Uzbekistan ban on child labor pushes 4m adults into cotton industry
The ban on child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry has increased pressure on adults to join the Uzbek cotton harvest to fill gaps in the workforce.
The government enforced the ban in 2008, following protests from leading retailers and fashion brands.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) praised Uzbekistan's government earlier this year for ensuring that children were kept out of the harvest workforce. However, mandatory manual labor in the nation’s cotton industry is still under criticism.
The Uzbek government has imposed new quotas on schools, hospitals, and local administrations, which required them to send up to 60% of their adult staff to work in the harvest this year.
The Cotton Campaign, at the forefront of the fight against child labor in Uzbekistan, published a report last week showing that 4m adults were instructed to work the fields, or face fines.
Umida Niyazova of the Uzbek-German Forum said: "Cotton in Uzbekistan is produced by massive human rights violations, including forced labor […] The government needs to dismantle the forced labor system."
Our author Eric V. Edmonds has written about child employment laws, asserting that policy should consider the root causes of child labor. He notes that coordination with compulsory schooling laws has the greatest impact on reducing child labor, and that wider contextual factors such as poverty should also be well monitored.
Read more here.
Related articles:
Does minimum age of employment regulation reduce child labor? by Eric V. Edmonds
Designing labor market regulations in developing countries, by Gordon Betcherman