One of the less noticed special days, the World Day Against Child Labour, is celebrated on 12 June. Most Australians will associate child labour with past times and distant places: with Dickensian chimney sweeps and coal miners and with children sold into slavery on other continents.
Some may also be ruefully reminded of their attempts at domestic strike breaking and negotiating with their children to help with the washing up. Either way it is not one of Australia's greatest problems. But it does encourage musing about when child labour is wrong, and what this may say about adult work.
Even in impoverished nations children's work is not uniformly bad. Two acquaintances come to mind.
A young woman who was trafficked for sex work in Australia was sold across the Burmese border when she was five as a domestic servant. She was on-sold to Bangkok to work in a factory when she was nine, always locked into the factory premises. At 12 she was further on-sold for sex work in Bangkok, later in Malaysia as the bloom of youth faded, and finally to Australia. Her work history is one of straightforward evil.
I also met a girl in a village of El Salvador. For generations her family had lived by making rope from cactus fibre. She was fully equipped and educated for her working life by the age of nine. Her work contributed substantially to the family income and made her a valued member of her society.
Although this form of child work may cease to support families in changing economic circumstances, and we would hope that children will receive a broader education, it cannot be simply condemned. We must ask further under what conditions children may legitimately be asked to work, and when work will be abusive.
The test of the legitimacy of children's work is whether it helps them flourish as human beings. It must help them develop into healthy, secure, sociable adults, equipped to raise a family and make a contribution to society. Work can clearly play a part in children's development. In an ideal world work can involve physical exercise, encourage connection with other children and adults, teach skills and self-reliance, and help affirm the child's worth by the contribution they make to their family.
But to develop as adults children need more than work. Of course the balance of work, and even the definition of childhood, will differ in different cultures and economies. In Western cultures they need to have time for play and rest, for being around the house and listening casually to adults talking about things that matter to them. They need time to wonder and lots of unprofitable activity. Work forms a small part of the conditions that contribute to their development as persons.
To judge the legitimacy of children's work we must also consider the relationships involved in it. Where work is done within the family, is clearly beneficial to its welfare and is carefully measured to their own good, there is no problem. For that reason moderate domestic chores are important.
But when children are put to work in factories under conditions measured for adults, are subject to strangers charged with producing more at less expense for distant shareholders, and learn only simple repetitive skills, their work is an abuse of their humanity. It fails to respect them in their relationship to family and society.
The criteria by which we judge the morality of children's work, however, applies to adults' work as well. If judged by narrowly economic criteria, there would be no objection to children's work. It would be judged by its profitability and left to the market to set a price. As with the selling of drugs the only obstacles to engaging in it would be legal, not ethical. But once we hold that ethical considerations should govern the relationships involved in work, we must apply them to adults as well as children.
To lock children in a hot factory and require them to work for 12 hours without a break would insult their humanity. But it would also insult the humanity of adults. The damage done to children will be greater because of their development is more inchoate, but forcing adults to work under these conditions would be unacceptable for the same reasons. Work is a human activity and so needs to be measured by the extent to which it expresses and enhances the humanity of those who take part in it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.