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Child labor, an offspring of ‘bankrupt employment, economic program’

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Child labor, an offspring of ‘bankrupt employment, economic program’

 
Child labor arises in the Philippines because of the government’s failure “in generating decent jobs.” – KMU
By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – “Children should have time to play and learn, and to be free from child labor. When children are forced to work, we deprive them, their communities and the country of a better future,” said Lawrence Jeff Johnson, director of the Philippine office of International Labor Organization (ILO), as the Philippine National Statistics Office (NSO) released new data on child labor this week.

Based on reports and despite various organizations’ frequent appeals for the rights of the child, child labor still persists in many countries, especially in less developed countries such as in the Philippines.
“They put their health at risk and their lives in danger,” said Johnson of the millions of child workers. He said member states of the ILO, including the Philippines, have committed to the global goal of ending the worst forms of child labor by 2016. But the global economic crisis, he said, has “led to the slow and uneven progress in the fight against child labor.”

To progressive groups in the Philippines, however, the global crisis is not the only obvious drag in combatting child labor. The said crisis, in fact, is a result of the problems that forced children out of school and into hazardous work. According to the labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), for example, child labor arises in the Philippines because of the government’s failure in generating decent jobs in the country, which they blame, in turn, on Aquino’s “refusal to veer away from the bankrupt employment program of attracting foreign investors into the country by offering cheap and repressed labor.”

So far, there are no changes being announced in the Aquino government’s job generation strategy, even as the labor department is claiming they are “very determined” in fighting child labor.

Borne by poverty and joblessness

“Children are being forced to work because their parents either have no jobs or are earning pitiful sums in their work,” Elmer “Bong” Labog, chairman of Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), said in reaction to news that more than half of 5.5 million working children as of Oct 2011 are considered as child labor and mostly in hazardous conditions..... MORE

SourceBulatlat.com

URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/06/29/child-labor-an-offspring-of-%E2%80%98bankrupt-employment-economic-program%E2%80%99/

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