Child Labor and the Urban Third World by Bagchi Subrata Sankar;

Author:Bagchi, Subrata Sankar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

d) Economic Condition of the Studied People

In the Control Group, it was found that both the persons in labor force or labor force participation rate (90 per cent participation rate) and the incidence of persons actually working (88 per cent participation rate) were very high. Female participation rate in the Control Group was also very high i.e. 85 per cent participation rate and nearly 81 per cent of the females were actually working. Contrary to popular belief that higher labor force participation rate indicate better economic participation, this trend actually indicated that the non-participation in work could result in starvation for these people who lived virtually at the subsistence level of the economy. In the Program Group, on the other hand, the incidences of labor participation were much lower with nearly 54 per cent rate of labor force in the population and 49 per cent was actually working. Female participation trends in labor force from the Program Group were even lower as only 25 per cent of these females were in labor force and only 22 per cent of them were actually working. These trends indicate the relative affluence of the residents of Program Group.

The incidences of unemployment showed that less than 3 per cent of the labor force in the Control Group was actually unemployed during the fieldwork. But most of the so-called employed people were actually engaged in some kind of unstable and subsistence level of work in the informal economy – a trend which can also be termed as incidences of ‘misemployment’. In the Program Group, less than 9 per cent of the total persons in labor force were unemployed and the argument of misemployment can also be extended here as a substantial number of people in this group fell into the (mis)employment category. The distribution of the children in labor force and children actually working (Table–3) revealed that in the Control Group nearly 90 per cent of the children were in the labor force and of them 84 per cent were actually working. Among these working children, boys and girls were in almost equal proportions. In the Program Group, on the other hand, less than 6 per cent were in labor force and a majority of them were actually working. Thus the distribution of the working children compared with the working adults (Table–4) revealed that nearly 40 per cent of the work force in the Control Group were child laborers. In the Program Group this percentage was a mere two and half. It is the author’s contention that a correlation could be drawn between the prevalence of child labor and urban marginality in the Third World which should pave the way for a new understanding of child labor in the Third World. During his review of relevant literature the author did not come across any references, by the Western and/or non-Western observers, where the phenomenon of child labor in urban areas has actually been taken up in relation to issues of urban marginalization particularly in terms of the security of tenure.

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