The country has much more
work to do to overcome the problem of child labor.
Child labor exploitation is
worsening in the Philippines. In 2011, the Philippine National Statistics
Office reported that there were 5.5 million working children in the country,
2.9 million of whom were working in hazardous industries such as mines and plantations.
The agency added that 900,000 children have stopped schooling in order to work.
The following year, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR)
released a survey that showed that one out of four workers in palm oil
plantations in northeast Mindanao region were children below 18 years old.
Last
month, the Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education Research (EILER) published a
baseline study which confirmed the prevalence of child labor in mines and
plantations in various parts of the country. In plantation communities, about
22.5 percent of households have child workers. In mining towns, child labor
incidence was 14 percent. The group noted that the youngest worker interviewed
in the study was five years old, although the common age of child workers was
12. The group learned that 76 percent of child laborers have stopped attending
school. Most child laborers were working for 10 hours a day, or 13 to 16 hours
a day in some extreme cases.
Child
laborers in oil palm fields often serve as fruiters, harvesters, haulers,
loaders, and uprooters. Meanwhile, child laborers in sugarcane estates work in
weeding, harvesting and fetching of water. Banana plantation workers are
assigned in bagging and de-leafing duties. Outside banana plantations younger
children are involved as banana peelers for rejected bananas which will be
dried and processed as animal feeds.
In mines,
child laborers usually fetch water, carry sacks of rocks, load thick logs that
are used to support the underground tunnels, or become errand boys of regular
workers. They are also reserve workers or relievers whenever regular miners cannot
come to work.
Girls in
mines work in gold panning or provide services to miners such as doing their
laundry or cooking meals.
EILER
observed that child workers are exposed to extreme weather conditions, long
working hours, and harsh environments while using substandard tools and
equipment. In plantations, trucks would pick children from their homes and
bring them to makeshift tents that are located in nearby provinces to stay and
work there from two weeks to one month without their parents. And since most
plantations use harmful agro-chemicals, the children are also directly exposed
to these threats.
Children
in mines are handling dangerous tools and are made to work without personal
protective equipment for long hours. They are also vulnerable to social hazards
like the use of illegal drugs inside the tunnels to keep them awake for hours.
“The
nature of their work which provides very little wages coupled with the fact
that they skip school means that child laborers are unable to break from the
families’ cycle of poverty, perpetuating the problem of inter-generational
poverty among the poor families in the plantation and mining industries,” said
Anna Leah Escresa-Colina, executive director of EILER.
She added
that low wages, contractualization, and lack of livelihood for families as some
of the factors pushing children to work even in hazardous and difficult jobs to
augment family incomes.
Ambassador
Guy Ledoux of the European Union emphasized that
“it is important that dissuasive penalties are imposed in practice on persons
who subject children to work in hazardous or exploitative conditions.” The EU
provided assistance in conducting the study on child labor in the Philippines.
The EILER
study confirmed earlier surveys about the high number of children working in
hazardous industries. It also highlighted the failure or inadequacy of
government initiatives to address the problem. As the world marks the 25th
anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child, the Philippines must be more aggressive in combating the worst forms
of child labor in various parts of the country. By Mong Palatino
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