Labor Relations Commons^™

The Catch-22 Irony Of Child Labor And The Urgency For State Intervention, Ka Yee Lau

Augsburg Honors Review

Child labor (CL) has been found to enhance substantially the poorest households' chances for short-term survival. CL could also - it has been argued - facilitate CWs' socialization and development of moral values and survival skills. This article aims to demonstrate that these short-term benefits are considerably outweighed by the corresponding long-term detrimental repercussions on CWs' health, education, and earning potential in adulthood. While the poorest households might strategically employ CL as a last resort to ensure their short-term survival, it is CL per se that maintains these families in extreme poverty through the impediment to CWs' human capital accumulation, …