Underage workers in precarious jobs

A photo-story of The Daily Star published yesterday depicts the hazardous condition in which children are working in the city, at a time of their lives when they should be in schools. For a meagre earning of Tk. 150 each, they crush bricks with hammers without any protective gears, risking grave injury to themselves to support their struggling families. They represent the tens of thousands of child labourers in the country who work amidst extremely exploitative circumstances, without any protection of or monitoring from the government; existing laws and safety regulations are barely ever implemented. As such, employers, for whom the children are a cheap and profitable source of labour, do not even guarantee the most basic safety requirements, while the rest of the society treats child labour as a "necessary evil".

Although the Labour Law set the minimum legal age for employment at 14 in 2006, children as young as 6 or 7 years old are employed, with 93 percent of child workers toiling almost 13 hours a day. We urge the government to impose and enforce stricter restrictions on employment of underage workers, especially those in hazardous jobs like mining, stone welding, van pulling, electrical work, shipbreaking, etcetera. Employers must be brought to book for violation of labour laws and workplace safety conditions. In the long run, the government has to address the root cause of poverty that is pushing more and more children towards precarious work, providing income-generating opportunities to parents and better incentives to send their children to school.