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Kids Corner
"Fields of Hope" Website Tackles Child Labor
Chances are, you don’t love doing the dishes, mowing the lawn or the rest of the household chores that adults ask you to do. But the sad fact is that there are tens of millions of children around the world who are working strenuous, low-paying jobs eight to 10 hours every day, sometimes longer.
These aren’t kids who are helping their parents on the farm or lending a hand to the family business. They’re children from very poor families who desperately need the extra income, no matter how small. Seven out of 10 child laborers work in agriculture, including an estimated 800,000 migrant children in the United States. In other countries, children also work in factories, mines and as domestic servants.
Dishonest employers hire children in violation of national and international labor laws because they know they can get away with paying them pennies an hour. They put children to work at dangerous machines and around deadly chemicals, unconcerned about the risk. They know no one will complain because their families need the jobs so badly.
It’s a tragic and shameful situation. Kids’ Corner first told you about it last year in a story about Free the Children, an organization started by a 12-year-old boy in Canada that is doing a tremendous job helping child workers and their families around the world. Their projects include building hundreds of schools so that children can get an education and begin to lift themselves out of poverty.
Now there’s an outstanding new website called Fields of Hope that’s packed full of information about child labor around the world. It was designed especially for kids by the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity.
You’ll learn that an estimated 250 million children under the age of 14 — some as young as 5 years old — are working throughout the world. Half of them work fulltime, leaving no time at all for school.
You’ll learn how dangerous the work is, for children and adults. Migrant workers are exposed to pesticides, hurt by sharp tools, bitten by snakes and insects and suffer many illnesses and injuries from heavy lifting, bending, and falls.
You can take a quiz on the site and read about Linda Chavez-Thompson, a child laborer who grew up to be a labor leader. You can also watch a video about child labor, read about a day in the life of a child worker and click on a world map to learn about the different types of agricultural work that children do in each region and country.
We hope you’ll check out the site and tell your friends and teachers about it. You’ll find it on the Internet at
www.fieldsofhope.org. We also encourage you to revisit the Free the Children site at www.freethechildren.com.
Chances are, you don’t love doing the dishes, mowing the lawn or the rest of the household chores that adults ask you to do. But the sad fact is that there are tens of millions of children around the world who are working strenuous, low-paying jobs eight to 10 hours every day, sometimes longer.
These aren’t kids who are helping their parents on the farm or lending a hand to the family business. They’re children from very poor families who desperately need the extra income, no matter how small. Seven out of 10 child laborers work in agriculture, including an estimated 800,000 migrant children in the United States. In other countries, children also work in factories, mines and as domestic servants.
Dishonest employers hire children in violation of national and international labor laws because they know they can get away with paying them pennies an hour. They put children to work at dangerous machines and around deadly chemicals, unconcerned about the risk. They know no one will complain because their families need the jobs so badly.
It’s a tragic and shameful situation. Kids’ Corner first told you about it last year in a story about Free the Children, an organization started by a 12-year-old boy in Canada that is doing a tremendous job helping child workers and their families around the world. Their projects include building hundreds of schools so that children can get an education and begin to lift themselves out of poverty.
Now there’s an outstanding new website called Fields of Hope that’s packed full of information about child labor around the world. It was designed especially for kids by the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity.
You’ll learn that an estimated 250 million children under the age of 14 — some as young as 5 years old — are working throughout the world. Half of them work fulltime, leaving no time at all for school.
You’ll learn how dangerous the work is, for children and adults. Migrant workers are exposed to pesticides, hurt by sharp tools, bitten by snakes and insects and suffer many illnesses and injuries from heavy lifting, bending, and falls.
You can take a quiz on the site and read about Linda Chavez-Thompson, a child laborer who grew up to be a labor leader. You can also watch a video about child labor, read about a day in the life of a child worker and click on a world map to learn about the different types of agricultural work that children do in each region and country.
We hope you’ll check out the site and tell your friends and teachers about it. You’ll find it on the Internet at
www.fieldsofhope.org. We also encourage you to revisit the Free the Children site at www.freethechildren.com.