A Child's Right to Work

My Filipina wife is angry at Westerners again. She has heard of the drive in the developed world to shut down child labour.

“What does she expect the children to do?” she asks. “Nothing?”

The alternative to a job, for many kids in the Third World, is not school. They cannot afford school. It is slow starvation. Nor, if there were schools, would there be any jobs for them once they graduated, for which they would not be better qualified by a few more years actually doing the job.

We are doing them no favours by preventing them from making a living, or from training to make a living.

No: the whole drive against child labour is cultural chauvinism. It is no more logical than demanding that kids in the First World be freed from the slavery of compulsory education.

Now there’s a campaign a lot of children could get behind.