‘Could It Be That They Do Not Want to Hear What We Have to Say?’ Organised Working Children and the International Politics and Representations of Child Labour

Abstract

This chapter is primarily concerned with exploring and problematising the representational strategies deployed in processes of global governance and advocacy related to child labour. It is observed that on the international level the broad category of ‘child labour’ is narrowly represented as a form of modern slavery by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and influential NGOs such as the Global March Against Child labour. Actors that challenge such narratives, in particular working children’s movements, are excluded from exerting influence. To better understand how we arrived as this impasse and how we can move forward, the chapter aims to reconstruct, analyse and problematise the institutional and geo-political developments that have resulted in the current status quo, with a special focus on the efforts of organised working children to influence this process. Using the theoretical constructs of the ‘paradox of institutionalisation’, the ‘paradox of a children’s right to participation’ and the ‘problematic of representational power’ to analyse the chapter’s empirical reconstruction, it is concluded that the ILO is to reconsider its restrictive advocacy campaign in favour of identifying more nuanced and evidence-based programmes and policies on child labour.

This chapter was elaborated within the framework of research project P2GEP1_191426 funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Introduction

In the fall of 2017, I travelled to Buenos Aires to participate in the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) ‘IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour’ (hereafter: IV Global Conference). The aim of the IV Global Conference was to take stock of global progress made, and to set out an agenda to achieve the eradication of child labour in all its forms by 2025.¹ Kailash Satyarthi, who became known as the face of the Global March Against Child Labour and who together with Malala Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, was one of the keynote speakers during the opening ceremony of the conference.

Satyarthi started his speech by insisting that the, at the time, estimated 152 million child labourers worldwide are not just figures in report, but that each of these children has “a beating heart and a divine soul”.² He brought some of these children to life in the minds of the conference participants through a series of personal anecdotes. Satyarthi told a story of how he met with a Syrian refugee in Turkey who had lost a child which was probably trafficked. The man was now desperate to marry off his 12-year-old daughter before she too got stolen or sold. This was followed by an account of a group of trafficked child labourers in Delhi that were recently rescued from a jeans factory by Satyarthi’s organisation. These children, he emphasised, had not seen daylight for three years, and would not dare to dream to one day wear those jeans.

Not long after Satyarthi’s speech ended, I received a text message from Maria, one of the young representatives of the Movimiento Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes Trabajadores (Latin American and Caribbean Movement of Working Children and Adolescents; hereafter: MOLACNATs), the umbrella organisation of Latin American working children’s movements. As will be detailed later on in this chapter, members of working children’s movements defy and challenge the narratives of working children as passive victims waiting to be rescued. Instead, they assume their identity as workers and claim the recognition of their right to dignified work. Maria and I had met at a conference on working children that was held in Bolivia several weeks prior. There she had explained to me that MOLACNATs had explicitly requested access for working children to the IV Global Conference, but that the organisers had let them know that due to security measures nobody under the age of 18 would be welcome. In response, MOLACNATs sent a delegation to Buenos Aires to demonstrate against their exclusion. Maria’s text informed me that the protest would be held on the third day of the conference, at the Plaza del Congreso in front of Argentina’s National Parliament. Maria and other representatives of MOLACNATs were joined by members of Asamblea Revelde, a local working children’s movement founded in one of the poorer suburbs of Buenos Aires. After some ice-breaker activities to get everybody’s attention, two of the MOLACNATs delegates read out loud the letter of complaint they had sent to the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child:

Seeking to exercise our rights as per Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we asked the organisers to let us participate in the IV Global Conference […]. Not only was this right to participate denied to us, but it was denied to anyone under 18 years of age, “for security reasons”. Without fully understanding the reasons for this violation of our rights, we ask ourselves: Do they want to protect us or do they want to protect themselves against us? Could it be that they do not want to hear what we have to say?³

Talking to the working children and their supporting adults at the protest, it became clear to me that the prevailing belief was indeed that the ILO simply did not want them there, and was not interested in what they had to say. This belief had been strengthened by an article in the German periodic Der Spiegel, for which one of the ILO’s child labour experts, Jose Maria Ramirez, was interviewed. When asked about the claim of organised working children to have a say in the IV Global Conference, Ramirez explained that allowing them to do so would be like inviting people to talk about the advantages of eating meat during a vegetarian dinner.⁴ In other words, their presence and discourse was perceived to be incompatible with the representations of ‘child labourers’ as passive and vulnerable victims who are not able to speak for themselves.

This is problematic because even by the ILO’s own legal definition, ‘child labour’ is a broad concept which constitutes much more than the so-called ‘worst forms of child labour’ such as slavery and trafficking as depicted by Satyarthi during his speech. Current global challenges such as the ongoing climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic result in growing numbers of working children who deserve policies, programmes and solutions that are substantiated by a plurality of experts, including working children themselves. To better understand how we arrived as this impasse and how we can move forward, I will use this chapter to reconstruct, analyse and problematise the institutional and geo-political developments that have resulted in the current status quo. It will bring to light how a select group of individuals and organisations came to hold the power to represent child labour as a form of modern slavery, while other actors and approaches, in particular organised working children and their claims for better working conditions, are excluded from global policy making. This reconstruction is based on: primary sources retrieved from several archives, including the ILO archives in Geneva, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and the Netherlands National Archive in The Hague; semi-structured interviews with current and former (staff) members of governments, international organisations, NGOs and working children’s movements conducted between 2015 and 2019; and additional secondary literature.

In the following section “Shifting Priorities in Child Labour Policy”, I will detail the institutional developments inside the ILO between 1979 and 1996 which resulted in the decision to adopt a new ILO convention on the worst forms of child labour. In the section “We Do Not Want Them to Represent Us” I will then discuss the working children’s movements and their efforts to participate in international events aimed at producing recommendations regarding the aim and scope of the new convention. The recognition of a paradox inherent in the notion that children have a right to participate in global governance helps to make sense of the finding that while this process provided the opportunity for organised working children to participate on the international level, it simultaneously resulted in their further exclusion. The penultimate section of the chapter, the section “Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour”, revolves around the role played by Satyarthi and the Global March Against Child Labour in the drafting and promotion of the new convention that was eventually adopted in 1999. I will engage with the theoretical concepts of ‘mutual legitimation’ and ‘representational power’ to elucidate how the ILO—and in particularly the group of trade unions inside the organisation—and Satyarthi’s Global March made strategic use of each other to feign democratic legitimacy and to uphold an effective, but self-serving, advocacy strategy in which working children are narrowly represented as helpless and voiceless victims of modern slavery. In the concluding section of the chapter “Concluding Remarks” I will make the case for why this representational strategy is problematic and why working children’s movements are to be considered important stakeholders in the search for evidence-based programmes and policies that revolve around a more holistic understanding of working children’s rights and wellbeing.

Shifting Priorities in Child Labour Policy

Reconsidering Convention 138

Central to the ILO’s global campaign to eradicate child labour is its Minimum Age Convention 138 (hereafter: C138), which was adopted in 1973 to replace all earlier sector specific child labour conventions. It is important to make clear how C138 defines ‘child labour’, as this legal framework provides the basis for the statistical structure which is used to estimate and monitor how many children are in ‘child labour’ world-wide.

Whereas its preamble states that C138 has the objective to achieve “the total abolition of child labour”, the actual text of the convention makes clear that this certainly does not mean all work done by children, as defined as persons under the age of 18 years.⁵ While it sets a general minimum age of 15 years for all employment and work, it also provides many significant exceptions to this standard. The first concerns so-called ‘light work’, meaning work which is not likely to be harmful to health or development and which does not hinder school attendance. This type of work can be done by children of 13 years and older. The second main exception concerns so-called ‘hazardous work’, “which by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morals of young persons”.⁶ No person under the age of 18 is allowed to be engaged in such work. C138 provides further special exceptions for countries “whose economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed”, or in other words: developing countries.⁷ They are allowed to exclude non-hazardous work from the scope of C138 if it is done within “family and small-scale holdings producing for local consumption and not regularly employing hired workers”, and to lower all these minimum age standards by one year, except for hazardous work.⁸ Despite these specific exceptions for developing countries C138 remained highly unpopular during the first years after its adoption, being ratified by only a handful of countries.

During the UN International Year of the Child in 1979, the ILO introduced the so-called ‘two-plank’ policy in an attempt to mitigate the initial failure of C138 to protect working children. In short, this policy encouraged countries to focus on protecting working children by regulating and ‘humanising’ their work in the short term, while aiming for ratification of C138 and the abolition of all child labour in the long term (van Daalen & Hanson, 2019). For a decade or so the ILO merely encouraged and applauded such programmes. Yet at the beginning of the 1990s, it started to implement its first technical assistance programmes, of which the ‘Smokey Mountain’ project was the most significant and would set the course for the ILO’s future anti–child labour campaign.

Smokey Mountain

The project ran from 1989 to 1992 and was primarily aimed at helping children and their families that worked on and around the large garbage dump known as ‘Smokey Mountain’ in Manila, the Philippines. Whereas the outcomes of the project were considered a relative success by those directly involved (Gunn & Ostos, 1992), it served yet another goal for those overseeing the ILO’s broader campaign on child labour, namely raising awareness and funding. As explained by a former ILO official:

I was interested in that project really for two reasons. One is that a few [children] would benefit from some nutrition support and from some educational support on a part-time basis. It does not really change substantially their lives, but it helps. But there was a more fundamental reason. When that project was done, it happened to attract international media attention. Imagine from a media point of view, these children working on this mountain of garbage that is smoking and burning all the time, under very, very difficult conditions. After that, it was easy for us to mobilize resources for the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour, IPEC, and later on of course for the new Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour.⁹

The ILO had commissioned a photographer to take pictures of children working on Smokey Mountain that were used in ILO publications and advocacy documents, which thus aided the ILO in its efforts to raise funds and awareness. In 1992, the year the Smokey Mountain project officially ended, the ILO kick-started its International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) which continued to focus on projects similar to Smokey Mountain, loosely applying the same methodology. During the first years of its existence, most of IPEC’s country projects were aimed at improving the working conditions of children working under very harsh and hazardous conditions. At the same time, awareness was generated by publishing reports about these projects (ILO, 1993). This pragmatic approach led to internal discussions about the viability and desirability of the thus far ineffective C138 and its general prohibition of all forms of work under the different minimum ages.

Targeting the Intolerable

More than two decades after it was adopted in 1973, C138 had been ratified by only 45 member states, amongst which were only very few developing countries. It was telling that out of the ten countries in which IPEC had implemented its programmes, only Kenya had ratified the convention (ILO, 1995). It was believed that the work done by IPEC on projects concerning child workers at great risk should inform national and international policy to reach such children more effectively. The former Deputy Director General of the ILO, Kari Tapiola, explained that as a result, many inside the ILO considered C138 “to be unwieldy or even obsolete” (Tapiola, 2018, p. 15). Yet this line of reasoning ran into stiff opposition from the Workers’ Group inside the ILO, led by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).¹⁰ Fearing a ‘race to the bottom’ during the years of increasing globalisation and the moving of production processes to countries with lower labour standards (Nieuwenhuys, 2007), the ICFTU was one of the fierce proponents of including a so-called ‘social clause’ in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which in 1995 would become the World Trade Organisation (WTO) (Vandaele, 2005). The social clause would link the international trade regime to the human rights regime by establishing minimum labour standards for workers in all member countries, and a child labour-free production process was one of the proposed standards. When it became clear that a social clause would not be adopted by the WTO, the ICFTU turned to the ILO and advocated for strengthening instead of weakening the ILO’s commitment to abolish all forms of child labour (van Daalen & Hanson, 2019). The solution to this internal divide was found in the adoption of a new child labour convention. This new convention was to prioritise action against what would become known as the worst forms of child labour, while at the same time it was to reconfirm that the ratification of C138 and its objective to abolish all forms of child labour would remain the fundamental long-term goals.¹¹

In a 1996 report the ILO made public its strategy to adopt a new convention and what was to be understood by ‘the worst forms of child labour’:

[G]ive priority in the first instance to abolishing the worst and intolerable forms of child labour such as slavery and slave-like practices, all forms of forced labour including debt bondage and child prostitution, and child work in hazardous occupations and industries. (ILO, 1996, p. 115)

In this report, the ILO also presented its first global estimates of child labour. Based on findings of experimental surveys in four countries it was estimated that about 250 million children were economically active in developing countries. While this figure was only a very rough estimate and said nothing about the type of work done by children or the conditions under which it was undertaken, its association with phenomena such child slavery and prostitution significantly shaped the public imaginary. In the words of former ILO-IPEC director Frans Röselaers, “The number drew international attention to the magnitude and scope of the child labour problem worldwide. It was widely publicised; hardly any article on child labour failed to mention it” (IPEC & SIMPOC, 2002 Preface).

Discussion: The Paradox of Institutionalisation

This section has made clear how the institutionalisation of a pragmatic policy to mitigate the early failings of C138—by prioritising the protection of working children and the improvement of their working conditions—paradoxically resulted in shifting priorities that would come to drown out arguments in favour of this policy.¹²

When in 1979 it was understood that C138 and its abolition objective—even with its many exceptions and flexibility clauses—was too ambitious to be ratified and implemented by developing countries, the ILO believed to have found an intermediary solution. It encouraged countries to improve the working conditions of children for whom working under the hazardous conditions was unavoidable. An ILO report published in 1989 noted a “remarkable surge” in “creative projects” conducted by governments and NGOs with the objective to “prevent the abuse of child labour and to protect and assist those children who do work” (ILO, 1989, p. 30). Only a year later the ILO initiated the Smokey Mountain project and got its own hands dirty.

While children and their families were provided with practical assistance and viable alternatives, ILO policymakers recognised the larger instrumental potential of the project. The shocking images and narratives of young children working on Smokey Mountain resulted in increased media attention and facilitated the mobilisation of resources. That the ILO still believes in the power of such representation is confirmed by the fact that, 20 years later, the cover page of the report in which the ILO the presented its 2021 global estimates of child labour features a young boy scavenging on a garbage dump (ILO, 2021).

When IPEC continued to implement and assist projects aimed at the protection of children working under the worst conditions—often by improving their working conditions—serious questions were raised about the viability of C138 and its abolition objective, not in the least place because it was still very poorly ratified by those countries it was designed for. Options that were explored for the further institutionalisation of IPEC’s pragmatic policy ran into stiff opposition with the ILO’s powerful block of trade unions. For reasons that were primarily related to the global political economy and the labour position of Western unionised workers, the trade unions had no intentions on weakening the ILO’s commitment to the abolition of child labour, and in fact sought ways to reinforce this normative project. The solution to this internal divide was found in the adoption of a new instrument—one that prioritised the abolition of the so-called worst forms of child labour, including child slavery, child trafficking and child prostitution. After the Smokey Mountain project, the ILO understood the strategic force of representing child labour by means of these disturbing, but ultimately fringe, phenomena, in particular when combined with publicised global estimates of hundreds of millions of children in ‘child labour’ as broadly defined by C138.¹³ This emotive advocacy campaign heavily influenced the public imaginary and allowed for the further mobilisation of resources. At the same time, the focus on the worst forms of child labour projected an ideology that would come to obscure and exclude the more pragmatic and creative approaches that laid at the foundation of the ILO’s initial shift in addressing child labour. This becomes clear from the following section, which details the efforts of working children’s movements to have influence over the process of discussing and drafting the new convention.

“We Do Not Want Them to Represent Us”

Working Children Get Organised

The first working children’s movement is generally considered to be the Movimiento de Adolescentes y Niños Trabajadores Hijos de Obreros Cristianos (Movement of Working Adolescents and Children of Christian Workers; hereafter: MANTHOC) that was founded in 1978 in Lima, Peru (Chacaltana, 1998; Taft, 2019b). One of the central objectives of MANTHOC, and most other working children’s movements that followed, is to secure work with dignity for children, and the societal recognition of their status and value as workers with rights of their own. In the wake of MANTHOC, working children started to organise in other countries in Latin America, and in Africa and Asia as well. In Brazil, the Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas da Rua (National Movement of Street Boys and Girls; hereafter: MNMMR) was formed in 1985 (Swift, 1997). Two working children’s organisations, Bhima Sangha and the Bal Mazdoor Union, were founded in India during the late 1980s, and in Africa the African Movement of Working Children and Youth (AMWCY) saw the light of day in 1994 (Liebel, 2001; Swift, 1999). Although these different movements each have their own specific origin story owing to the different political, economic, and cultural circumstances in the respective region, they do have much in common (Nieuwenhuys, 2009; van Daalen, 2020). All of them are locally organised grassroots organisations of working children supported by adults and local NGOs that provide a platform on which working children can come together to strive for the improvement of their lives as children and workers.¹⁴ Central to the philosophy of all these movements is the idea of protagonismo infantile (children’s protagonism; hereafter: protagonismo). While definitions and interpretations vary, it roughly translates to a viewpoint that foregrounds children as having the agency to create social change, to make decisions for themselves, to claim their own rights, and to represent themselves (Taft, 2019a). One of the ways in which the movements seek to exercise protagonismo is by trying to influence policies and programmes on different levels, from the local to the national and international, where they seek self-representation through elected delegates (van Daalen & Mabillard, 2019). With the funding and support of several international child rights NGOs, representatives of the above-mentioned movements came together for the first time in 1996 in the town of Kundapur on the west-coast of India.¹⁵

The Kundapur Meeting

Confronted with the news about the creation of a new ILO child labour convention, the representatives of the different movements decided they wanted to have influence over its drafting. They believed it was important to break the pattern of others, adults, “talking and talking about our problems, as they have been doing for so many years without finding solutions”.¹⁶ Based on their discussions and experiences during the Kundapur meeting, they drafted a manifesto consisting of ten points that formed the basis of their joint international campaign. This list would become known as ‘the Kundapur Declaration’ and consisted of, amongst others, the following demands:

• We want respect and security for ourselves and the work that we do.

• We want an education system of which the methodology and content are adapted to our reality.

• We want to be consulted in all decisions concerning us, at local, national, and international levels.

• We are in favour of work with dignity and appropriate hours, so that we have time for education and leisure. (IWGCL, 1998)

The Kundapur Declaration was primarily a call to recognise working children as workers with rights to a safe and developmental working environment. Similar to the conventional trade unions, they also demanded influence in decision-making processes that affect them. The opportunity to do so presented itself in the form of two ILO ‘preparatory conferences’ to which NGOs and researchers were invited to come up with recommendations regarding the aim and scope of the new convention. The first was held in Amsterdam, the second in Oslo.

From Amsterdam to Oslo

The NGOs supporting the movements lobbied the Dutch government and the ILO to invite the movements of working children to the Amsterdam Child Labour Conference (hereafter: Amsterdam Conference). It was conveyed that the movements not only requested to participate, but that they claimed ‘equal representation’, meaning that if there are 20 ministers invited, there should be 20 working children present as well. The movements explained that “We will have discussions with our ministers, but we do not want them to represent us”.¹⁷ The organisers finally agreed to invite eight representatives of the different working children’s movements who had participated in the Kundapur meeting: three from Latin America, two from West Africa and two from Asia. Eight, because eight ministers from developing countries were invited to the conference, by which the organiser believed they had respected the working children’s demand for equal representation.¹⁸ During the conference, the working children’s representatives were able to attend all the discussions of the different panels and workshops, and on day one of the conference they were assigned their own plenary panel session.¹⁹ During this panel session, the representatives presented the Kundapur Declaration and were asked to respond to a set of questions, including: Why do children work in conditions that are exploitative and dangerous? Vidal of MANTHOC argued that the ILO’s general abolitionist approach pushes children to the more dangerous margins of the informal economy and should therefore be considered as one of the causes. Work, he explained, is one thing; bad working conditions are another. He urged the conference delegates not to confuse the two. At the end of workshop in which all of the working children participated, the conference participants adopted a recommendation that explicitly called for the participation of NGOs and working children’s movements in the further development of international law and policy on child labour. However, in the official conference report, this specific recommendation was rendered more general and only made mention of ‘civil society’ (SZW, 1997). Despite such small setbacks, the delegation of working children’s representatives felt strengthened by the experiences in Amsterdam and was confident they would be allowed to participate in a similar fashion in Oslo. There, however, things turned out to be more challenging than expected.

Having witnessed how the movements participated in Amsterdam and how their presence and claims for work with dignity attracted much media attention (ILO, 1997a), the trade unions united in the ICFTU pressured the Norwegian Government and the ILO to exclude organised working children from participating in the Oslo Conference.²⁰ The trade unions believed that their presence and diverging discourse would undermine the objective of the conference and of the new convention, that is to abolish all of child labour by starting with the worst forms. In response to their exclusion, the movements decided to organise a parallel ‘shadow conference’ elsewhere in the city in an attempt to influence the debates from the outside, for which they received support and funding from Save the Children Sweden and the Dutch Government.²¹ But things took a turn several weeks before the start of the conference. General elections had provided Norway with a new government that proved much more receptive to the idea of children’s participation, and at the last minute the movements were informed they could send three representatives to officially participate in the Oslo Conference. Furthermore, all of them were allowed to attend the closing ceremony on the final day. Despite these commitments by the organisers, the three working children’s representatives that were elected by their peers to participate in conference concluded that, unlike the Amsterdam Conference, Oslo was not an appropriate space for the voices of working children to be heard.²² No special arrangements had been made and they had not been invited to participate in any of the panel discussions. The delegation of Latin American movements’ representatives therefore decided to demonstrate in front of the main entrance of the conference building with tape over their mouths as a symbol of their marginalisation. Their sense of being silenced was reinforced by the publication of the official conference report, in which not a single mention of their participation was made (ILO, 1997b).

Notwithstanding, they had succeeded in participating in both preparatory conferences and remained determined to continue their collective mission to directly contribute to the drafting of the new convention during the 1998 International Labour Conference (ILC).²³ Together they wrote a letter to the Director-General of the ILO:

Dear Sir,

We would like to make a request concerning the International Labour Conference scheduled to be held in Geneva; especially regarding point 6 on the agenda, the proposed new convention on the ‘most intolerable forms of child labour’. In 1997, we, the representatives of working children’s movements, participated in two Conferences where this proposed convention was discussed. Eight of us were at the Amsterdam Child Labour Conference, and four of us were at the Oslo Child Labour Conference. As you know, we are for a Convention that truly protects children from what the ILO calls the intolerable forms of child labour. But as the persons the convention will most affect, we are concerned its provisions be realistic and helpful. For that reason, it is important that the working children’s own thinking should be heard from the mouths of their own democratically elected representatives […] We, the movement of working children want to be able to benefit from the ‘self-representation’ principle so fundamental to the ILO, and from Article 12 of the [UN]CRC because we are democratically elected and given a mandate by our movements which exist in more than 40 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this view we would like to be fully represented in the debate regarding the proposed convention.²⁴

Discussion: The Paradox of a Children’s Right to Participation

As will be discussed in the following section, the movements would never receive an answer from the ILO and were excluded from the further deliberations and drafting of the convention on the worst forms of child labour. Ironically, while the series of international events that were held in preparation of the new convention presented them with the opportunity to influence this process of global governance, their presence and participation ultimately resulted in their exclusion from future international discussions concerning child labour. This can be understood as the result of an inherent paradox that lies in the notion of a children’s right to participate in global governance, which sees children lose effective control over the exercise of this special right as soon as they enter the international political arena.

The claim of the working children’s movements that they had a right to participate in Amsterdam, Oslo and Geneva was certainly not baseless. The practically globally ratified 1989 UNCRC addresses the complex issue of a child’s right to meaningful (political) participation.²⁵ The obligation of states to respect the views of children has been identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child as one of the four ‘general principles’ of the UNCRC.²⁶ This general principle is not captured by one comprehensive article, but by a cluster of articles enshrined inside the UNCRC: Article 12 (right to be heard), Article 13 (freedom of expression), Article 14 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion), Article 15 (to freedom of association and to freedom of peaceful assembly) and Article 17 (right to access to information). State parties are obliged to take all appropriate legislative, administrative and ‘other’ measures (e.g. social and educational) to ensure the implementation of these articles. By means of the 2002 General Assembly Special Session on Children (UNGASS), the UN put in practice its obligation as intergovernmental organisation to indeed seek out and respect the views of children in international matters affecting them. In the preparatory process leading up to the UNGASS, more than 40,000 children from 72 countries were surveyed about their realities and their rights and obligations as children. During the UNGASS itself, hundreds of children—including representatives of working children’s movements—were invited to participate in the different events of the special session and were asked to provide recommendations for the outcome document, ‘A World fit for Children’ (Skelton, 2007). In this document, world leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the UNCRC and to facilitate the participation of children in international law and policy making concerning them.²⁷ But as the examples in this chapter have shown, this was—and remains—anything but established practice.

Based on discourse of protagonismo and claims of their special children’s right to participate, the representatives of working children’s movements succeeded to gain access to the preparatory conferences in Amsterdam and Oslo and thereby to a process of global governance. However, as soon as they did, they lost effective control over the exercise of this right and were dependent on governments and the staff of international organisations when it came to the level of influence and self-representation they could practically exert. This is primarily due to the fact that the sphere of international law and policy making remains governed by interests and politics instead of by an adherence to rules and principles. Despite historical precedent of NGO involvement in international affairs that started centuries ago (Charnovitz, 1996), there still is no general theory and little empirically grounded accordance on what the exact role of civil society in global governance is or should be (Alston, 2005). For the Amsterdam Conference, the Dutch Government was not persuaded by arguments that the movements had a right to participate in the event, but agreed to their demands of full and ‘equal’ participation because of the threat of bad publicity if they would not allow them to do so. One of the civil servants in charge of organising the conference explained how she discussed this with her responsible Minister:

I said, ‘Yes, we have to do this. It is politically not feasible to just exclude the working children now. We will be crushed in the newspapers and this conference is doomed to fail if we do not accommodate these particular civil interests.’²⁸

Regarding the Oslo Conference, the working children’s representatives initially remained excluded from participating not because they were not well organised, but because the ICFTU held significant influence over the organisation of the conference and the trade unions simply did not want them there. After having witnessed how in Amsterdam the working children challenged the discourse on the worst forms of child labour by expressing their pride as workers and by demanding better working conditions and adapted education, it was considered that their presence in Oslo would undermine the purpose of conference. That it took an actual change in government for the movements to be allowed to participate shows just how erratic and unpredictable the state of international law and policy making remains, and how overtly dependent children are on other, more powerful, actors for the effective exercise of their participation rights. While the ICFTU and the ILO thus had to stomach the physical presence of three working children’s representatives in Oslo, it was made sure that their presence and discourse on work with dignity would not be acknowledged in the official conference report. This was only a harbinger for the ensuing events in Geneva where the ILO held complete control over the drafting process of the new convention, and over which civil society organisations (CSOs) were included or excluded. In a strategic move to provide the ILO with the appearance of being a democratic institution that is open to working children’s participation, Kailash Satyarthi and his Global March Against Child Labour (hereafter: Global March) were co-opted in the process of drafting and promoting the new convention on the worst forms of child labour.

Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour

The Global March Against Child Labour

Whereas the official request of the working children’s movements to participate in the ILO conference in Geneva remained entirely ignored, on the 2nd of June 1998 Kailash Satyarthi and dozens of children of his Global March were invited to the UN’s Palais de Nations for the grand opening of the conference.

Satyarthi had made a name for himself in India as a radical raid and rescue activist during the 1980s. By founding Rugmark (now known as GoodWeave International, which provides certifications for ‘child labour free’ carpets and other woven goods produced in South Asia) (Chowdhry, 2003) he also became an influential international actor. He was furthermore involved in the drafting of the so-called ‘Harkin Bill’ (officially called the Child Labor Deterrence Act) which was unsuccessfully proposed to the US Congress by Senator Tom Harkin on several occasions since 1992, with the aim of imposing an import ban on products produced by child labour.²⁹ But Satyarthi gained real world-wide recognition as the founder and public face of the Global March. The Global March was modelled after a march against child slavery and servitude that was previously organised by Satyarthi throughout India, and which revolved around small rallies in towns and cities. Children that were rescued by Satyarthi’s organisation featured prominently in these rallies, voicing their stories of neglect and abuse (Rotthier, 1995). From this experience sprung the idea for a global march that consisted of different marches crossing Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. In the periphery of the aforementioned 1997 Amsterdam Conference, Satyarthi organised a meeting of NGOs during which the Global March was officially founded. The objective of the Global March was simply to raise global awareness of child labour and to promote education for all.³⁰ After this meeting, a large-scale network and media campaign followed, with information letters sent to hundreds of NGOs all around the world, asking for their support and participation by organising events to coincide with the Global March, which was planned to symbolically end in Geneva to coincide with the 1998 ILC.³¹

Similar to the march in India, the Global March rallies were characterised by the presence and testimonies of rescued or former child labourers. The detailed accounts of anthropologist Susan Levine (1999), who attended the regional Global March events in South Africa, provide a window into why and how the Global March selected those children for the final march in Geneva. One of the organisers explained why he believed that a girl named Noluthando would be a suitable candidate:

You can tell by her shyness that she is quite traumatized by the experience of work. She feels inferior to the other kids here who do not work.… And I think the fact that she cannot speak English works to our advantage for Geneva. We want people to see how work damages children, that they are illiterate because of work and are emotionally traumatized. (Quoted in: Levine, 1999, p. 151)

This strategy was also reflected in the information brochures about the core marchers that were distributed to journalists during the Global March events on the different continents. The list with the names, ages, nationalities and languages of the former or rescued working children was accompanied by a myriad of testimonies, many of them describing incidents of physical and psychological abuse in situations of slavery, servitude and bondage.³²

The Worst Forms of Child Labour

As addressed in the section “Shifting Priorities in Child Labour Policy”, through the Smokey Mountain project and the 1996 global estimates of child labour, the ILO had understood the power of advocacy based on disturbing images and narratives of victimhood. Witnessing the wide support and media attention that the Global March had rallied based on a similar strategy, the ILO engaged in talks with Satyarthi on how it could play a role in the ILC in Geneva and the discussions on the new convention. This would not have been possible without the approval of the workers’ group led by the ICFTU. Whereas the trade unions are generally fiercely opposed to the participation of other (non–trade union) organisations in ILO matters—as these are generally perceived as competition for influence—they too understood that Global March would be a strategically valuable partner. With the consent of the workers’ group, it was agreed that the Global March would be invited to the opening ceremony of the ILC as described above. The former Executive Director of the ILO, Kari Tapiola, explained that “some tweaking of established procedures was needed to enable this unique demonstration” (Tapiola, 2018, p. 17).

The role of Satyarthi and the Global March in the ILC went beyond their symbolic presence and support. During the negotiations about the final text of the convention, the Vice-Chairperson of the ILO’s workers’ group emphasised the special relationship between the Global March and the trade unions as he explained that “the organisers of the Global March had been in constant discussion with the Worker members about reaching an agreement on language acceptable to them” (ILO, 1999).

In the end, the members of the ILO’s drafting committee agreed on the final text of ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (hereafter: C182) which was officially adopted during the 1999 ILC. In its preamble it is clearly stated that C182 was devised to complement C138, which remains “the fundamental instruments on child labour”.³³ In its central article, Article 3, C182 reconceptualises the concept of ‘hazardous work’ as ‘the worst forms of child labour’ and explicitly states that grave acts such as child slavery, child trafficking, forced child soldiering, child prostitution and pornography are to be considered as such forms, and that members states should prioritise eradicating them first. C182 thus does not impose any new standards and is de facto more of a soft law than a legally binding instrument. This helps explain its enormous success in terms of ratifications. Within only two years, C182 had been ratified by 116 countries, steadily growing to 187 out of the 187 ILO member states by 2020 and so becoming the first globally ratified ILO convention and the spearhead of the ILO’s ongoing global anti–child labour campaign, in which Satyarthi and the Global March continue to play prominent roles.

Discussion: Two Lovers Locked in Romance

As was made clear in the previous section, states and intergovernmental organisations remain in strict control of the space for participation by CSOs in global governance, and decisions are often politically and instrumentally motivated. This was the case for the Amsterdam and Oslo conferences, and so it was in Geneva. But CSOs, like the Global March, are political entities as well. They aim to benefit from participating on the international level in a way that goes beyond exerting influence over global governance. This can be understood as a process of ‘mutual legitimation’.

Kenneth Anderson contends that much more than merely a pragmatic choice to benefit from the expertise of (I)NGOs, their involvement provides “some veneer of democratic legitimacy” as they are generally perceived as baring a connection with ‘the people’ (Anderson, 2000, p. 95). NGOs in their turn receive legitimacy and credibility from participating on the highest political echelon. Anderson compares this situation to that of “two lovers locked in romance” in which they offer each other “love tokens of confirmations of legitimacy and eternal fealty” (2000, p. 117). The co-optation of Satyarthi and the Global March provided the ILO with a three-fold package of short- and long-term strategic benefits. First, the fact that the Global March initially presented itself as the representative of a large network of NGOs made its association with the ILO and the development of C182 a clear symbolic democratic affair. It helped the ILO to deflect criticism of it being an unfavourable environment for CSO participation.³⁴ Second, the presence of former and rescued working children that had been selected by the Global March to walk into the halls of the ILC projected onto the ILO the democratic legitimacy of the participation of children and relieved it from the pressure imposed by NGOs and organised working children to allow the latter to participate in ILO matters. Third, in terms of advocacy and fund raising, Satyarthi and the children of the Global March reinforced the proven effective strategy of representing of child labour as being a form of modern slavery and of working children as helpless victims waiting to be rescued. What Satyarthi and the Global March gained in return was ‘representational power’ on the highest echelon of international politics concerning child labour.

In a series of articles on the international politics of child labour, Anna Holzscheiter (2016, 2018) theorises representational power as meaning both acting on behalf of another (thing, person, group, etc.) and creating a discourse while doing so. Holzscheiter differentiates between, on the one hand, the ‘power to represent’, and on the other, ‘the power over representation’. Having the power to represent in processes of international law and policy making means to be acknowledged as the legitimate representative of those affected. The power over representation refers to the discursive practices through which NGOs advocate for others by constructing identities and narratives about those they claim to represent. The ILO provided Satyarthi and the Global March the power to represent working children, who in turn are represented as victims who are not able to speak for themselves. Satyarthi is, in Holzscheiter’s words, “caught between a rock and a hard place” (2016, p. 226), by which she means that he has to support the institutionalised discourse on children’s right to participation while at the same time benefits from representing children as vulnerable victims in service of his own representational power.

Representatives of working children’s movements were not given any formal representational power to represent themselves because they would destabilise the delicate process of mutual legitimation between the ILO and the Global March, and the strategic representational campaign from which they both benefit. That the movements therefore presented a real threat to the ILO’s global campaign was understood and addressed when the final text of the convention was presented. A member of the drafting committee made explicit the paternalistic approach that had prevailed, and insisted to not take seriously the existence and claims of the absent working children’s movements:

To conclude, ignore those who talk of children’s rights to work. Remember their right to learn and play, and our responsibilities as adults to choose for them a better life. There is a burden on our shoulders. It does not hurt like a load of bricks on the shoulders of a child, of a child labourer, nor as rape hurts a child forced into sex work. But it is a burden we must carry.³⁵

Concluding Remarks

The year during which this chapter was elaborated, 2021, was declared the UN International Year on the Elimination of Child Labour (IYECL).³⁶ The main objective of the IYECL was to raise awareness and accelerate progress towards the global goal of eradicating all forms of child labour by 2025. This latter objective has been adopted by all UN member states as part of Target 8.7 of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).³⁷ Target 8.7 is the latest policy instrument in the ILO’s global anti–child labour campaign, and in the light of the above discussions on the worst forms of child labour, it may be no surprise that the target furthermore calls for the abolition of modern slavery, trafficking and forced labour. During the IYECL, Satyarthi, who has remained the public face of the ILO’s anti–child labour campaign ever since the adoption of C182, was appointed as one of 17 special ‘UN SDG Advocates’ whose task it is to raise global awareness about the SDGs, and about Target 8.7 in particular. This, again, is hardly surprising. To gauge how effective the campaign on the worst forms of child labour with Satyarthi as public face and voice has been, one only needs to type ‘child labour’ into any online image search engine, and an array of very young Brown and Black children meet the eye; all seemingly living in the Global South, all performing activities that resemble slave-like conditions, all waiting to be rescued from peril. While it might be intuitively and emotionally appealing, there are a couple of serious problems with this strategy.

First, while these representations do certainly allude to the harsh, dangerous and often immoral situations in which real children find themselves, critical researchers have shown the ambiguity and nuances of the different realities that are captured by container terms such as child slavery, trafficking (Howard, 2017) and marriage (Horii, 2020). Such studies show that children involved in such practices are often exercising agency and that the situations they find themselves in are not always so straightforwardly ‘wrong’ as campaigns make them out to be. Second, representing child labour by these forms obscures the fact that behind the broad category of ‘child labour’ lies an immensely diverse phenomenon, and numerous empirical studies have highlighted the heterogeneous experiences of children that work for many different reasons, be it economic, cultural, social or emotional, under many different conditions.³⁸ As mentioned earlier on, in many countries in the Global South, C138 allows children to work full-time the day they turn 14 years, while an 11-year-old that is helping a parent tend their land or at a local market for one hour per week is considered to one of the 160 million children that the ILO estimates were in child labour in 2020 (ILO, 2021). The ILO’s own figures furthermore suggest that the vast majority of working children combine some form of formal education and work, and that most children considered to be in child labour work in non-hazardous work which can have beneficial effects as well (Bourdillon et al., 2010). Third, for reasons alluded to above, this one-dimensional representation of child labour which has come to dominate the public discourse not only obscures, but also excludes representations of more diverse experiences and approaches, as the working children’s movements experienced in their own quest for representational power on the international level; during the 1990s in Amsterdam, Oslo and Geneva, but also more recently in a process revolving around a new law in Bolivia in the drafting of which organised working children were involved (van Daalen & Mabillard, 2019), and in Buenos Aires during the ILO’s IV Global Conference as described in the introduction. As Noah Peleg (2018, p. 430) has noted:

It seems that the organisers of the 2017 IV World Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour in Buenos Aires had not ‘security concerns’ but rather stability concerns. Enabling the participation of the working children’s movements would have destabilised their agenda and their paternalistic approach.

Working children’s movements certainly do not represent all working children, and their demands and solutions should be as critically scrutinised as should the ILO’s mainstream abolitionist approach. But they certainly do represent many of the diverse realities that working children experience and the problems they encounter. Furthermore, they have shown to be ready to step up and transform insights based everyday experiences and into a discourse and agenda that lends itself to international law and policy making. Child labour will not be abolished by 2025, nor will it probably ever be. If we may believe the ILO’s (2021) latest global estimates, 160 million children are currently working in some form or another, and it is predicted that the effects of the worsening climate crisis and the current Covid-19 pandemic will add millions more to the under-18 work force. These children deserve creative and effective local programmes and policies guided by a sensible and evidence-based international framework infused with children’s own experiences and based on a more holistic understanding of their rights and wellbeing. The past has shown that the exceptions and flexibility clauses of the C138 can accommodate such an approach, and working children’s movements would make for valuable actors in a reconceptualisation of the ILO’s global approach to child labour. For this to happen the ILO needs to first untangle itself from the locked-in romance with the Global March and instead prioritise those who it claims to want to protect.

Notes

• 1. This agenda was published as the Buenos Aires Declaration and can be accessed here: https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_597667/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm (accessed on 11 January 2022).

• 2. The opening ceremony was recorded and can be viewed in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMMd6gsnGcc (accessed on 11 January 2022).

• 3. The full letter can be found on https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/secretariat-of-movement-of-latin-american-and-caribbean-working-children-and-adolescen/ (accessed on 13 December 2021). At the time of writing this chapter no answer has been received from the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

• 4. The full article can be found here: www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/child-labor-in-bolivia-is-legally-permissable-a-1130131.html (accessed on 11 January 2022).

• 5. The text of C138 is available from: https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C138 (accessed on 11 January 2022).

• 6. C138—Article 3 (1).

• 7. C138—Article 2 (4).

• 8. C138—Article 5 (3). For a more elaborate discussion of these and other exceptions provided by C138, see: Hanson and Vandaele (2003); Nieuwenhuys (2007).

• 9. Interview with former ILO staff member, 30 November 2016.

• 10. Unlike other UN agencies, the ILO is a tripartite organisation which is composed of member states as well as of representatives of trade unions, the so-called ‘worker’s group’, and of employers’ organisations. In 2006 the ICFTU merged with the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) and became the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

• 11. In addition, the ICFTU managed to secure the inclusion of the ‘abolition of child labour’ in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which placed a moral obligation on all member states to adhere to these principles and rights to whether or not they have ratified the related conventions. For a critical discussion on the Declaration and its moral force, see: Alston (2004).

• 12. In his book on social movements and human rights, Neil Stammers (2009) addresses and theorises ‘the paradox of institutionalisation’ by pointing out how power and interest distort the codification and institutionalisation of natural rights.

• 13. Ironically, while the recurrent global estimates have since been closely associated with images and narratives about the worst forms of child labour, these figures do not actually include any data on practices such as slavery, prostitution or soldiering, as these remain outside the scope of what can be learned through the household surveys on which the global estimates are based. For a critical discussion of the global estimates, see: Janzen (2018).

• 14. For an insightful discussion about the dynamics between adult and working children in the Peruvian context, see: Taft (2015).

• 15. The main facilitator of the Kundapur meeting, and the movements’ international campaign that followed, was the International Working Group on Child Labour (IWGCL). The IWGCL was created as a collaboration between two international child rights NGOs, the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) and Defence for Children International (DCI) and existed between 1992 and 1997. For more information on the IWGCL and the different projects it initiated, see: IWGCL (IWGCL, 1998).

• 16. IWGCL, ‘1st International Meeting of Working Children Kundapur (India)’ (Archive Defence for Children International Nederland, Inventory Number ARCH03007, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 1996).

• 17. Ibid.

• 18. Letter from the Dutch Government to the IWGCL (Archive Defence for Children International Nederland, inventory number ARCH03007, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 24 January 1997).

• 19. Unless stated otherwise, the following accounts are descriptions of video recordings of these preparatory meetings, that were retrieved from the archives of DCI-Netherlands in Leiden. The videos are on file with the author.

• 20. Interview with former ICTFU staff member, 14 December 2015.

• 21. Ministry of Foreign Affairs the Netherlands, ‘Agreement Concerning: Working Children’s Meeting, Oslo, 23 October—1 November 1997 (Activity No. WW128501)’ (Archive Inventory 21586, Inventory Number 1950, National Archive, The Hague, 13 October 1996).

• 22. International Save the Children Alliance, ‘Report on the Working Children’s Forum Oslo, Norway 21 St October—2nd November 1997 and the International Conference on Child Labour 27th—30th October 1997’ (Save the Children Resource Centre, 1998).

• 23. The ILC is an annual forum during which ILO delegates identify and discuss social questions and draft, adopt and monitor international labour conventions.

• 24. Letter to the ILO Director-General (Archive Defence for Children International Nederland, inventory number ARCH03007, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 10 March 1998).

• 25. The United States is the only UN member state to have not ratified the UNCRC.

• 26. The other general principles are: ‘non-discrimination’, ‘best interest of the child’ and ‘the right to life, survival, and development’. For a critical discussion of the general principles, see: Hanson and Lundy (2017).

• 27. Shortly after UNGASS, UNICEF (2003) published its ‘State of the World’s Children 2003’ which sets out why it is important to listen to the views and opinions of children in global policy making.

• 28. Interview with former Dutch civil servant, 29 June 2016.

• 29. While the Harkin Bill never came became law, its mere submission had a deleterious effect in Bangladesh where thousands of children were abruptly dismissed from garment factories, many of whom ended up in much worse conditions (Hertel, 2006; Rahman et al., 1999).

• 30. Satyarthi would also become one of the public faces of the global Education for All campaign (Miles & Singal, 2010).

• 31. Novib, ‘Global March Against Child Labour Report of The Hague Workshop’ (Archive Defence for Children International Nederland, inventory number ARCH03007, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 1997).

• 32. Global March Against Child Labour, ‘Core Marchers Coming to the Netherlands 21–24 May, 1998’ (Archive Inventory 2.15.86, Inventory Number 1950, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1998).

• 33. The text of C182 is available from: https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C182 (accessed on 11 January 2022).

• 34. For more on this critique and the difficult relationship between trade unions and other CSOs, see: Thomann (2008).

• 35. https://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc87/com-chid.htm (accessed 11 January 2022).

• 36. General Assembly resolution 73/327, International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, 2021, A/RES/73/327 (25 July 2019), available from https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3814287?ln=en (accessed 11 January 2022).

• 37. For the full text of Target 8.7, see: https://www.alliance87.org/target-8-7/ (accessed 11 January 2022).

• 38. See for instance the work of Olga Nieuwenhuys (1996) and Tatek Abebe (2007), to name just a couple.