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USA
Consider for a moment the abundance of wealth found in the United States. Nevertheless, over eleven million American children live without health care. One out of every five American children lives in poverty. The media markets a toxic cocktail of sex and cigarettes, violence and vulgarity – to our three year olds. Finally, hectic schedules, spawned by the dichotomy between a fragile economy and our own rapacity, leave many families with little time for valuing the joy, wonder, and contemplation that our youngest children regularly experience.
Valuing what we refer to collectively as a playful childhood is predominantly a modern phenomenon. In fact, many still debate its importance. During earlier centuries, most American children worked alongside their parents and this labour – primarily agricultural or domestic – helped to ensure their family’s survival. Little more than their father's chattel, children did not possess rights as such. Colonial society expected stoicism, austerity, and unfailing obedience from its children who were to be seen, but never heard. And the children of slaves and indentured servants often fare much worse, enduring a life of extreme hardship and pain.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American children left their families to work in the dark, dangerous conditions of factories, refineries, and coal mines. Others peddled newspapers, collected junk, or shined shoes. Again, this labour helped to ensure their family's survival. It also ensured that obtaining an education became difficult, if not impossible. Finally, it ensured that hundreds of thousands of children suffered needlessly in the name of industrialised avarice, enduring conditions similar to those endured today by millions of children the world over.
In 1924, Congress proposed a constitutional amendment prohibiting child labour. Although that proposition ultimately failed, it exemplifies the progress made in the fight to provide children with rudimentary rights. Finally, in 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labour Standards Act (the “FLSA”). This did not prohibit child labour but constructed the legal foundation for America's regulation of children working.
Currently, over five million children between the ages of 12 and 17 engage in some type of work. Sometimes, employment affects these children positively. It may provide them with practical vocational training, communication skills, independence, and self-reliance. But many work in contravention of the rules laid out by the FLSA. Some are underage. Some engage in hazardous types of work. Some work impossibly long hours – hours that prevent them from going to school. Many others are injured or killed in work-related accidents. In spite of all applicable regulations, child labour remains a problem in the United States.
It is likely that the children who work as America's undocumented migrant and seasonal farmhands suffer the most. An estimated 800,000 such children work exhausting days (some fourteen to sixteen hours long) tending America's crops for as little as two dollars an hour. Eighty to almost ninety-nine percent of these children come from poor, immigrant, and minority backgrounds. Their labour exposes them to pesticides and other chemical poisons that impair their development. It causes them to miss school, face physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their ruthless employers, and develop myriad physical ailments. Sadly, the FLSA does not protect them.
The plight of these children only emphasises that all American children still lack affirmative rights. Our ratification of the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child (the “CRC”) would do much to ameliorate this.* It would firmly declare American intentions to eradicate all of the (controllable) negative aspects of child labour and would obligate the United States to do so.
To hear the voice of America's childlabourers (particularly those exploited as migrant farm workers), along with the voice of child-labourers everywhere, is to enter into a reality that very few will recognise as a part of our greater, global society. To do nothing, to remain silent, is to be in complicit agreement with the abusers and exploiters who perpetuate their plight.
Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me.” If we want to walk in God's way, we must value childhood. We must protect children, embracing and valuing their joy and wonder. We must determine when is work a healthy, even necessary, way for children to learn and grow. More importantly, we must determine when it is cheap, easily exploitable, quasi-slave labour.
In order to make that determination properly, we must remain guided by our prayers, by our hope. Currently, that hope is incarnate in how we live out two important manifestos. First, it is incarnate in the way we in ECUSA live out our General Convention resolutions concerning children – including The Children's Charter for the Church, which advocates for the well-being of every child. Second, it is incarnate in the way we as the Anglican Communion respond to and live out "A World Fit For Children,” – the millennium development goals set out by the United Nations Special Session on the Rights of the Child.
*Note. The Convention on the Rights of the Child has now been ratified by 191countries. USA has not yet ratified it.
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