Wider social welfare and heavier penalties can help end child labor

Ying Chunxi, who lives with his 80-year-old grandmother in the Wumeng area of Guizhou, has to do the cooking himself and go up the mountain to collect plants every day. [Photo provided to China daily]

A 14-year-old child in Foshan, South China's Guangdong province, died working in a local underwear factory. The local authorities fined the factory 10,000 yuan ($1,537) for employing children. But Qianjiang Evening News said on Monday that it is loopholes in the legal system that caused the tragedy:

Even though middle school textbooks repeatedly tell us that child labor is a phenomenon of the early stages of global capitalism, the fact is children are still found to work in domestic factories of the mainland.

China ratified the Convention Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor in June 2002. Before that China had already promised that workers had to be aged at least 16. That's a promise to the hundreds of millions of domestic children as well as to the world.

However, the domestic laws have rather light punishments for those employers who exploit children.

The nation's Labor Law says those employing children below 16 should be fined, and only if their wrongdoings are "serious" will their business licenses be confiscated, while the Law on Protection of Minors says only those employing minors for heavy, dangerous, or detrimental labor should be fined.

Thanks to the weak wording of the laws, those employers exploiting children face almost negligible penalties, which are far from enough to end the practice.

Such light penalties are like a straw man in the rice field and cannot protect children efficiently. Legislatures need to do their job and honor their promise to children by increasing the punishments for law breakers.

Most child laborers are poor and they work to support their families.

It is thus the lack of social welfare that forces these poor children into factories. Instead of trying to legalize child labor as some claim, what is needed is better social welfare so that children from poor families no longer need to work.