What is Child Labor?
Child labor includes work that is dangerous, exploitative, or prevents children from accessing education and basic opportunities. It often involves long hours, unsafe conditions, or tasks that place children at physical and emotional risk. In this video, you’ll see how child labor goes beyond occasional help at home and instead reflects conditions that limit a child’s ability to grow, learn, and experience a safe childhood.
Why is Child Labor Increasing?
Child labor is increasing as more families face economic pressure and lack access to stable income, education, and social support. In many cases, children work to help meet basic needs when parents are unable to earn enough on their own. This video explains the key factors driving this trend and how global challenges are pushing more children into the workforce.
Where Does Child Labor Still Exist?
Child labor exists across the world and is deeply connected to how everyday products are made. The video explains that about 70% of child labor happens in agriculture, producing goods like cocoa, coffee, and rice, while the rest appears in services and industries such as mining and manufacturing. The video also highlights how materials like cobalt, used in electronics, can come from supply chains where children are involved in dangerous work, showing how child labor is often hidden within global production systems.
Read the Full Video Transcript: The Fight to End Child Labor
This transcript reflects the spoken content of the video and is provided for accessibility and reference.
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Okay, there's something I really want to show you, and it's actually buried deep in a report from the International Labor Organization and UNICEF from 2021. It's on page 12, and it's this little graph right here. Let's actually take a closer look.
Okay, this graph shows the progress made towards ending child labor, and every four years over the past 20 years, those numbers have gone down. But if you look really close right here, from 2016 to 2020, the numbers are actually going up just a little bit.
Okay, so like, what does all of this mean? Well, for the first time in 20 years, the fight to end child labor—it hasn't only stalled. Child labor is actually on the rise, and I really want to help you understand why.
Child labor—it's an intricate supply chain which allows easy deniability for the multinationals making a huge fountain. By law, enforcing agencies on factories employing children has turned the spotlight on child labour in this country. The problem of child labour is entrenched, but it is solvable.
Okay, so if we want to understand what's happening right now, the best place to start is actually 120 years ago.
Back in the late 1800s, child labor was at an apex because of the Industrial Revolution. In places like Europe and the United States, children were employed to do very dangerous work. We're not talking about chores around the house. Children as young as like five or six were working in factories and mines or on plantations.
It was incredibly dangerous, hazardous work—12 to 18 hours a day for little to no pay.
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This is a photo of Lewis Hein. He was a photographer back at the turn in the 19th century, and he would visit children while they were working and take these like candid portraits. He would write down their names, age, and little quotes, and he would write all this down in a little notebook that he would carry around.
Then these photos would go on to be published in really big newspapers, and journalists would write stories. Over time, it started to change things. It started to change the way people saw child labor.
We have made, I think, great stride. Industry is organizing itself with a greater understanding. Child labor is abolished. By 1938, the United States had passed something called the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was this law that essentially stopped children from doing certain kinds of dangerous work. It was a really good thing.
By 1900, at the peak of industrial exploitation of children, there were 1.8 million children working, and at the time, that was a huge number.
So let's fast forward to today. According to the International Labor Organization and the U.N., there are 160 million children in child labor, and 79 million of those children—which is almost 50%—they're actually engaged in hazardous child labor.
I think it's really tempting to see child labor as a thing that happened a long time ago, but that's not the case. The number of children in child labor today is much, much, much greater than it was back in the 1900s.
According to the experts here, the global rise in child labor is being really driven by sub-Saharan Africa, and that increase is coming from things like population growth, conflict, extreme poverty, and a lack of social protection.
That region alone has 86.6 million children working, but the problem of child labor exists everywhere: 26.3 million children are working in Southeast Asia, 24.3 million in Eastern and Southern Asia, 10.1 million in Northern Africa and Western Asia, and 8.2 million in Latin America, and 3.8 million children in Europe and North America.
Child labor is happening all over the world, and it's happening in these like super big numbers.
That doesn't answer why—like why are children being forced to work?
I reached out to the International Labor Organization, and I asked one of their experts, Thomas Wessing, that question: why is this happening?
Families that are using child labor or having their children work—poor families—they may have fallen ill. They may not be able to work due to covey. They may have lost their job. They may have had difficulties even long before, because many of them work in agriculture and smallholder farming.
Survival family farming is not generating the income that is necessary from just one person, so many parents just say, what do I do? I need to get the harvest done. I need to get food on the table. So I also need to ask my kids to help.
Parents may be aware that this is not the best solution for the kids, but they just have no alternative. They may not be conscious. They may think it is okay that their kids work, and as long as they're close to the family, it will not do any harm to them—which is also unfortunately not fully true.
Because many, many occupations that children are doing, even in the family context, are quite dangerous for them and exposing them to risk, part of getting them out of school, which means also that they miss out on education.
Right, the explanation is usually related to poverty and the lack of a sufficient family. That should not be a justification to let that go, but it's not the families to blame for that.
Okay, so like big question: how do we get back on track? How do we start to end child labor again?
Well, I think we actually have to start with an understanding of what products are made using child labor, but manufacturers have found ways of getting around the law now.
Garments. Most of these child miners will never own a smartphone. Most of the world's chocolate is made from West African cocoa. 300,000 school-aged children work in dangerous conditions to produce it.
Okay, look at this breakdown of child labor by sector: 70% of child labor is happening around agriculture, so products like sugar, coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, rice, potatoes, beef.
20% of child labor is going towards the service industry, so that would be things like hotels, restaurants, retail, cleaning, repair services, transportation.
And then 10% of child labor is in sort of the industry sector, and that would be products like gold, coal, oil, granite, and textiles—carpets, electronics, stuff like that.
Let's take a quick look at an example here. There have been countless reports that children are involved in the mining process for cobalt in Central Africa.
So once the cobalt has been mined, it's actually bought by big Chinese companies, and it's shipped back to China. It goes into these big factories where they take the cobalt, refine it, and it's used as one of the key ingredients in making lithium batteries—batteries that you would find in cars and electronics.
Then those batteries are shipped all over the world to be put into products that we're buying.
You're looking at your cell phone right now in your hands, thinking, like, was my battery made using child labor? I have bad news for you.
In 2019, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Dell—they were all named in this big lawsuit for this very thing. It's physically tough work. They remove all this rock by hand over nearly four months. It's incredibly insecure for them. Although this is really rich in minerals, and it's going down just 15 meters, there's no support bars. They have no protective masks or protective equipment at all.
The children's cobalt is sold cheaply to mostly Chinese traders. We film secretly. They don't ask questions about where their cobalt comes from or whose work to extract it—they just want the best price.
Most of these child miners will never own a smartphone. They barely survive from day to day, and many other children, like Dorsa, will be back again tomorrow, digging out one of the most sought-after minerals of our time for a pittance.
Okay, so what do we do? Like how do we end child labor? The experts here will bring up four primary things.
The first is legislation. When a country passes child labor laws and imposes fines for violating those, you start to move the needle.
Okay, the second thing here is share your time and money. There are incredible non-profits and NGOs who are working hard to fight this. They're keeping kids in school and paying school fees. They're intervening when children wind up in hazardous working conditions. They're helping parents learn new skills and sources of income.
Okay, so here's the third thing. Before you buy something, do your research. Make sure that what you're buying does not include child labor in the supply chain at some point. You can write letters to big brands or the companies that you support, asking them to ensure there is no child labor involved in the making of their products.
Okay, and the fourth thing is just education. Keep learning about this issue. Keep reading and doing your research, and tell friends about it. Share this video. The more we understand the issue, the better prepared we are to act.
It's true that child labor is rising and that all over the world children are stuck in these hazardous jobs, but I really believe this: someday we'll live in a world without child labor.
Like we know how to stop it. We know what to do. Ending child labor is not some impossible dream—it's achievable. We can do it. But it starts—real change, it starts with us—and it only ends when every child is free to be a child.
Okay, that's it. That's the end of the video. I just wanted to say thank you for watching. If you made it all the way to the end of the video, this is such an important topic, so I really appreciate you watching the whole video and learning more about child labor. We're going to keep making these videos, and we would love it if you would subscribe. We've got more planned in the future, so stay tuned.
Yeah, thanks again, and have a great day.
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