Child Labour Issues Within International Business

Child Labour

Child labour is when children who should be in full time education are put into labour (employment) instead. This is currently in places such as Africa, India, Mexico and Brazil. They work mainly in agriculture, or manufacturing sectors of business and are employed a lot by Multinational Corporations. Some of these companies which use child labour are:

• Nike
• Gap
• Adidas
• Walmart
• Primark
• Asda

Having your company name involved in this issue is seen to give your company a bad ethical image and could result in customers not buying your goods if they knew. It may lower costs of production, but could result in legal conflicts and loss of custom for being unethical. One example of a company who were found out to be producing their goods with child labour are Nike. They produce a lot of sports clothing and equipment which is used by millions across the globe. They were found to be operating sweatshops in Pakistan and Cambodia where footballs were being made by children as young as 10 years old. This gave them a very bad public image and may have effected their level of sales. As a result of this they have changed their labour force to over 16's only officially, but we don't know if they are still using some child labour.

Some Examples of Child Labour Include:

Nike and Child Labour

Nike, the sportswear and equipment manufacturer, was famously involved with employing young children to make their footballs. They were employed by the company to stich together the footballs by hand in countries such as Pakistan and Cambodia. They faced huge problems with unhappy customers when this information came to light, and it has taken them a long time to regian their brand identity, Here is a link of Nike admitting their mistakes:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1020-01.htm

Gap Using Child Labour

The clothing retailer, Gap was found to have been using child labour for the production of their clothes. This was particularly damaging to the company becuase they had made a name for themselves as an ethical comapany who look after their workforce. This had a large impact on the Gap brand which was not seen as ethical anymore. This is a link to a news article on this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/oct/28/ethicalbusiness.india

How big is the problem?

• The International Labour Organization estimates there are 218 million working children aged between five and 17 (2006)

• 126 million are estimated to work in the worst forms of child labour -- one in every 12 of the world's five to 17 year olds (2006)

• 74 million children under 15 are in hazardous work and should be "immediately withdrawn from this work" (2006)

• 8.4 million children are in slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labour, forced recruitment for armed conflict, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities (2002)

• Girls are particularly in demand for domestic work

• Around 70 per cent of child workers carry out unpaid work for their families

The above map shows where the most common areas for child labour to exist are.

These are pictures showing some examples of child labour. They show footballs being stitched, rubbish being collected by a young boy, and another boy putting a tyre onto a wheel.