THE SQUEEZE ON WORKERS
Work is often loaded with all kinds of moral and social significance to justify its centrality in our lives. But the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a more essential aspect into sharp – and desperate – focus: that throughout history work has meant strategic action to ensure survival.
There is no way of getting past this bare and rather basic fact when confronted with the reality of multitudes of labourers who, it is generally supposed, should not be working at all (or at least not full-time): children.
Ahead of the World Day Against Child Labour on 12 June, UNICEF announced that progress towards ending child labour had stalled, with a rise of 8.4 million in work over the past four years. Of the total 160 million working children, half were in hazardous work (defined as ‘likely to harm their health, safety or morals’). And there were dire warnings – of an additional 9 million being pushed into child labour by the end of 2022 due to the pandemic, with the possibility of this number ballooning to 46 million without ‘critical social protection coverage’.1
Some days earlier, a report by Human Rights Watch had recorded the testimony of a few of these children, such as 13-year-old Florence from Uganda, who said: ‘I started working because we were so badly off. The hunger at home was too much for us to sit and wait.’ And 15-year-old Kiran from Nepal, whose family had borrowed money after being out of work for months during the pandemic: ‘If I go back to school now, my family will go further into debt. We have a lot to repay and I cannot add more expenses to what’s already there.’ Fourteen-year-old Gita, also from Nepal, described working at a carpet loom from 4.00am to 10.00pm: ‘My fingers hurt from knotting the threads… my eyes hurt from looking at the design
