Child Labour

Honorable Judges, respected teachers and dear fellows, Assalam-o-alaikum. I want to open my thoughts in this speech on child labour. Could you imagine living in the west as a child and being chained to a loom to weave a carpet in a poorly lit and dirty building? Being deprived of your education and childhood all for Just a few pennies a day? Child labour is a familiar topic, yet you might be wondering what it means. Child labour is simply the employment of children as wage earners. Children of any age can be a victim of child labour and it is a huge problem in third world countries.

Even in Canada we have children as young as seven delivering newspapers, but in Canada children get paid fairly. In other countries like India, children can be chained to looms and forced to make carpets. They are forced to work in sweatshops, making toys and firecrackers for very low pay. Child labour was a serious problem during the Industrial Revolution in Great Brittan in the 1700''s and the problem started to touch the other regions of globe with the development of technical resources. The said labour was getting very much low amount as remuneration as compared to the elder labour. There was another reason for low payment to children.

Being so small creature the children were unable to participate in labour unions and held strikes to demand for their rights. Child labour was also offered with cheap facilities of education and other fringe benefits. In 1802, British Parliament made the first laws against child labour. They law said the employment of children less than nine years of age in cotton mills was not allowed. Similar Conditions existed in the United States. In 1832, about 40% of all factory workers in New England were between those ages of seven and sixteen. So, in 1836, Massachusetts passed the first state child labour law.

This law prohibited the employment of children under 1 5 in any factory unless the children were attending school. By 1860, however, only a few states had outlawed factory employment of children under ten or twelve years of age and in 1890 almost 20% of U. S. children were still employed full time. In 1916, the first federal child labour law passed the U. S. congress, setting standards for hiring children. They had to be sixteen or older to work in mines and quarries, fourteen or older for other types of work and could not e employed longer than eight hours per day and forty-eight hours per week.

The law also prohibited night work for children under sixteen. In 1938, the Fair Labour Standard Act was passed to promote child labour reform. Children fourteen and fifteen years old are permitted to work only a limited number of occupations outside of school hours and the law requires employers to pay child labourers U. S. minimum wage. Try to ensure that the products you buy are not made by children. Do some research on the manufacturers and the laws of the country that how old you are or how young, can make a difference. Thank you very much.