Is Child Labor Ever Ok?
Is child labor always bad? Your first reaction is probably ‘yes, it’s always wrong’, but what would happen if these children stopped working? If that happened, their families wouldn’t be able to afford food.
Shehzad Noorani, a freelance photographer returned to his home in Bangladesh to photograph children who start working at 6am, hammering batteries so they an get the carbon rods out which they later recycle. These kids earn around $.40 a day doing this. The main issue isn’t how little their getting paid for this, its the black chemical dust that shoots out of the batteries. Noorani describes the dust as covering their entire face so you can only see their white eyes and red lips. To keep their lips moist the children lick their lips, eating this deadly dust.
Obviously this dust is extremely dangerous and deadly. However, what are these children supposed to do? They need to make money to feed their families. What Noorani ends up saying is that there needs to be some form of child labor however it needs to be safe and not deadly.
The part of the story that is really emotional is when Noorani asks one of the girls what her dream is and she responds, “Dreams? No, I get too tired, I just sleep.” As if the medical side effects weren’t bad enough, the toll of these jobs has even stolen their motivation and dreams.
Do you think child labor is ever justified?
To read more human rights-related news, please visit the Causecast Human Rights page.
For the full story, please visit CNN.
Photo: Shehzad Noorani for David Elliot Cohen’s book “What Matters”
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Related causes: Human Rights, Youth
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