End child labour in all its forms by 2025
Child labor is still quite a big challenge globally. there is about 2 billion children in the world around 152 million children are still in child labor. if you think about the garment chain specifically there will be children. Child labor occurring in all different tiers of the garment supply chain. Child labor is children under the age of 15 engaged in any form of work and hazardous forms of child labor. Is any child that might be engaged in in any activity that's detrimental to their physical emotional or mental well-being. So in the government context that will be things like working in the dying parts of the supply chain. Some handling chemicals that they just shouldn't be handling it might be night work or it might be working on machinery that's just not built for the physical kind of development status of their bodies. children potentially could be having a variety of jobs all the way in the garment supply chain so they might be at the at the raw material end so they might be involved in things like cotton production and cotton harvesting they could potentially be involved in some of the dying processes as well. And all the way into the factory work and quite recently we've we have had cases of underage or to child labor occurring in factories and they were using fake identities in order to gain access to those factories. Around 70 percent of children are working in the agricultural sector. in the garment context that means looking at things like cotton production cotton harvesting all the way into looking at kind of factory work. So the drivers of child labor are really complicated that often systemic ultimately is going to be rooted in poverty. But some of the dry drivers of child labor might include a lack of access to education or a lack of access to quality education. It might be things like birth registration. So children who haven't been registered at birth find it harder to gain access to social services like education and healthcare which could be a driver for child labor. Also sometimes it's a rite of passage. sometimes children will be engaging in child labor because it's a rite of passage into adulthood. And so the drivers of child labor are really often quite systemic and complicated. Children's rights are entitlements that children have. So children have all the rights that we have as adults but they also have additional rights which recognize their development status and sometimes their unique vulnerabilities. So children have a right to play for example and they have a right to education which we don't have as adults.
UNICEF takes a really holistic approach to thinking about how business is impacting on the lives of children. We tend to take a kind of three tiered approach. So we look at issues as they affect children in the workplace. And so we think about issues around child labor also going into the decent work and thinking about what does decent work mean for parents and caregivers. What does it mean to have a healthy working environment. We also look at community issues and work to build systems that make communities more resilient and obviously by having a more resilient community. You then have a more resilient workforce. they work in the kind of community space but also work in the policy space with with governments with both national and regional representatives to look at some of the policy challenges that might be driving businesses negative impacts on children's rights in the workplace. running a number of different factory programs in Bangladesh and Vietnam and there we work with factory management to really understand how their factory might be impacting on the lives of children. looking at things like maternity provision, working hours. and breastfeeding in the workplace.
There's a new piece of legislation in Vietnam which entitles women to an hour breastfeeding break during the day. And so Unicef has been working with factory management to really help them implement that and that policy within the workplace. and have actually seen retention rates increase and absenteeism in the workplace decreased because mothers are able to give their children the the nutrition that they need and so less mothers are having to take time off work to care for their children. -so fashion companies have a number of roles to play.
Firstly they have a role in just recognizing that their businesses are having an impact on children more and more fashion brands now have a human rights policy which is great, for their to be more human rights policies recognizing particular vulnerable groups of rights holders. companies should be naming children as one of the particular groups of vulnerable rights holders that they might be impacting. So that's the first thing really having a kind of policy and commitment to, to children. And the second thing is around transparency so really working to increase the transparency in their supply chain. mapping your Tier 1 but then also starting to think beyond Tier 1 and thinking about the particular vulnerabilities that are involved in things like subcontracting.
the third thing Unicef really want is for businesses to think about their own buying practices. what is it in the way that they are buying which might be driving child rights impacts further down the supply chain.
things like late ordering which means that companies have to find different subcontractors to sometimes manage the load that fashion brand is now asking them to meet. thinking about the price that they're paying their factories as well and thinking about whether or not the price that they're paying their factories will enable them to pay their workforce in a way which doesn't just support their workforce but also supports their families.
fashion brands have a really important role to play in in increasing the development outcomes for children. So when it comes to things like decent work fashion brands have a really important role to play in promoting decent work. promoting good working hours promoting things like a decent wage promoting good health and safety in the workplace because these things will have a massive impact on children and particularly in the context of the garment sector which is a sector that's dominated by women. The improvements that the fashion brands can make in the workplace would just have a big impact on the women and her family. It's also shown that things like increasing women's wages women are more likely to spend a proportion of their wages on the family. So that's going to have a big impact on the lives of children, similarly thinking about issues around gender equality as well promoting gender equality promoting women's economic empowerment decreasing things like domestic violence has this double dividend. So it has an impact on the women but it also has an impact on children and the women's family as well.
one of the things that companies could be doing to increase transparency in supply chain is moving beyond audits. at the moment companies are very very reliant on Social Compliance audits which involve an auditor going into the factory for one or two days to see what the factories are like to see what the working conditions are like to get a sense of what people are being paid. [that will give you a snapshot in time as to what's going on in that factory But it won't really help identify some of the underlying systemic or root drivers of of labor rights issues in the workplace which then have an impact on children's rights]
companies need to start thinking about how do they go beyond audits, the best way to do that is just by engaging in the local community. reaching out to community stakeholders, asking workers questions not just in their capacity as workers but also in their capacity as as parents and caregivers and understand how the workplace is impacting in their wider, their wider life.
UNICEF has a number of tools to help businesses understand identify and address where their impacts might be on children.
recently they've launched an online open source free platform for businesses called the Childs Atlas which allows businesses to go onto this platform and input some of their sourcing data or country information data and it will give them a very broad overview of where some of their impacts might be on children in the workplace marketplace and the community. there's also a number of different toolkits around how businesses can engage child right stakeholders how businesses might want to integrate children into policies and also around how businesses can integrate children's rights into human rights due diligence.
Human rights due diligence in a nutshell involves understanding what the impacts might be on human rights. And then going out to identify and then address and where there are impacts on on human rights to then put in place a plan to mitigate those impacts and then remediate where there might be an impact. The more policymakers can legislate or encourage companies to improve transparency to improve them information that's out there and that will increase action by companies to better understand what's really going on in their supply chain. Consumers are also part of that buying supply chain. it is also really important for consumers to think about how they are buying as well and what they're buying and actually fast fashion has driven pressures down the supply chain which has led to impacts on labor rights and impacts on human rights and children's rights more generally. it is important that consumers thinking about how they're buying and how they're involved in this developing fast fashion industry. when you're out shopping just be mindful of who you're buying from. if you want to buy those clothes ask the questions so ask the companies that you're buying from. Where are they buying, what provisions do they have in place to make sure that workers all across their supply chains are protected.
Fashion consumers have a really important role to play in just asking questions. So holding fashion brands accountable for their human rights policies and making it clear to fashion brands what your values are as a consumer and you don't want to be buying clothes or products from businesses that don't operate in a way that meets your own values. It will be great if fashion consumers could ask companies to publish information about their supply chain so wherever they sourcing from wherever their factories and encouraging them to move beyond that first year to really start thinking what subcontracting might look like and what kind of lower tiers of the supply chain look like all the way down into the raw , raw material sourcing. So where is the raw material for those products coming in the first place.
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