Levels of work
Aim:
To consider different types of work young people do.
You will need:
The list of work examples, a group of people, paper/card and pen.
Duration:
30 minutes
Children around the world help adults with jobs. Some children may help their parents to look after the household, care for younger children, and help in the garden. It is good for older children to do tasks that help in the family, but there is a point where child work becomes unacceptable.
Useful background information:
Light Work is work that does not interfere with education. This is permitted for children from the age of 12. 'Child labour' refers to children working where their health and education is at risk. Child labourers are defined as all children below 12 years of age working in any jobs, children aged 12 to 14 years engaged in harmful work, and all children (under 18) engaged in the worst forms of child labour (e.g. hazardous work, prostitution, slavery).
Use this information about child labour to help you with the activity. There are no right or wrong answers - the aim is to discuss your ideas and your reasons for them, and to come up with a compromise.
It is best if you have a group of 10 or more people. Each of the 10 people should represent one of the examples. The task is to arrange the 10 people in order, from the most to the least acceptable types of work for children to do. You could write each example onto a piece of paper or card for the people to hold, to make it easier to remember. If you do not have enough people, you can just arrange the pieces of paper on the floor.
List of people:
- I am 13. I help at home by washing dishes for 20 minutes every day.
- I am 15. I work for 3 hours every night after school in my family's shop.
- I am 17. I spent one Saturday helping my Dad repaint the house.
- I am 14. I work every weekend as an assistant in my father's mechanic yard.
- I am 9. I look after my younger sisters all day while my mother is at work.
- I am 16. I ran away from home and now I work as a prostitute.
- I am 12. I occasionally help on our farm, spraying crops with pesticides.
- I am 14. I work as a domestic cleaner every day, and go to night school in the evenings.
- I am 11. I work in a mine, collecting rocks underground to carry to the surface.
- I am 14. I work 3 mornings a week (before school) delivering newspapers.
At the end you might want to discuss how you felt about this activity. Try to put yourself in the place of a child labourer. How would you feel? It often makes people very angry or upset when they think about these issues. It is ok to feel like that. Take time to talk to your group leaders about anything you are unhappy about.