However, throughout the world, childhood itself is under assault by new as well as historic forces. Today's child in too many parts of the world must not only cope with warfare, famine, and pestilence at an early age, but is too often denied childhood itself by being forced into labor under abusive and destructive conditions. Many millions of children around the world labor in work that is coerced, forced, bonded, enslaved or otherwise unfair in wages, injurious to health and safety, and/or obstructive of educational or moral development.1
Whereas the majority of child labor is found in informal sectors of the world's poorest economics, a growing element in global competition is the employment of children in developing country export industries making products such as glass, garments, brassware, leather goods, and hand-knotted carpets for sale on the international market. The oriental carpet industry employs one of the most abusive forms of bonded child labor involving perhaps as many as 1 million children in South Asia.2
The United Nations and the International Labor Organization have established universal principles to protect children from such abuse, including the International Covenant on the Rights of the Child and the ILO Convention No. 138 for Minimum Age for Admission to Work. These international conventions have been ratified by many countries, not including the United States.
There is growing awareness in international development agencies that child labor is not a by-product of generalized poverty, but is rooted in specific policies that disproportionately neglect or disadvantage certain populations, ethnic, caste or gender groups, and that unbalanced development policies have contributed to the exacerbation of child labor.3
We therefore call on The United Methodist Church:
1. to support public policies that include the ratification and enforcement of international labor conventions regarding child labor, affirmed by The United Methodist Church in the resolution on the "Rights of Workers," (adopted 1988) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, affirmed by The United Methodist Church in the resolution on the Ratification of Human Rights Covenants and Conventions;
2. to work to eradicate the evils of child labor through encouraging the appropriate agencies and units to join the Child Labor Coalition, a broad-based coalition of medical, welfare, religious, consumer, labor and human rights organizations in the United States, and to support such consumer initiatives as the RUGMARK campaign, initiated in India by UNICEF, the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude and others to label and market oriental carpets made without exploited child labor;
3. to support legislative and administrative measures to ban the international trafficking in goods made by child labor; and
4. to support unilateral and multilateral aid and development policies that attack the root causes of child labor, such as lack of basic education, gender and caste prejudice, and unbalanced development schemes that disadvantage certain populations.
1 Cf. A. Bequele and W.E. Myers, First things first in child labour: Eliminating work detrimental to children, ILO and UNICEF, 1995, pp.1-27.
2 U.S. Department of Labor, By the Sweat and Toil of Children, passim. 1994.
3 Pharis J. Harvey, "Where Children Work: Child Servitude in the global economy," The Christian Century, April 5,1995, pp. 362-365.
General Conference Webmaster: Susan Brumbaugh
PETS Creator: John Brawn
Petition Text: 21065-GM-NonDis-O
1996 United Methodist General Conference