Child Labour

HORREL, S. and J. HUMPHRIES (1995), "The Exploitation of Little Children: Child Labour and the Family Economy in the Industrial Revolution", Explorations in Economic History 32, pp. 485-516.

Introduction:

Industrialisation has been at the centre of revolutionary changes in the world of commerce and has had huge impact on the lives of many. Such impacts have indeed been the well published transformation of labour practices and the well being of many native economic statuses as a result. However, industrialisation was not simply a written script waiting to gain evolution step by step but it has instead been the most unexpected and controversial of labour practices that played a major role and helping hand in its progress. The topic in discussion here is child labour and its illegal implications in respectable industries for the purpose of contributing to family economy which has forever changed the face of commerce. Such practices are indeed unacceptable and should be completely discarded but the fact that it remains a topic of ethical discussions among business leaders nowadays and an ongoing practice is to a huge extent motivated by the inevitable success achieved by families and businesses in the past.

Child labour can be considered to be a cruel practice in the social corporate responsibility of an organisation as it expose children at very young ages(usually below 14 years of age) in the working environment which imminently deprives them from their childhood, impedes on the child ability to transition to adulthood and effectively block their access to education. This therefore reduces their choices as they grow up and expose them to conditions harmful to their health and developments.

But it's very important for the purpose of this literature not to be entirely focused on the effect of child labour but also its causes. As reported in the related article, the economic states of families before and during the industrialisation have been the very heart of the exploitation of child labour. But just to what extent were the circumstances of families in the industrial era that fuelled their income gaining instinct to indulge their children to such cruel practices? Why could anything not be done at the first sight of such malpractices in the past? Has the phenomenon of globalisation got anything to do with the child's labour popularisation and evolution in modern commerce? Those are rhetorical questions which a line will eventually have to be drawn under in this literature but in this essay I am also going to carefully analyse the causes and origins of child labour and the impact that the rapid growth of industrialisation had on its dominant burst onto the commerce stage.

Summary:

The child labour topic of discussion was written by Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries and effectively investigates the issue of child labour from his first sight in human history and the economic ramifications which highly influenced helpless children being utilised as a source for great economic gains. Such practices occurred in the ages of industrialisation and the details revealed in this article investigate the participation of children at younger ages using a data set of household budgets and structures as proclaimed by the author.

Thompson (1963, P.349) described "the exploitation of little children" as the most shameful aspects of British industrialisation. The idea that industrialisation in Britain progressed at rapid pace with children being regarded as an important labour force component contradicts and puts the success that it gave to the world of commerce in shadow. There were however differential views and opinions as to what the exact causes of child labour were with some authors associating its increase with the rapid spread of domestic industry. Others as revealed in the article saw factory expansions as a promotion of child labour but the most dramatic and extensively controversial of views came from Cunningham (1990) who claimed that the major problem during the industrial period was the unemployment of children rather than their overwork. This therefore means that the inclusion of children in the labour force was seen as a compulsory approach by their respective families and was fully executed once the child was considered fit to perform works whilst at the same time ignoring their immaturity as explained in some passages of this article. His views are however legitimate to be discussed as it evidently relates to the biggest outrage of child employment which is the age at which children started to work. Children were put in work for the purpose of contributing to family economies and so parents were careless and complicit in pushing children to work to bring some stability to their financial status. According to Sadler's report of 1982 revealed in the article, there were suggestions that some children were supporting their parents in idleness and they had no other choice but to accept the circumstances and it "caused outrage in those eras as it became very visible and inevitably arose immensely into a huge concern" ( Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1973).

The article also goes as far as stressing a huge emphasis on the qualitative dimension of children's works which analyses the natural changes that occurred in the workforce as they performed a diversity of tasks in factories under the guidance of parents but were also moved to different environment such as the cotton mills where the working conditions tended to be harsh (Thompson 1963, P.306 -309). Industrialisation promoted the availability of different workable sectors for children to work such as mining and outwork trades which clearly eliminated any thoughts of factories being the main cause of the increase of child labour.

As Pinchbeck and Hewitt (1973) pointed out, children had been employed for long hours in domestic industry and especially agriculture before factories became the norm. And moreover, the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1834 reduced the number of children working in factories as male real wages increased and technology reached a new height in the industry.

The analysis of the overall impact of child labour during industrialisation has also been oriented towards the gender factor with some researchers keen to find out the roles of females in the labour force and ways in which economic circumstances impacted differentially on males and females.

All speculative comments and views revealed above gave us a brief understanding of the nature of child labour and its possible causes but its important to emphasise on the main direction of the article and not to stray from that as it's primarily focused on the quantitative evolution of child labour and its relationship to changes