Why Can't We Ban Child Labor? Knee-Jerk Solutions Won't Work

June 12 was World Day Against Child Labor. This is the third and final installment in a series of articles exploring the state of child labor today.

In 1992, NBC’s Dateline broadcast images of 11-year-olds cutting garments and sewing clothes in Bangladeshi sweatshops into 14 million households. The collared shirts and pleated pants crafted by children were bound for Walmart stores across the United States.

It was the program’s highest-rated episode at the time, and the public was furious. The wheels of government, usually slow to turn, began to trundle forward. Then-Democratic Senator for Iowa Tom Harkin quickly introduced a bill to ban products made with child labor from entering the U.S. market. I’ve met with him multiple times and discussed the complicated legacy of his well-intentioned action.

The legislation died on the table. But it still had a profound effect on tens of thousands of lives.

Worried about the impact of a U.S. ban, factory owners in several countries preemptively fired the children they employed. According to a 1997 report by UNICEF, 50,000 children were dismissed by the garment industry in Bangladesh alone following the announcement of the proposed legislation.

But nothing else changed for those children. Education was still too costly or unavailable. Access to food was still a primary concern, and their families still lived in poverty. So, the children found new, often more dangerous work, breaking rocks, pulling rickshaws, hustling on street corners -- or in prostitution. Tens of thousands of children went from a bad situation to an undeniably worse one.

This tragic example helped set off a debate in development circles. At its heart is a deceptively simple question: Should we ban child labor outright? Development orthodoxy, enshrined in United Nations conventions and International Labour Organization policies going back decades, says yes. “Children shouldn’t work in fields but on dreams,” the ILO slogan says.

That point is inarguable. Child labor is a moral question, and an easy one at that. Children deserve the opportunity to grow, learn and play, no matter the circumstances they are born into. The practice must end. Except the debate isn’t over morality, but the efficacy of methods. Right and wrong have already been established, so what we need now are tactics. We all want a world where children aren't exploited. But the question remains: how do we get there?

A vocal contingent point out that the thousands of children turfed onto the street in Bangladesh is evidence that banning child labor won’t get us there. These efforts, they say, distract from the types of holistic solutions to poverty that target the root of the problem. Child labor is just one symptom, they say. It’s likely that both sides of the debate are right.

We need to get kids out of mines, off the streets and free from factories. We need to end exploitation, pain, suffering and hopelessness. We absolutely need to ban the worst forms of child labor. But any ban must offer alternatives: new sources of income for parents, services for families, innovative farming techniques to ensure food security and accessible schools for children. It must be paired with awareness-raising campaigns to change cultural attitudes, especially when it comes to young girls and domestic work. And it must be met with an equal commitment from Western governments, corporations and nonprofits not to cut and run, but to double down on responsible, sustainable growth.

That’s what the 1992 U.S. ban got wrong. Designed with the best of intentions, it ignored the second part of the equation. It succeeded only in making consumers in the Global North feel better. That feeling came tied to a missed opportunity for real solutions.

This is an unfortunate pattern. Every few years, there’s a crescendo of moral outrage as a story breaks about exploitative labor practices. A boycott ensues, and we feel like we’ve done our part by not shopping from the brands that have been exposed. But the grinding poverty that forces children to work continues unabated. We opt out of the consumer cycle while children remain stuck.

The children captured by Dateline cameras in Bangladesh were working not because they wanted to but because they had to. In our quest to help them, we went for a singular, knee-jerk reaction, laying all of our hope on one piece of legislation. Instead of deploying tactics that would fundamentally change children’s lives, working with local governments to regulate the industry and ensuring that labor doesn’t prevent education, we relegated the already-vulnerable children even further onto the margins, forcing them to fend for themselves. We cut and run, leaving 50,000 children turfed onto the street.

Study after study after study shows that if the only work available to the world’s most desperate children is dangerous, that is the work they will do. That is why we need to race to end the practice of child labor while protecting the most vulnerable children who are susceptible.

The ban had the right idea with the right motivation, but alone, it was the wrong tactic. It wasn’t enough.

My brother, Marc, and I founded WE Charity in 1995 with the goal of freeing enslaved children, and I have seen remarkable progress. There are 110 million fewer child laborers in the world today than when we started nearly 25 years ago. We hope this trend will continue as we gain a better understanding of the hurdles and institute holistic solutions geared toward ending extreme poverty that makes child labor a last resort.

We can end child labor in our lifetime, but it will take both approaches. A ban without the necessary alternatives is naïve, and programs that address poverty while ignoring the ongoing reality of child labor are short-sighted. We can do better. Children around the world are counting on it.

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