Child labour in TT

The Ministry of Labour is adopting a hypocritical attitude with respect to the enormity of child labour in this country, when in establishing a steering committee on the prevention and elimination of child labour it has the committee give priority to dealing with children working at the Beetham and Forres Park landfills, and infers that this is the major problem. The Ministry of Labour was reacting to a 2002 Report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that there were more than 17.4 million underage children working in the Caribbean. But there are scores of children, incidentally a problem for decades, who work as male and female prostitutes exposing themselves and others on a regular basis to sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

In turn, there are thousands more who work in the illicit drug trade, many of them in the nation’s schools, while others work as bandits and pick pockets, and yet others as runners for hardened adult criminals. This is not an overnight phenomenon, and the Labour Ministry’s vow to “spare no effort” to eliminate the “insidious evil” of child labour, its horribly cynical reaction to the ILO Report, is a clumsy attempt to mask its own inaction and prior unconcern. Several ILO Reports on child labour have been published from 1919, when the ILO was formed, and it is inconceivable that officials at the Ministry of Labour are today attempting to make the public believe that they are only now aware of what the Ministry affects to describe with feigned disgust as that “insidious evil.”

And this, particularly, as Trinidad and Tobago had adopted, as a member of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the ILO’s 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. And, of course, the several other Conventions before and since. Were Ministry of Labour officials not aware that the United Nations had declared in The Millenium Report published in 2001 that approximately 17.5 million children in Latin America (including the Caribbean) “between the ages of five and 14 work either-full time or part-time.” And was this country not part of the international survey conducted? The question of child labour, of children from as young as five years, internationally, and from eight and nine years, in this country, being exploited for the gain of others is not something with which the Labour Ministry should play games.

Already, too many children in Trinidad and Tobago are growing up unable to read and write because of being forced into the labour market at a young age, or when they become adults, unable to acquire the most elementary skills which would allow them to upgrade themselves. The ILO study has pointed to areas in which child labour has been continuously exploited and which clearly are applicable to this country — agriculture, domestic work, scavenging, prostitution and pornography. Perhaps what the Labour Ministry is telling the country is that successive Administrations, including the present Administration, until now have been delinquent in addressing the problem of child labour. But having tacitly admitted this lapse it must be prepared to effectively tackle the problem, which has been a contributory factor in all too many instances to juvenile delinquency, the spread of HIV/AIDS, increasing crimes, to the spread of the illegal drug trade to schoolchildren and to hobbling of the country’s social and economic development.