Covid-19, Poverty, and Child Labor in Ghana, Nepal, and Uganda
The 69-page report, “I Must Work to Eat”: Covid-19, Poverty, and Child labor in Ghana, Nepal, and Uganda,” was co-published with Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) in Uganda, and Friends of the Nation in Ghana. Researchers examined the rise in child labor and poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the pandemic’s impact on children’s rights. Children described working long, grueling hours for little pay after their parents lost jobs or income due to the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Many described hazardous working conditions, and some reported violence, harassment, and pay theft.
Abuse and Exploitation of Child Domestic Workers in Indonesia
This 74-page report documents how Indonesian children as young as 12 work 14 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, without a day off. They are also forbidden from leaving their place of employment or contacting their families.
Child domestic workers are nearly invisible among child laborers. They work alone in individual households, hidden from public scrutiny, their lives controlled by their employers. Child domestics, nearly all girls, work long hours for little or no pay. Many have no opportunity to go to school, or are forced to drop out because of the demands of their job.
Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugarcane Cultivation
Businesses purchasing sugar from El Salvador, including The Coca-Cola Company, are using the product of child labor that is both hazardous and widespread. Harvesting cane requires children to use machetes and other sharp knives to cut sugarcane and strip the leaves off the stalks, work they perform for up to nine hours each day in the hot sun.
Tens of thousands of girls in El Salvador work as domestics, a form of labor that makes them particularly vulnerable to physical abuse and sexual harassment. This 35-page report calls on the Salvadoran government to include domestic workers, who are almost exclusively girls and young women, in its program to address hazardous child labor.
West African governments are failing to address a rampant traffic in child labor that could worsen with the region’s growing AIDS crisis, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. The 79-page report, “Borderline Slavery: Child Trafficking in Togo,” highlights Togo as a case study of trafficking in the region.
More girls are employed in domestic work than in any other form of child labor. They are exploited and abused on a routine basis, yet are nearly invisible among child laborers. They work alone in individual households, hidden from public scrutiny, their lives controlled by their employers.
The Indian government is failing to protect the rights of hundreds of thousands of children who toil as virtual slaves in the country's silk industry, Human Rights Watch said in this new report.
The 85-page report, "Small Change: Bonded Child Labor in India's Silk Industry,"calls on the Indian government to implement its
Free trade alone cannot ensure greater respect for workers' rights nor prevent millions of people from being excluded from the benefits of globalization. Human Rights Watch believes that measures to protect workers' rights should be built into trade agreements to ensure that globalization does not come at the expense of human rights.
In investigations in Egypt, Ecuador, India, and the United States, Human Rights Watch has found that the children working in agriculture are endangered and exploited on a daily basis. Human Rights Watch found that despite the vast differences among these four countries, many of the risks and abuses faced by child agricultural workers were strikingly similar.
Child Labor and Obstacles to Organizing on Ecuador's Banana Plantations
Banana workers in Ecuador are the victims of serious human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today. In its investigation, Human Rights Watch found that Ecuadorian children as young as eight work on banana plantations in hazardous conditions, while adult workers fear firing if they try to exercise their right to organize.
Women in Guatemala's largest female-dominated labor sectors face persistent sex discrimination and abuse, Human Rights Watch charges in this report. The 147-page report examines two sectors, export processing and private households, which employ tens of thousands of women sewing clothes for sale in the United States and working as live-in domestic workers.
The global scandal of violence against children is a horror story too often untold. With malice and clear intent, violence is used against the members of society least able to protect themselves—children in school, in orphanages, on the street, in refugee camps and war zones, in detention, and in fields and factories.
Each year over one million children between the ages of seven and twelve are hired by Egypt's agricultural cooperatives to take part in cotton pest management. Employed under the authority of Egypt's agriculture ministry, most are well below Egypt’s minimum age of twelve for seasonal agricultural work.
United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers
Agricultural work is the most hazardous and grueling area of employment open to children in the United States.3 It is also the least protected. Hundreds of thousands of children and teens labor each year in fields, orchards, and packing sheds across the United States. They pick lettuce and cantaloupe, weed cotton fields, and bag produce.
Every recognized country in the world, except for the United States and the collapsed state of Somalia, has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, pledging to uphold its protections for children. Today the convention stands as the single most widely ratified treaty in existence.
