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Poverty Analysis
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G.K. Lieten
Many exercises have been done on the delineation of the causes of child
labour. In my analysis, I shall make a twofold distinction. On the one hand
I shall make a distinction between the pull process and the push process.
Economists particularly have focussed the investigation on the rational
choice process within the child labour family, an autonomous choice that
is seen to be associated with such variables as poverty and illiteracy. On
the other hand, I shall distinguish forms of child labour. In all languages,
different words exist for different types of activities in which products,
services, artefacts and mental constructs are produced. The English
language has words like labour, work, toil, occupation, employment;
Hindi has such words as shram, kam, mehnat, rozgar, mazduri, etc. An
explanation for the phenomenon of child labour, as I shall argue, will have
to start by separating categories before meaningful statistics, and
multivariate analysis based on those statistics, can be produced.
Statistical exercises, on the basis of different sets of data (for example
Cigno et al., 2001, Kannan 2001, Ramachandran and Massün 2002, Giri
National Labour Institute 2000) have established that child labour is
positively related, among other factors, with poverty, education,
agriculture, and the overall work participation ratio.
The V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, for example, has studied the
inter-district differentials in various variables that may have a correlation
with child labour. In respect of a number of states, some correlations stand
out, but they usually do not show a uniform pattern across the different
states that have been studied. There is the suggestion of an inverse
relationship between for example rural male and female literacy and child
labour and between the general development index and the incidence of
child labour. Statistics and correlation exercises work on the assumption
that all variables have been clearly defined, that these variables, in
combination or taken separately, represent the causal factors, and that the
number of observations is sufficiently large to lead to meaningful
conclusions. The three conditions are not necessarily fulfilled, and the
statistical conclusions hence apparently hang in the air. We are made to accept that in all states there is ‘a strong inverse
correlation between rural literacy rates and incidence of child labour’, and
that ‘strengthening of rural literacy programmes would lead to nearly 50
per cent decline in the incidence of child labour’ (National Labour
Institute 2000, booklet on Bihar: 2). These correlations, in a statistical
sense indeed may exist, but a quick look at the cases selected in Table 1, a
selection I should add that was done purposefully with an eye on the
outliers, informs us that there are significant differences, within states and
particularly between states.
.Poverty
The cultural explanation is not necessarily distinct from the poverty
explanation. It has often been argued that child work was essential to the
survival of the children and their families. It indeed is obvious that, by and
large, poverty is an important reason why children work. If they were not
to work, survival of the entire family could be at stake. Child labour as a
matter of fact can be beneficial to the child, not only in terms of the
preparation for the tasks of adulthood, but also in terms of direct
improvement of health condition. Since labour adds to the family income,
it will add to the nutritional intake of the young worker, and the morbidity
levels of the working child may even be lower than the levels prevailing
among comparable counterparts. With these considerations in mind, it is
not uncommon to divide child labour in four categories, from intolerable
to hazardous and neutral and ending up with varieties of child work,
which even may have a positive impact on the future adult.
Segmented Labour Market
One would imagine that the profit motive is the foremost causal factor on
the pull side. The ‘nimble finger’ usually stands out as an important factor.
It is contended that to contend that employers in certain industries prefer
the child labour hands as being more dexterous and more productive.
However, studies conducted by the ILO, for example, have argued that the
prevalence of specific skills or specific dexterity does not cut much ice. In
the industries where the argument is being used, for example in carpet
weaving, diamond polishing and sport goods stitching, adults and children
work side by side. When some of the tasks are performed exclusively by
children, the skills required are so minimal that child labour is clearly
replaceable by (male or female) adult labour. Profit margins would drop
only marginally if child labour were to be replaced by adult labour (Anker
and Barge 1998; see also Chandrashekar 1997, Sharma et al. 2001).
Under conditions of an excess supply of labour, which is usually the case
in child labour-prone areas, one could moreover expect employers to
employ adults rather than children. The downward pressure on wages,
which is bound to occur in an environment of a weak or non-existent
collective bargaining power and of an abundant supply of (adult) labour,
would ultimately lower adult wages to a level hardly above the level of
child wages. Since this has not happened, the suggestion is that adult
labourers, after all, do have a bargaining power, which keeps the wages
and the labour circumstances at somewhat higher levels.
Conclusions
For an efficient and realistic intervention in policy matters, a
differentiation needs to be made of the different categories of
disenfranchised children: the labouring child, the working-cum-schooling
child and various other disabled children who are usually referred to as
nowhere children. A clear analysis will also help us to have a better
understanding of the causes of child labour, although one should add that
causes tend to be multivariate, and that explanations need to be found in
the structure (of poverty, modes of employment, labour relations, etc.) as
well as in agency.