Hidden Hands

International Perspectives on Children's Work and Labour

Angela Bolton, Phillip Mizen, Christopher Pole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415242431
• eBook ISBN: 9781134547227
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Hidden Hands focuses on a specific and neglected area of contemporary child welfare; that of children's paid work and labour. This book provides the first cross-cultural examination of children's productive activities, their relationship to children's broader social lives, and their implications for the child's education, welfare and well-being. The contributors look at the situation both here and overseas. They discuss issues including conflicts between schooling, education and work in the UK, child poverty, motivating children to work, children from ethnic minorities, the work and labour of children in industrialised countries and the situation in the US, Denmark, Germany and Russia.

The growth in the study of childhood encompasses anthropology, sociology, social policy and social work, as well as education. This book will be of use in all of these areas.

1 ‘Hidden hands’

International perspectives on children’s work and labour

Christopher Pole, Phillip Mizen and Angela Bolton

Several of the chapters in this volume started out as papers presented at a one-day conference on children’s work and labour held at the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom, in May 1999. The idea for the conference itself emerged from a study of children’s work and labour,‘Work, Labour and Economic Life in Late Childhood’, based at the universities ofWarwick and Leicester (Mizen, Pole and Bolton 1999) and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the wider research initiative ‘Children 5–16:Growing into the Twenty-First Century’. The aims of the conference, and indeed of our own individual research project within the programme, were to place under the spotlight children’s work and labour in contemporary Britain, while also providing a platform from which to promote the wider discussion of what now amounts to a considerable body of research. These aims remain those which essentially underpin this volume.

However, while both the original research project and conference focused only on Britain, this volume widens the scope considerably by looking at the work and labour of children in a range of different countries spanning North America, western Europe and Russia. In this respect we feel our book makes a distinctive contribution to recent and on-going debate. Not only do the various contributions extend across several different national contexts, they are united by their specific interest in the phenomenon of children’s work and labour in the ‘developed’ or ‘industrialised’ world. In one sense it may seem surprising that the issue of children’s work and labour should still be considered a legitimate source of research and enquiry in what are generally speaking very wealthy countries, where the labour of children is usually regarded as a past evil or somebody else’s ‘problem’. But the very fact that we have been able to include contributions from researchers that range from the large and prosperous economies of the United States of America and Germany, through to economies like Russia ‘in transition’ to a free market, is testimony to the fact that in many countries throughout the ‘developed’ world, the act of labouring among children still constitutes a ‘normal’ aspect of their everyday lives.

Most of the chapters in this volume begin from the premise that employment for children in the countries this volume covers is a majority experience, or at least one not confined to a small minority. This simple statement itself may well come as a revelation to many readers and if this is the case then we have accomplished one of our objectives in putting this book together. Read on a country by country basis, the chapters included here should allow the reader to obtain a good idea of the extent and nature of work and labour among children in a number of key countries in the industrialised world. But our intention is also to do more than this by highlighting the different approaches that have been utilised when considering the phenomenon of children’s work and labour in the ‘developed’ world. Traditionally, studies of children’s labour in countries such as those covered here have emphasised the significance of work as a source of socialisation and preparation for what was regarded as the serious or ‘proper’ work to be undertaken after the end of formal full-time education. Here too, a number of the chapters approach the issue in their respective countries by treating children’s work and labour as significant primarily in terms of its developmental implications. The task for analysis is therefore to come to a measured opinion about the appropriate role for work in promoting healthy psycho-social development. Other chapters included here advocate a different emphasis, however. In these chapters, attention is shifted away from what work signifies for children’s future lives to what children say about their work in the present. This in turn is part of a more general shift in emphasis towards a more child-centred approach to the study of children’s work and labour. Here the starting point is children’s own experiences of work and the fact that the decision to enter work constitutes a rational response to the immediate experiences of childhood, whatever these may be. Consequently, a number of the chapters included here endorse the general view that work must be seen as integral to understanding what childhood is and what children are, rather than merely as a means of speculating on what childhood experience may lead to and what children may become as a result.

In inviting researchers to contribute to this volume a further intention has been not just to portray the different kinds of work in which children engage, but also to consider the consequences of their participation in paid employment for different aspects of their lives. These include their motivations for working, the significance of money to their lives, the impact of child employment on their families and the relationship between school and work. As editors of the volume, it seemed to us that although – as with adult workers – children engage in work primarily because it provides them with an income, it is their reasons for doing so and the use to which this income is put that can extend our understanding of child employment beyond a simple cash nexus, to include the consequences, responsibilities and possibilities which access to money brings to working children. Accordingly, contributors to the volume have considered child workers not just as peripheral wage labourers incidental to the businesses in which they are involved, but also more centrally as producers. They also consider their roles as consumers and the relationship between this and aspects of youth culture and their capacity for participation therein. In short, the volume attempts to unpack the complexities of child employment not merely from the perspective of the work place and in relation to the wage worker (the child), but also in relation to wider social and economic issues which shape the reasons for work, the experience and some of the consequences of it.

In the main, this volume is concerned with children’s paid work. This should not be taken as indicating either a lack of awareness on our part of other forms of children’s labour, nor a relegation of the importance of these below that of remunerated work. Indeed, the chapter by Saul Becker and his colleagues is testament to the sometimes considerable involvement of children in the care of a relative. Furthermore, Jens Qvortrup’s chapter argues forcefully for the need to treat children’s school work as a form of socially necessary labour, since it is through schooling that children add value to future processes of wealth creation. The one notable omission, however, is a dedicated chapter examining children’s relationship to and involvement in domestic labour. Aspects of this relationship are addressed in Anne Solberg’s chapter on children’s work and labour in Norway, where she argues forcefully for the need to view children as a productive element, and not simply a cost, in a clearly established domestic division of labour. Nevertheless, our decision not to include a whole chapter on children’s domestic labour is simply a pragmatic one. The research in this area that we are most aware of has already been well discussed elsewhere (Morrow 1996).

Collectively the chapters have established that work is a key aspect in the lives of many children throughout Europe, North America and Russia, and that in many cases it has great economic and social significance to the lives of the children and their families, and indeed to their employers. The authors have shown that work is not an activity which is incidental to the definition and experience of childhood. Moreover, the fact that this point has been made by different authors in the context of different and contrasting national economies and work cultures serves to emphasise the point. Any attempt to understand contemporary childhood and the forms it takes in industrialised countries, therefore, must surely incorporate and recognise the significance of children’s work and labour.

This volume consists of eleven chapters authored by some of the leading researchers in the field of children’s work and employment in their respective countries and in some cases beyond. Chapters 2 to 6 deal with issues relating to children and work in the United Kingdom while chapters 7 to 11 are provided by authors from Denmark, Germany, Norway, Russia and the USA. While points of comparison and similarity between the different countries are not always made explicit in the text, these become very clear as the chapters are read in relation to one another.

The contents

The chapter by Jim McKechnie and Sandy Hobbs that opens Part I in many respects sets the scene for the volume by outlining the extent and nature of children’s work in Britain. In doing this, the chapter provides a useful overview of much of the literature on children and work relating, in particular, to the UK and the USA. The chapter also introduces important questions about the relationship between work and schooling, and discusses the complexity of the relationship between children’s participation in paid work and the experience of poverty. These issues are picked up in the following chapter by Sue Middleton and Julia Loumidis, who highlight the recent government initiatives aimed at reducing poverty in the UK, under the aegis of the New Deal. While the emphasis here is firmly on getting adults back to work as a means of alleviating poverty, Middleton and Loumidis point out that the situation is much more ambiguous in relation to children’s work. Here, the policy emphasis is upon keeping as many children and young people in full-time education as possible, at least up to the age of 18. The chapter examines these contradictions and the experience of children’s work more generally in the context of a nationally representative survey of life styles and living standards of 11–16 year olds in the UK. Data from the survey give rise to a discussion of the economics of part-time work, how experiences differ between young people in varying socio-economic circumstances and the implications for the future lives of the young people.

In Chapter 4 Phillip Mizen, Christopher Pole and Angela Bolton pick up some of the themes introduced in the previous chapter but from a different methodological position. Based on detailed qualitative research of just seventy children, this chapter examines children’s work experiences in terms of the types of jobs that they do, their motivations for work, the uses to which they put their wages and the significance of work to their lives and to their families. The chapter engages with issues of poverty, independence for the young worker, social life and spending patterns.While the research takes as its starting point some of the insights from the ‘new sociology of childhood’, the authors argue that an emphasis on children’s agency on its own is not sufficient to explain their participation in the labour market. They stress the need to take account of structural forces which govern children’s social lives and, in the context of work, position them as a powerless social group.

In the chapter by Miri Song, the labour of children in Chinese take-away restaurants in the United Kingdom is the focus. Through her qualitative study, Song argues that the dominant western notion of children as dependent upon their parents is to some extent brought into doubt as far as the experience of these children and their families is concerned, since it is the former’s labour that is crucial to both the welfare of their parents and the viability of family businesses. Such a distinctive relationship, she argues, is further underlined by the experience of being part of an immigrant community. The resulting isolation and subjection to racist practices further intensify the moral and material pressures on children to direct their ability to labour towards the family interest.

In Chapter 6 the emphasis shifts slightly in terms of the definition of work as Saul Becker, Chris Dearden and Jo Aldridge examine the role of children as carers. Indeed part of the chapter is a discussion of whether caring should be considered as a form of work. Having established fairly unequivocally that it should, the chapter then draws on the authors’ research to outline the possible implications of children’s caring duties for their own physical and emotional health, their schooling and general well-being. The chapter is important in raising questions about the concept of childhood as a protected phase in the life course.

Chapter 7 by Jens Qvortrup provides a useful link between the chapters that focus on Britain and those on other countries. The chapter raises issues relevant to all modern economies by picking up the theme of education and children’s work in the context of the contribution which the family makes to post-industrial society. Qvortrup argues that the concept of children’s waged work is in some senses anachronistic, as this no longer fosters the kinds of skills which are central to wealth creation.What is more important in this respect is children’s school work. Qvortrup sees this as making a major input to what he calls ‘the modern social fabric’. Although this is unpaid labour and, in this sense, there are parallels with the chapter by Becker et al., its importance lies in its capacity to foster exchange values which now dominate modern economies, rather than use values characteristic of manual activities and workmanship. Its importance is further demonstrated, according to Qvortrup, by the expansion of the time children now spend in full-time schooling relative to their time spent in waged work.

The chapter by David Hansen, Jeylan Mortimer and Heidi Krüger offers a comparison of children’s work in the USA and Germany. The authors point to many similarities in the experience of work in the two countries as they focus on the consequences of employment, the contexts of work and alternative pathways open to adolescents. The existence of high and low quality jobs is seen as significant in the relationship between school and work. High quality jobs are seen to offer students an opportunity to gain confidence and to develop positive occupational skills while those of low quality may provide less positive opportunities.

Like many of the children discussed in the chapter by Hansen et al., those on whom Anne Solberg reports in Chapter 9 conduct their work alongside adults. However, in this chapter the concern is more with ways of ‘seeing’ children’s work and labour, and the analytical implications that follow from this, than it is with classification and description. By adopting a self-reflexive approach rooted in her own experience of researching children’s work in Norway over the past two decades, Solberg outlines the changing ways in which she has come to view the work and labour of children. Her central argument is that traditional modes of seeing children’s work, ones rooted in a concern with what work means for their future, constitute a barrier to recognising how children are centrally involved in various types of productive activity that are constitutive of the communities in which they live. From the fishing communities of northern Norway, through to the suburbs of Oslo and the institution of the Norwegian family itself, Solberg insists on the need to look carefully and in detail at what children actually do, rather than what they are destined to become.

The final two chapters offer an insight into children’s employment in contrasting economies, those of Germany and Russia. In both countries, despite their different histories and their relative economic strengths and weaknesses, child labour is common. The chapter by Heinz Ingenhorst offers a largely descriptive account of the extent of children’s work and labour in modern Germany. Demonstrating parallels with the chapter by Mizen et al., it discusses the reasons why children work and the significance of their wages to the family budget, to patterns of consumption and to their social lives. The chapter also considers some of the negative aspects of earning money. These are seen as a loss of free time and exposure to pressure and dangers while at work.

In Chapter 11 Valery Mansurov sets the growth of child labour in Russia against the backdrop of social and economic change since perestroika. He outlines children’s growing motivation to work in response to, on the one hand, increasing family poverty and uncertainty as parents may wait months to be paid for their own labour; and, on the other, the perception that market reforms make early labour experience a more relevant grounding for the future than their participation in the troubled system of state education. Amid the simultaneous decline in official programmes of job placement and summer camps, children are increasingly to be found in the informal job market of street trade, car washes and newspaper vending, and in the dangerous and growing criminal gangs who are all too willing to recruit children.

Part I

Children, work and labour in modern Britain

2 Work and education

Are they compatible for children and adolescents?

Jim McKechnie and Sandy Hobbs

In debates about the work undertaken by children and adolescents, employment and education are often referred to as if they are mutually exclusive activities. This is most clearly seen at the international level, where many propose that a compulsory education system is one of the key weapons in a country’s battle against ‘child labour’ (Fyfe 1989; Weiner 1991). The International Labour Organisation has claimed that ‘Compulsory education has historically been one of the most effective instruments in eliminating child labour in practice’ (ILO 1996). Others, while broadly endorsing such a view, have argued that in any analysis the quality, relevance and cost of education must be taken into account. Bequele and Myers (1995) have suggested that although education may solve some problems of child labour, in certain circumstances it may be a part of the problem itself.

Although this chapter will not pursue the global debates on child labour and education, it is worth stressing the international context in which discussions of child employment in contemporary Britain take place. Countries such as Britain are sometimes treated as if they represent a model for the treatment of children to which economically underdeveloped economies should aspire. This is based partly on the assumption that Britain long ago ‘solved’ its child labour problem. As Lavalette (1998) notes, it is sometimes claimed that the reduction of child labour in Britain was due to the introduction of compulsory education. An alternative interpretation is that, rather than force children and adolescents out of employment, compulsory education changed the nature of that employment. It has moved the main forms of employment from full-time to part-time and changed the status of such employment. This in turn led to a change of focus for debates about children working.The concern for many became one of how to regulate the relationship between part-time work and education so that education was not harmed.

Let us briefly sketch out three alternative positions on this question. First, some propose that employment may in fact be a positive experience for the individual. Such a view implies that we have produced a false dichotomy between employment and education. They are not mutually exclusive, and gaining work experience alongside schooling is a crucial part of preparation for adult roles. Cunningham (1999) demonstrates that this view was particularly prominent in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. Whether this employment is a part of the formal education system is of minor importance. The important issue is to ensure that experience of work is gained, since it makes a positive contribution to the individual’s development. Such views are reflected in the pronouncements of many official bodies in the United States, such as the President’s Science Advisory Committee Panel on Youth in 1974 and the National Commission on Youth in 1980. In line with this thinking, in the early 1980s the US Labor Department sought to relax the legislation on child employment to increase the job opportunities for teenagers (Greenberger 1983).That work can serve this ‘educational’ role can be supported by research showing that working can lead to skill development and to conceptual development (Rogoff and Lave 1984; Saxe 1988; Boyden 1994; McKechnie and Hobbs 1998a).

A second identifiable position might be termed the ‘benign view’ of employment. It is a view to which policy makers are drawn. Historically we know that employment often took extremely exploitative forms. However, such cases no longer exist because legislation and education have combined to stop this happening. Laws are in place to ‘protect’ children. This legislation defines the nature of acceptable employment for young people and specifies when, and under what circumstances, it can be undertaken. Implicit in this view is that, at the very least, legally restricted employment will have little chance of harming children. Education can take its proper place as the true ‘work’ of children. Such a view has a major problem to face in that researchers have clearly shown that the legislation is ineffective (Hobbs and McKechnie 1997). A second problem ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 ‘Hidden Hands’
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography