World Day Against Child Labor: Children Should Be in School, Not at Work

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/06/12/world-day-against-child-labor-children-should-be-in-school-not-at-work/

by James Parks, Jun 12, 2008

On any given day, some 218 million children between the ages of five and 14 are child laborers. Many of these children work long hours, often in dangerous conditions.

Today is the annual World Day Against Child Labor, and workers in more than 60 countries are holding events to focus on efforts to ensure children spend their days in school, not at the workplace.

Félie, 12, is among them. He works in a mine in Kolwezi, a town of 21,000, in the southern province of Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is featured in a post on the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center website. Here’s how the site describes what Félie does each day:

All day long, he hauls heavy bags of rock and dirt from the mouth of a cobalt mine to a water-filled pit—actually an abandoned industrial site—100 feet away, where others sift the content through the contaminated water to find the precious ore. The bags are so heavy that it takes two adult men to load them onto his back. The path is slippery with mud, and he must take care not to lose his footing and fall. The ore goes to a middleman, who sells it to a mining company. If he is lucky, Félie will make $2 a day for this hard, dangerous work.

Sadly, Félie is hardly alone. The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports an astonishing 122 million children are laborers in the Asia-Pacific region, followed by sub-Saharan Africa (49.3 million) and Latin America and the Caribbean (5.7 million). Some 8.4 million children are trapped in the worst forms of child labor, including slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, forced military recruitment, prostitution and pornography.

To commemorate this year’s World Day Against Child Labor, the Solidarity Center has launched a fundraising campaign, “Send a Child to School,” to help ensure that Félie and thousands like him gain an education and have hope for a better future. In a unique partnership with schools, communities and local and national governments, the Solidarity Center supports improvements to school infrastructure in exchange for tuition forgiveness. The program also provides accelerated learning courses and vocational training for older children.

A $30 donation can send a child to school for a year. To make a tax-deductible contribution to “Send a Child to School,” click here and here to learn more about the center’s efforts against child labor.

FULL story at link.