is even more starving.
I would agree with this sentiment if they this was voluntary labor. Others have pointed out that trafficking, beatings, and forced labor are also components.
Reaction: If I read that $Company's supply chain features trafficked / beaten / forced labor, then I'll be reaching for the big red "REJECT" stamp before I even get to the part about the ages of the victims.
In Europe and the US, it wasn't too long ago either when families could only afford to send some of their children to school. Others had to work from a very early age to support the family. If you ban child labor without offering anything to supplement the lost income, then you're just harming them more.
I think it would be better to frame the issue as why so little of the profit made from their work reaches them. It's insane to see cocoa farmers so poor that they've never tasted chocolate, as can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0
If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sacrificing their children to increase labor availability.
>If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages.
Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids not working.
Why are the families starving? Is the only option in that area growing cocoa for export to the West? Why can't those people work for themselves, to grow their own food, to feed themselves?
Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it?
There seems to be a very obvious economic solution somewhere between 'grow cocoa for other people for a pittance' and 'starve'. These people are poor, not helpless.
Without knowing too much about Ghana specifically, I have been to third world countries and seen some of the conditions that prevent an economy from flourishing. It is usually a lack of property rights altogether (autocratic governments that take from individuals at will, which you can only avoid by being too small to cut down), deep corruption in the government that basically runs on bribes (whereby the highest bidders thrive), endless violence or war preventing an area from being able to benefit from long-term investment (either public or private), a broken currency system, a broken or nonexistent legal system to settle property disputes. A lack of skilled labor in the country itself, due to brain drain, war, and nonexistent infrastructure.
Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch!
(I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)
They're only "better off" if there's better things for those children to be doing. If schools are not available, then what? If there's no adults available to supervise the children (because they're doing labor themselves), then what?
For most of human history, child labor was common practice. It's purely a first world, modern thing that you can truly dial back child labor.
This. You can literally read the history of China since the 1990s and witness this exact phenomenon! Child labor goes down, wages go up, adult employment goes up, poverty goes down...
No, it's the other way around: wages go up, then child labor goes down. Also, China is not a great example as it had a One Child policy for most of the last 50 years. In Ghana, for example, there is an average of 4 children per woman.
Yes thank you good lord. IDK if it's the ritual contrarianism or what but HN consensus is extremely tolerant of or even flat out pro- child labor. Unreal.
Another point of view - road to hell is paved with good intentions. Policies pushed by idealists often hurt the people they are supposed to help. Even policies pushed by cynics often have unforeseen second order effects that bite the people in the ass. People writing here don't share the risk of any solution going downhill with the people actually in Ghana.
A pressure on the big companies to clean up their supply chain of child labor (noble effort) - do you know which segments of Ghana laborer will be hurt and how. If you don't know (or at least have very good guesstimate) - then be prepared to be surprised unpleasantly from some of the results.
This isn't a novel point of view this is the point of view repeated over and over on HN every time this comes up, including today. I have considered it and I still think we should not have child labor!
Small-l "libertarianism" has convinced many otherwise reasonable people that if you raise wages, giant corporations with huge profit margins will elect to shut down.
Is this an issue with the price of sugar? From the video, it seems like they have already fermented the beans, turning it into some basic dark chocolate after that shouldn't be too hard especially if you're not after a smooth texture.
From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum security prison followed by often several hours of more work to do at home.
Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.
Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.
>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."
It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.
I am sorry you had such a horrible experience at school. I’m not denying that what you say can happen, but for contrast, my 7yo son enjoys his school greatly and even misses it during holidays.
Is there something to suggest that school was a horrible experience for him? My only takeaway is that it is work that is pushed upon children, which is undeniably true.
In a similar vein to your anecdote, and pertinent the larger topic, I greatly enjoyed harvest when I was 7 and always missed it when it was over. That's why I became a farmer in adulthood – and I still feel the same way about it. Work (even paid work) doesn't mean unenjoyable.
It's utterly wild that you would equate back-breaking manual labor with doing multiplication tables. It speaks to how very little back-breaking manual labor you've done in your life.
> Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc.
Is that not also the case for the kids in the article harvesting cocoa? According to the article, they harvested a total of 140 pounds of cocoa for the year. According to Wikipedia, a typical worker can harvest around 150-175 pounds of cocoa in one day.
Even if they are horribly inefficient compared to a typical worker, perhaps in large part because they are having fun and playing at the same time, we're still only talking a handful of days of work each year. You can only drag out the harvest for so long. What do they do the rest of the time?
So your solution to not treating children baddly is to not have children? Seems a bit strange instead of just ... you know pay people a descent wage so they don't have to put they children in arms way
As my uncouth grandfather used to say: “Wishes in one hand, shit in the other, which will fill first?” These children work because they have no choice. They are paid these wages because they can’t make more.
I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them. If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.
Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.
By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage. I’ll even help you bootstrap the direct cash transfer mechanisms via mobile payments if you have deep pockets. But that is unlikely to happen. Hope is not a strategy.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-labor ("The International Labour Organisation states in its latest World Report on Child Labour (2013) that there are around 265 million working children in the world—almost 17 per cent of the worldwide child population. According to the publicly available data discussed in more detail below, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where child labour is most prevalent.")
I am gonna venture to guess that you never really either interacted with people from those populations.
> I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them.
Let's first get this out of the way. The men don't want children at equal rate. No need for grand plan about empowering women (what ever that means beside just increasing everyone, both men and women economical outlooks) : just make contraceptive and sexual education available.
> If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.
Correlation and causation etc...etc... I might introduce you to orthodox jews, some Mormons and Muslim communities which don't really follow those models.
> By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage.
ahah yes, personal solution to systemic problems... Following this logic, we should all be silent about everything.
> Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.
I don't buy the premise and this sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Just treat people decently and don't participate in system which involve children doing back breaking jobs.
> Hope is not a strategy.
And whatever you are proposing is ? The idea that it's easier to somehow curb the population growth a whole group of nations instead of just having proper international laws to regulate child labour seems both crazy and reversed.
Polution control won't solve child labor, instead child labour, women right and polution growth will be solve by better economical outlooks. And that start by having people actually make living wages...
In the final anlysis the problem is not that deep. To paraphrase Gates, those conditions continue because the market wants it, and the public opinions doesnt particularly care. You are wellcome not to care, but to invent poorly constructed argument to make you sleep better at night.
Wikipedia suggests that a typical person can harvest 175 pounds of cocoa in one day. Costs are an unknown here, but grossing $115 for less than a day of work is more than many in the USA can achieve.
It's not clear that there is a problem. It seems the family just has a once-a-year afternoon hobby and a privileged busybody with no sense of reality got arbitrarily upset that harvest took place on a school day.
There may be some kind of problem, but the article is missing all of the details we would need to determine that. All we get is: "There is a problem! But I'm not really going to tell you what it is beyond some meaningless fluff. Instead, here is a story about a family who likes to spend time together. But know that they spent that time during school hours, so you should be outraged!"
Where? In former communist countries the workers didn't have any power after the seizing of the means of production, as now they were ruled by brutal dictatorships with powerful militaries who'd send you to the gulag for $REASON.
Hardly the envisioned "seizing the means of production" and more like "being seized for production".
Where would you see that evidence if it was nevere done? Because it can't really be done.
Because the workers themselves don't have power to seize anything. The military is the one with the power to seize stuff come a revolution because they're the ones with a lot of big guns, not the workers. But now the workers themselves become part of the things being seized, to serve the military leadership, not the workers.
Sounds like "child labor" is downstream of the actual problem.