By Penny Mbabazi
Atuhaire, Associate
Researcher,
The struggle to promote and defend labour rights is not a new phenomenon
in our current times. It dates back to the history of the 1930s and 1940s when
a lot of bad things happened in the world and nations worldwide decided to come
together.They agreed to have an international moral code for right and wrong
behavior.
In the process, a good number of international and national
instruments were developed to reinforce the basic rights that every individual
is entitled to by virtue of being human. Children were not an exception.
The world over, children occupy an important and unique position in
society mainly because of their vulnerability to the obvious economic-social
challenges that accompany their journey to adulthood. Ugandan children and
generally those in Africa experience these effects more compared to those in
developed nations. Irrespective of the
circumstances that surround the child’s way of life when growing up, the
general wellbeing of a child hugely remains the responsibility of parents,
society and government.
While responding to the plight of children in 1989, the United
Nations through the Convention on Rights of the Child (CRC) agreed to have a
set of non-negotiable standards and obligations to protect the rights of a
child. These basic standards, which are also human rights, set minimum
entitlements and freedoms that bind governments.
It is no wonder that the CRC has been widely known as the first
legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of
civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. More to this, Uganda is
a signatory to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 128
(1973) on the minimum to employment and ILO Convention No. 182(1999) on the Worst
Forms of Child Labour.
On the regional level, the African Charter on the Rights and
Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) ushered in a new aspect of children’s rights. It
recognizes the fact that the situation of most African children remains
critical. This is because of the unique factors of their social, economic,
cultural, traditional and developmental circumstances, natural disasters, armed
conflicts, exploitation, hunger and many others.
Precisely, Article 15(1) caters for specific interests of working
children and points out that “every child is to be protected from all forms of
economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be
hazardous or to interfere with the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral
or social development.”
The Charter shares the understanding that children occupy a unique
and privileged position in the African society and for them to realize a full
and harmonious development of their personality; they need to grow up in a
family environment with an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding. Uganda
ratified the African Charter on The Rights and Welfare of The Child in 1994.
Coming closer to home, the 1995 Constitution reaffirms the same
values that children under the age of 16 years are “entitled to be protected
from social or economic exploitation and shall not be employed in or required
to perform work that is likely to be hazardous or interfere with their
education or be harmful to their health or physical, mental, spiritual moral or
social development.” The Uganda National Labour Policy defines child labour as
work that is hazardous or exploitative and threatens the health, safety,
physical growth and mental development of children. Even when certain hazards
may not be immediately obvious such as body cuts and exposure to diseases, they
in many cases increase their exposure to sexual, physical, or emotional abuse.
For a very long time, Uganda was operating under obsolete laws
that were enacted in the 1960s and 1970s. These laws largely contradicted the
expectations of fundamental international labour conventions but it was not
until March 2006 that the Parliament made history and enacted four sets of
labour laws that changed the image of labour rights in Uganda.
These laws include the Employment Act, the Occupational Safety and
Health Act, Labour Unions Act and the Labour Disputes Act. They have since been
regarded as a ray of hope for all workers.The common thing among these laws is
that they restrict employment of children under the age of 18 years and prevent
employment of children under the age of 14 years except in light work. They are
also meant to serve as a deterrent to those who involve children in unacceptable
labour and provide a framework for developing regulations
that would improve inspection and enforcement to stop the worst forms of child Labour.
The combinations of all these laws and guidelines seem to give an
impression that children have strong legal protection and that their rights are
well guarded by those in authority. However the situation in practice reveals
otherwise.
For instance, in 2006, the Ministry of Gender Labour and Social
Development carried out a study on the National Child Policy and it was
revealed that the worst forms of child labour included children working as
domestic child labourers, fishing, commercial sex, the urban informal sector
and street activities, armed conflict and in the construction sector.
These findings are verified by daily experiences we encounter on
our streets of Kampala and in other towns of Uganda. Apparently, children seem
to have more business acumen than what society has ever imagined and expected
of them. They are ready to convince anyone they get an opportunity to speak to
ensure they make a sale of whatever merchandise they have. All kinds of people
buy groceries from them everyday especially when stuck in the evening traffic on
the way home. They are drawn to selling groceries ranging from bananas,
mangoes, and cooked maize, roasted nuts to children’s toys, books, kitchen
gargets and many others.
When you bother to ask them about the nature of their work, they
usually give similar responses that they are pushed into such kind of work to
get school fees and others will say they are looking for money for food. They
will tell you that the businesses are either for their parents, guardians or
their grandparents, a situation that creates more questions than answers!
Whereas others are on the streets begging and selling all sorts of
things, there are those that are confined and stuck in many homes of middle
class citizens as domestic workers. They take care of their masters’ babies,
cooking, general house cleaning and washing, work that is many times too
demanding for their age.
Work of this nature impacts on the child’s growth and development,
education and thus a vicious cycle of poverty and exploitation.
Such scenarios pose great challenges to the framers and
implementers of the laws that are meant to protect children.
In its report released early March 2011, ‘The Long Road to Realising Labour Rights in
Uganda,’ the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) found that poverty
was the main driver of child labour where 25% of children work and attend
school while 10% work and do not attend school.
Other studies have also revealed that the spread of HIV/AIDS has
contributed to the problem. Children drop out of school to enter the labour
market in order to look after sick relatives while many HIV/AIDS orphans are
forced to work to look after themselves and surviving siblings.
With such a cycle of events that lead to child labour, a deeper
understanding is needed to study the scale of the problem in terms of
incidence, nature, magnitude dynamics, distribution, injuries, and hazards and
variety of conditions in which children work.
The government should dedicate resources to community-based
institutions that are able to monitor and document cases of child labour. Labour
officers need to be well equipped with the necessary skills and resources to
enable them inspect homes to enforce labour laws. In all this, the bigger
burden rests on the government to ensure that it puts in place measures aimed
at improving the security of poor families so that children get a chance to be
children.
No comments:
Post a Comment