While increasing poverty pushes millions of children to backbreaking labor in mining and agriculture, the net worth of U.S. billionaires alone has surged by $931 billion since the coronavirus pandemic began, illustrating how the economic system (and more broadly, civilization) capitalizes on crisis and misery.
“Good time to remember that a number of free market economists defend child labor as being a good thing.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic and corresponding economic upheaval threaten to push up to 150 million people into extreme poverty by 2021, in-depth reporting Thursday from the Associated Press showed that the coronavirus crisis is also undermining two decades of gains against child labor in the developing world, where an entire generation of impoverished children lacking access to safe education opportunities are being driven by economic necessity to work alongside their parents or in place of unemployed caretakers.
Progressive author and commentator Nathan Robinson said Thursday on social media that the dire situation demonstrates the depravity of the global economic system and its inability to guarantee the well-being of all the world’s inhabitants despite there being more than enough resources to do so. “Capitalism is monstrous,” he said.
Robinson also noted that it’s a “good time to remember that a number of free market economists defend child labor as being a good thing because it’s ‘freely chosen’ and work is good, so prohibiting it would be ‘coercive.'”
Good time to remember that a number of free market economists defend child labor as being a good thing, because it’s “freely chosen” and work is good, so prohibiting it would be “coercive.” Capitalism is monstrous. https://t.co/b2M3WdeZgX
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) October 15, 2020
In a Twitter thread, Robinson cited multiple examples of economists defending the alleged virtues of child labor, which Jeffrey Tucker of the right-wing think tank American Institute for Economic Research for instance described as an “opportunity [taken] away from kids” by compulsory schooling.
Tucker’s euphemizing of child labor, which he imagines to be “exciting,” is diametrically opposed to the AP’s horrifying account of the resurgence of young people—coerced by worsening poverty and disrupted learning routines amid the coronavirus crisis—taking on often dangerous work to help keep their families from going hungry or becoming homeless.
“With classrooms shuttered and parents losing their jobs, children are trading their ABC’s for the D of drudgery,” wrote María Verza, Carlos Valdez, and William Costa in AP. “Reading, writing, and times tables are giving way to sweat, blisters, and fading hopes for a better life.”
The journalists provide numerous examples of what potentially millions of children around the globe are doing now instead of going to school: “Children in Kenya are grinding rocks in quarries. Tens of thousands of children in India have poured into farm fields and factories. Across Latin America, kids are making bricks, building furniture, and clearing brush.”
“These children and adolescents,” AP noted, “are earning pennies or at best a few dollars a day to help put food on the table”—putting in long hours at jobs that used to be after-school activities but have in recent months been transformed into full-time work.
Astrid Hollander, UNICEF’s head of education in Mexico explained that “child labor becomes a survival mechanism for many families.”
“We have seen new children and adolescents selling in the street,” Patricia Velasco, manager of a city program for at-risk people in La Paz, Bolivia, told AP. “They’ve been pushed to generate income.”
Child workers interviewed by AP told reporters that they missed school but understood the need to assist their families, and their parents expressed dismay at the implications of interrupted schooling.
Despite resource constraints, caretakers explained that they are doing their best to prevent their children from falling behind.
“Under their mother’s watchful eye, the children work through schoolbooks they were given in February at the start of the school year,” wrote Verza, Valdez, and Costa in AP. “Each morning in the workshop, she has them take time to study.”
According to the news agency, governments are still trying to figure out exactly how many students have dropped out of their school systems, but with 1.5 billion schoolchildren affected by school closures at the height of national lockdowns, UNICEF has estimated that the worldwide numbers are likely in the millions.
Moreover, for at least 463 million children whose schools closed due to Covid-19, remote learning is not a possibility, prompting UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore in August to declare the widespread disruptions in learning a “global education emergency.”
Experts explained to AP that “in the past, most students who have missed class because of crises like the Ebola epidemic returned when schools reopened.”
“But the longer the crisis drags on,” they said, “the less likely [children and adolescents] will be to go back.”
According to Fore, “the repercussions could be felt in economies and societies for decades to come,” which is why UNICEF’s Reimagine campaign calls for “urgent investment to bridge the digital divide, reach every child with remote learning, and, most critically, prioritize the safe reopening of schools.”
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Featured image by Zouavman Le Zouave, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
(doubleplusun)well, i’ll use this opprortunity to translate what i wrote down down a few days ago: “Who still calls it a ‘pandemic’ instead of a ‘scamdemic’, or a scandal, or “the crimes [i.a. against humanity] of the coronafscists” – is (imo) complicit.
Gates Bless!
Orig.: “Wer es anstatt “Corona-Skandal” oder “Verbrechen der Coronafaschisten” immer noch “Pandemie” nennt, ist Mittaeter.” — wda, 2020-10-10
Exactly. There’s no pandemic and there’s no virus. “The pandemic” is just a trojan horse to obfuscate the crimes of the ruling class to implement their Great Reset.
The wilful attempts by people on the comment threads here to impose their libertarian ideology on reality have results that – as we see from the COVID-19 catastrophe unfolding in the libertarian-ruled USA – are lethal on the poor, the elderly and people of colour. But they don’t matter to you, do they?
“The United States on Friday was approaching a record for the number of new daily coronavirus cases, as a new study warned that the pandemic is set to cause half a million American deaths by February.
Covid-19 is on course to ravage states across the nation throughout the coming winter and more than 511,000 lives could be lost by 28 February next year, modeling led by scientists from the University of Washington found.
This means that with cases surging in many states, particularly the upper midwest, what appears to be a third major peak of coronavirus infections in the US could lead to nearly 300,000 people dying in just the next four months.” (The Guardian, 23/10/2020)