"I make dresses I'll never wear" - child labour

Recently I read a newspaper article about child labour. It left me thinking what my own childhood would have looked like if I had been one of these children forced to work from young age. Here in Austria we can barely imagine what it is like. We were mostly lucky, but unfortunately very many children were not. 

Around the world, 215 million young people have to work to feed themselves and their families. How is this possible?

In theory, young people under 18 are protected by the UN Convention and the ILO (International Labour Organisation), which forbid child labour. But in practice it looks different.

Millions of children are working all day long, sometimes in dangerous conditions. One of he worst examples for this is  the use of children in mining and quarrying. Some of them even start at the age of 3! The young workers have to use highly toxic chemicals and have to work in slavery-like conditions. They have to carry heavy loads and stand, dive or squat for long hours in order to extract mineral ore. And this carries long term effects on physical health! Work also means that children cannot go to school and without qualifications; they have no chance to finding better work.

But they often have no choice. Even if their parents are willing to send them to school it is impossible because they need the income of their children to survive. At the age of 10 a child already makes a big contribution to the family income and at age 16 a young person almost earns as much as an adult.

In order to let their children go to school, the adults in the families must earn enough and education must be free.