By Jessamyn Guinanao
The holiday season enriches the air with euphonious music, joyous laughter, and colorful celebrations. However, behind all the bright lights is a dark reality everyone knows but most look past.
It appears that Santa’s elves are actually little children who work in the streets of many countries worldwide — especially underdeveloped and developing ones like the Philippines. They brave the highways to sell garlands we hang around trees, firecrackers they build in makeshift factories, or bottled waters in return for a small amount of money.
As revealed by Vani Catanasiga, executive director of the Fiji Council of Social Services, kids scavenge for scrap metal at landfills and dump sites to help provide for their families. While students like us enjoy our school-free vacations, savoring the New Year’s festivities, street children offer to wipe car windshields and sell rags to passing vehicles just to put food on the table.
According to the ChildFund International in its Unseen Workers: Child Labor in the Philippines article, millions of impoverished children are forced to work at young ages, making child labor one of our nation’s most urgent problems. Although social scientists claim that some forms of work may be wholly acceptable, exploitative work most definitely is not.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines the concept well — “Child labor is work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity.” This may involve enslavement, separation from family, and exposure to hazardous conditions and illnesses. It is work that harms or exploits them physically, mentally, or morally, or prevents them from obtaining an education.
The days when most poor parents would encourage their kids to study hard, for education is key to liberating them from poverty, are long gone. As upsetting as this is, it is not because they want to, but because they have no other choice.
As written by the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) in their report, Revisiting Child Labor, the parents are often unemployed or underemployed and in dire need of stable income. Yet it is their children – more powerless and paid less – who are offered the jobs. Consequently, families turn to child labor in times of such crises.
The top reason that children work in jobs that are exploitative and inappropriate for their ages is widely considered to be poverty. As shown by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in 2021, one in five Filipinos lives below the poverty line.
This, among many reasons, is why children as young as 6 work in sugarcane fields and gold mines in the Philippines, or why there are 2.1 million child laborers aged 5 to 17 years old based on the 2011 Survey on Children of the PSA.
On the international front, a staggering estimate of 160 million children worldwide are involved in child labor, according to a 2021 ILO study before pandemic-induced school closures. This accounts for almost 1 in 10 children worldwide.
Devastatingly, the ECLT Foundation states that the effects of child labor are often carried through to adulthood: poor health and low literacy rates make it harder for former child laborers to access decent work and a better livelihood. Thus, they are more inclined to send their children into the fields to help support their families — leading to a vicious pattern of pressure, exploitation, and abuse.
This is not what youths deserve.
Every child is entitled to a life in school rather than on the streets. All children everywhere have the right to the knowledge and opportunities that education provides.
Therefore, to end child labor, it is crucial to have better implementation of anti-trafficking and anti-child labor laws, livelihood opportunities for parents to send their kids to school, and strengthened collective action.
In the Philippines, child labor should be addressed with the aid of existing legal measures, such as the Anti-Child Labor Law, the Expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, and the Domestic Workers Act. We must strictly enforce these laws to safeguard children from circumstances that will impede their normal growth.
Today’s youth will have to earn a living for themselves eventually, but for as long as they are children, they must be granted their rights to childhood. Whether it be their rights to walk the streets, not to head to the marketplace to lift boxes, but to school to learn with books; or their rights to travel to cities, not to earn money for their siblings’ tuition fees, but to set out for their own dreams — they must be guaranteed a childhood in which acting like grown-ups is merely for fun, not survival.
If only we would listen more closely to their cries for help and open our eyes to their heavy burdens, we might hear the dying wish of their youthful hearts hoping to sit at the dinner table, worry-free, next New Year’s Eve.