Child labor and their earning profile

Abstract

The problem of child labor neither is new nor is restricted to just Pakistan. It is prevalent all over the world but it has grown in the recent years in Pakistan because of landlessness, neglect of rural areas and slums in the urban areas and weak implementation of child protection laws, the poor families with a view to supplementing their incomes send their children for work these children tend to increase the total workforce and substitute the adult's work at far lower wages and thus putting pressure on the wages of adults. Resultantly the country is caught up in the vicious poverty-labor cycle. The present study is an attempt to measure the causes of child labor in Pakistan? What induces parents to send their children to work? Why do employer stress on having children work for them? It reviewed most of the studies conducted by different agencies and organization to see various dimensions of working children relating to age, sex, location, occupation, their earning, and industry. The study utilized the child labor survey 1996 to project the child labor magnitude in the recent years. The projections are based on Population Census 1998 and the most recent Labor Force Survey 1999-2000 data. The estimates show that there are 2.5 million children active in the labor market. Most of these children are male and rural residents. The industrial and occupational distribution of Child Labor Survey 1996 is used to see present distribution of children in different occupations and industries. v In the next part, the hazards to which these children are exposed to are discussed. It is observed that on the basis of injuries, carpet weaving is the most hazardous sector of employment for these children. These observations are made on the basis of different studies conducted to analyze the health situation of the working children. The last section summarizes the main findings and recommendations to solve this problem.