https://doi.org/10.37815/rte.v34n1.856

Original paper - English

Has Anti-Migration and Anti-Refugee Discourse Hampered Progress against
Child Labour?

¿Ha obstaculizado
el discurso antimigración y antirrefugiados el progreso contra el trabajo
infantil?

Simon
Steyne1 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2870-6238

1Independent expert (former ILO senior advisor on fundamental principles
and rights at work), London, United Kingdom

[email-masked]

Sent:               2021/08/24

Accepted:       2022/01/25

Published:      2022/03/15

Abstract

The chequered application,
since 2000, of integrated policies to eradicate the intersectional root causes
of child labour sits more recently in a wider political context of recrudescent
populist ethnonationalism accompanied by weakened respect by the governments of
many countries for the rules-based international system and rights-based
development. The author suggests that (apart from Northern-centric trade and
policy interests) influential populist-nationalist governments (including those
of the United Kingdom (linked to Brexit), and Australia (linked to the “Bali
Process”) have contributed to diverting global attention from the largest
cohort intended to benefit from Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 - the
160 million children now in child labour - by conflating forced labour with
trafficking and trafficking with migration and asylum. This conflation seeks to
demonise asylum-seekers, refugees, and economic migrants. It is an important
element of the discourse of populist-nationalist ruling parties in their search
for continued electoral support and reflects a willingness to violate
international law protecting human rights.

Keywords: Fundamental principles and rights at work (FPRW); employment, workers,
child labour, forced labour, trafficking, migration, asylum, UN Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), ethnonationalism, xenophobia, antisemitism,
exploitation, Brexit, Windrush Scandal, the Bali Process, human rights.

Summary: Introduction;
Trends, What Went Wrong? Populist Ethnonationalism: The English “Example”
–

Racism, the
“Hostile Environment`”, Brexit, and the Nationality and Borders Bill; Northern-Centrism
and SDG Target 8.7 and Conclusions and Proposals.

How
to cite: Steyne, S. (2022). Has Anti-Migration and Anti-Refugee
Discourse Hampered Progress against Child Labour? Revista Tecnológica - Espol, 34(1), 113-135. http://www.rte.espol.edu.ec/index.php/tecnologica/article/view/856

Resumen

La aplicación accidentada, desde
2000, de políticas integradas para erradicar las causas fundamentales
interseccionales del trabajo infantil se sitúa más recientemente en un contexto
político más amplio de recrudecimiento del etnonacionalismo populista
acompañado de un respeto debilitado de los gobiernos de muchos países por el
sistema internacional basado en reglas y desarrollo basado en derechos. El
autor sugiere que (aparte de los intereses políticos y comerciales centrados en
el norte), al combinar el trabajo forzoso con la trata y la trata con la
migración y el asilo, gobiernos populistas-nacionalistas influyentes, en
particular los del Reino Unido (vinculados al Brexit) y Australia (vinculados
al “Proceso de Bali”), han contribuido a desviar la atención mundial de la
mayor cohorte destinada a beneficiarse de la Meta 8.7 del Objetivo de
Desarrollo Sostenible: los 160 millones de niños que ahora se encuentran en
situación de trabajo infantil. Esta fusión busca demonizar a los solicitantes
de asilo, refugiados y migrantes económicos. Además, es un elemento importante
del discurso de los partidos gobernantes populistas-nacionalistas en su
búsqueda de apoyo electoral continuo y refleja la voluntad de violar el derecho
internacional que protege los derechos humanos.

Palabras
clave: Principios y derechos fundamentales en el trabajo
(PDFT); empleo, trabajadores, trabajo infantil, trabajo forzoso, trata,
migración, asilo, Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) de la ONU,
etnonacionalismo, xenofobia, antisemitismo, explotación, Brexit, Windrush
Scandal, el Proceso de Bali, derechos humanos.

Introduction

In June 2021, the ILO and
UNICEF jointly published global child labour estimates for 2016-2020 (ILO and
UNICEF, 2021). The number of children concerned had risen from 152 million to
160 million. This was before the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on the global
economy and despite the global consensus proclaimed in the UN Sustainable
Development Goal Target 8.7 to eliminate all forms of child labour by 2025, as
well as all forms of forced labour by 2030. It was the first increase since
quadrennial estimates began in 2000.

This
setback should not surprise us. This article, based on the first-hand
experience of a now-independent specialist on child labour, and the
intersectionality of fundamental principles and rights at work (FPRW), explores
some possible reasons for the chequered application, since 2000, of integrated
policies to eradicate the intersectional root causes of child labour. The
article is not, primarily, an essay about migration, nor is the Author a
migration specialist. It seeks to reflect on how the recrudescent juggernaut of
ethnonationalist populism and, especially, its conflation of forced labour with
trafficking and trafficking with migration and asylum (as well as
Northern-centric trade and policy interests), and related policies violating
the rights of migrants and asylum-seekers, may have contributed to deflecting
global attention from the largest cohort supposed to benefit from SDG Target
8.7: children in child labour.

Because, just as the four
categories of FPRW - freedom from discrimination, from child labour and from
forced labour, and freedom to organize and bargain collectively - are
mutually supportive and interdependent, so too are violations of these rights
“mutually aggravating”. The context of reversal of progress against child
labour includes: the rejection of the global trade unions´ proposal for an
integrated Alliance 8 to drive the 2015 Sustainable Development Goal on decent
work for all, which derived from the established ILO position that FPRW were
indivisible and interdependent; the establishment instead of an Alliance 8.7 intended
to concentrate only on forced labour and child labour; and the narrow focus of
certain influential governments, notably of the U.K. and Australia (both
self-proclaimed leaders of the Alliance), whose xenophobic anti-migration and
anti-asylum discourse and policies were central to their populist,
ethnonationalist project. This was epitomized in Australia by the Bali Process
and the incarceration of men, women and children on Nauru and Manus: and, in
the U.K., by the racist “Hostile Environment” policies that led to the Windrush
Scandal, and which contributed to the little-England exceptionalism of the
Brexit campaign and to a determination to violate the 1951 Geneva Convention: its
most recent consequence was the death of 27 mainly Kurdish asylum-seekers,
including three children, in November 2021, in the English Channel.

The article seeks to
contribute to an analysis of why, for the first time in two decades, child
labour is increasing. It explores some of the lexicon of the discourse
concerning “modern slavery” (a term that appears nowhere in relevant
authoritative international instruments) and its common reduction to
trafficking. It also considers the unhelpful but increasingly common misuse of
the term “exploitation” to imply that it takes place only in conditions of
forced labour, rather than being the essential economic relationship between
labour and capital in the capitalist mode of production, which organized labour
seeks to moderate through collective bargaining.

Trends

A summary of the latest
estimates and the chequered progress against child labour since 2000,
especially the stagnation and regression since 2016 is the best introduction.
The global estimates for 2016-2020 (ILO and UNICEF, 2021) show that:

·       160 million children are in
child labour: eight million more than in 2016 and the first increase since the
first global estimates in 2000.

·       The Covid pandemic could
prompt a further 8.9 million increases by late 2022.

·       79 million children (49
percent) are in hazardous work.

·       Progress continued in the
Asia and the Pacific Region and in Latin America and the Caribbean, but
sub-Saharan Africa saw a further rise, accounting now for more than half of all
child labour.

·       Child labour among
five-to-11-year-olds rose by 17 million; among 12- to-17-year-olds it continued
to decline.

·       97 million boys and 63
million girls are in child labour but, among five- to-14-year-olds, the gap
halves if we consider household chores performed by girls for more than 21
hours weekly.

·       123 million children in
child labour are in rural areas, a prevalence (13.9 percent) almost three times
higher than in urban settings.

·       112 million children
perform child labour in agriculture (70 percent worldwide; 81.5 percent in
sub-Saharan Africa; and still 44 percent in Europe and North America).

·       72 percent of all child
labour and 83 percent among five- to-11-year -olds is in family farms or
micro-enterprises. A quarter of these youngest children and half of 12-
to-14-year-olds in child labour perform hazardous work.

·       More than a quarter of
five- to-11-year-olds in child labour and a third of 12- to-14-year-olds are
out of school.

·       The 2020 estimates did not
provide a figure for forced labour: of 152 million children in child labour in
2016, 4.3 million were estimated to be in forced labour.

It is pertinent to note
that the concept of “modern slavery” appears nowhere in the relevant
Conventions. Its usage entered forced labour phraseology only recently, during
passage of UK Prime Minister-to-be Theresa May’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act,
partly to broaden the ambit of forced labour to include forced marriage.
Crucially, populist-nationalist governments’ discourse commonly deploys “modern
slavery” as a synonym for trafficking.

From 2000 to 2004, the
number of children in child labour fell by 23 million. From 2004 to 2008 it
fell by only seven million. Yet, between 2008 and 2012, greatly accelerated
progress reduced child labour by 47 million: a sevenfold improvement on the previous
four years.

The
Third Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour (the Third
Global Conference), hosted by the ILO’s tripartite Brazilian constituents in
2013, followed that extraordinary period of progress and consolidated global
consensus on the need for integrated policies to eradicate all forms of child
labour. (Global Conference on Child Labour, 2013; ILO, 2014). Previously, the
worldwide movement had talked of eliminating child labour, yet some had focused
only on its worst forms, deviating from the intersectional premise of the 1998
ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (the 1998
Declaration).

Four things had become
clearer in the run-up to Brasilia:

First, short-term direct-beneficiary
measures, simple to attribute and report to donors, had not supported
sustainable eradication - “pulling up the roots” - of child labour. Such
measures, often not consonant with nationally-established development
priorities, dominated international development assistance-funded projects on
child labour in the first decade of the century.

Second, measures directed
only at worst forms, not least in global supply chains (a small if important
proportion of child labour), ignored the wider context of movement of the same
child, siblings, and children in the same community between non-worst and worst
forms and, perhaps, different sectors, seasons, and places. These
considerations drove development of the Integrated Area-Based Approach to
create communities free of all forms of child labour (ILO, 2017; ILO, 2018a).

Third,
ILO Convention No. 138 (1973) on the minimum age for admission to employment
explicitly links the minimum age for work with the minimum school-leaving age.
The worldwide movement was increasingly clear that children’s human rights to
education and the eradication of all forms of child labour were indivisible.
Indeed, millions of younger children in non-worst forms of child labour are
still unable to go to school, attend irregularly, or are prevented by their
child labour from benefitting fully from their attendance.

Fourth, seeking to tackle
child labour in isolation from other fundamental rights was not only
unsustainable, it entailed great risks. This had been illustrated dramatically
in sporting goods manufacturing in Sialkot, Pakistan (a centre of activities
against child labour) when a major multinational enterprise threatened to
terminate contracts, endangering thousands of jobs, because of persistent
violations of trade union rights. Tragically,
the resulting tripartite Sialkot agreement on child labour and decent work
(which the Author helped negotiate) was blown off course after Benazir Bhutto’s
assassination.

The principal root causes
of child labour – family and community poverty – derive from an
interrelated complex of social exclusion and unequal distribution of power and
wealth not restricted to low-income countries. Child labour also persists in
emerging and richer economies where political will has been lacking or stymied,
notably among migrant worker families in the United States. Meanwhile,
governments of some less developed or emerging economies, notably India and
Brazil between 2008 and 2012, had sought to adhere to international
standards and implemented successful nationally-determined policies. Sadly, not
all donors followed the Brasilia consensus by supporting systemic change in
other, still largely donor-dependent countries.

By 2017, only 43 percent of
child labour was in low-income countries. 55 percent was in lower- and
upper-middle-income countries, including the seven largest emerging economies
in which half the world’s people live. Today’s figures (41 and 58 percent
respectively) perhaps reflect the reversal of progressive policies in key
middle-income countries. Approximately 14 percent of the world’s people live in
the 80 high-income countries, where 1.6 million children still perform child
labour. The least unequal countries, like some in the European region, have
largely eradicated child labour. However, there are high-income countries –
most obviously under the Trump presidency – where super-concentration of wealth
accompanies systemic poverty, weakened social protection, and deficient
protection in law and practice of FPRW.

Several matters should be
borne in mind when considering the roller-coaster up to 2012 and developments
since then, as reflected in the ILO’s comparable quadrennial estimates since
2000. Among them are: the need for integrated approaches against child labour;
that poor and emerging economies can adopt and apply sound policies; and that misdirected
donor conditionalities can hinder the development and piloting of such policies.

Figure 1

Trends in global progress against child labour,
2000-2020[1]

Source: ILO and UNICEF
(2021).

Between 2000 and 2012,
child labour fell by 78 million and hazardous child labour by 85 million. There
are several reasons why the hazardous figure exceeds the total:

·       Children above the minimum
age for work are considered to be in child labour only if it is a worst form:
hazardous work is used as a proxy;

·       At 18, children exit the
child labour statistical pool;

·       Children between the
minimum age and 18 years might move from hazardous child labour into acceptable
youth employment;

·       Convention 182 on the worst
forms of child labour requires children in worst forms to be removed from child
labour altogether but, without integrated implementation of Conventions 182 and
138, children below the minimum age removed from hazardous work might continue
to perform non-hazardous child labour. This appeared to have been the case
particularly between 2000 and 2004: hazardous child labour fell by 43 million
while the total child labour number fell by only 23 million; and

·       Similarly, from 2004-2008,
the number of children in hazardous work fell by 13 million, while the overall
number fell by only seven million.

The worldwide movement
re-emerged in the 1990s in the form of the Global March Against Child Labour,
campaigning for what in 1999 became Convention 182. It was further
reinvigorated by the adoption of the Convention, which also encouraged many
more ratifications of Convention 138.

Nonetheless, in the decade after
the adoption of Convention 182:

·       An overwhelming focus on
worst forms meant young children below the minimum working age continued to
enter child labour and few were removed from non-worst forms.

·       A widespread US-donor block
on funding public services left their capacity, in general, weakened.

·       Instead, major donors’
conditionalities on direct beneficiary projects required NGOs (accountable to
donors but not local communities) to deliver simple-to-report, short-term
benefits to limited numbers of selected children or families.

·       Most project funding went
on short-term service delivery and reporting, rather than confronting systemic
economic and governance root causes or promoting social dialogue; and trade
unions were not always treated as key partners.

·       Political considerations
often took precedence over data and evidence. While not all donors pursued the
direct beneficiary approach, it involved most of the funding of the ILO’s
International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC).

·       Although the Author and
others proposed that an ILO Regular Budget Supplementary Account should be
established to align development cooperation funds to the Governing Body’s
agreed strategies, the narrow focus on hazardous child labour in global supply
chains often diverged from the principle that nationally established
development priorities should prevail.

Child labour numbers fell
by 23 million from 2000 to 2004 and by only seven million from 2004 to 2008.
Then, despite the 2008 financial crisis, progress accelerated remarkably. From
2008 to 2012, the number of children in child labour fell by 47 million and, for
the first time, not only among children in hazardous work: at least 17 million
children too young to work but not in worst forms also benefited.

Further research might
explain this remarkable surge, but our knowledge of two countries that
contributed significantly to it supports some hypotheses.

Lower-middle-income India
is around the middle of the Gini income inequality index, while upper-middle-income
Brazil (with the world’s sixth largest population) is among the least equal.
During this period both governments pursued trilateral South-South child labour
cooperation with South Africa. These three, then progressive, administrations
asserted their sovereignty, pursuing nationally-determined priorities to
accelerate equitable development, combat income and social wage poverty in the
rural and informal economies, and, with varying commitment, to strengthen
protection of FPRW. The ILO constituents in the three countries also enjoyed
close and friendly collaboration with the ILO’s child labour programme.

The three countries’
determination found expression in India’s Convergence Model (with parallels in
Brazil) and Brazil’s 2013 hosting of the Third Global Conference. (ILO-IPEC,
2013). Convergence sought to combine relevant national policies to create a multiplier
effect. The constitutional amendment on the right to education, the midday
meals scheme, and specialised bridge schools for children leaving child labour
boosted school attendance and retention. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
Employment Guarantee Scheme and extension of social protection curbed family
and community poverty in the rural and informal economy and supported
child-friendly infrastructure improvements. Similar approaches emerged, for example, in
Pakistani Punjab, while Ghana’s Torkor Model achieved international acclaim.

While labour ministries
maintained their leading/convening roles, national tripartite child labour
committees increasingly co-opted other relevant authorities, converging
policies on labour markets, infrastructure, education, social protection and
health services, law enforcement and access to justice, labour inspection and
agricultural extension, antidiscrimination, and food security. Convergence also
supported local government authorities to fulfil their crucial roles in
delivering services to the population. This included community child labour
monitoring and remediation systems, which (unlike supply chain social auditors)
could provide permanent oversight, identify children in or at risk of child
labour, and refer them to relevant public services.

In 2014, Kailash Satyarthi
and Malala Yousafzai shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Kailash and Nitte Adyanthaya
of the Indian National Trades Union Congress (the Author’s successor as the ILO
Governing Body Workers’ group spokesperson on child labour) worked behind the
scenes with committed civil servants towards India’s 2017 ratification of both
ILO child labour Conventions. This brought the vast majority of the world’s
children under their ambit.

Following the 2012
International Labour Conference resolution on FPRW, the ILO endorsed an
integrated, intersectional approach to child labour as part of an integrated
fundamental rights policy (ILO, 2016) and established an integrated Fundamental
Rights Branch. (ILO, n.d.) Ratifications of Conventions 138 and 182 continued:
in 2020, Convention 182 became the first to be universally ratified by all 187
ILO member States. And, in 2013, Brazil’s brilliant influence on the Third
Global Conference (Global Conference on Child Labour, 2013) supported a broad and
incisive declaration targeting systemic root causes. Perhaps it was “of its
time and place.” If so, there are still lessons to learn, because the Brasilia
Conference followed the period of greatest progress.

Recalling the 47 million
reduction between 2008 and 2012, including 17 million children by definition
below minimum age (in child labour but not in worst forms) what happened after
Brasilia?

The title of Figure
1, taken from the ILO
estimates, suggests progress stalled only after 2016, but it had already
stalled for the youngest children from 2012 to 2016:

·       152 million children were
still in child labour.

·       The reduction of 16 million
was almost all among older children in worst forms.

·       The number of
five-to-11-year-olds (73 million) stayed unchanged.

·       Worse, among these youngest
children hazardous child labour increased.

·       And while other regions
advanced, child labour numbers grew in sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture now
accounting for 80 percent.

What Went
Wrong?

What
caused the dramatic stall? There is no “authorised” version of what happened
after 2012 and further research is required, but there are possible
explanations.

The
ILO’s member States bear primary responsibility for eliminating child labour. However,
the changes in government in India (2014) and Brazil (2019) cannot alone
explain the 2012 to 2016 regression, nor should we underestimate the importance
of ILO development cooperation with constituents, particularly in least
developed countries. Unfortunately, after 2011, direct funding for integrated
ILO support to strengthen constituents’ capacity to combat child labour
declined and IPEC’s presence in member States shrank greatly (ILO, 2016).

Among
Northern NGOs and donors (Ireland and Norway being notable exceptions) two principal
emphases re-emerged: global supply chains and enforcement against trafficking
from the global South to the global North.

First,
however, most child labour is not in global supply chains. Also, despite the
Rana Plaza disaster, too many actors still seek to hinder workers’ fundamental
rights to organise and bargain collectively, arguing that supply chain problems
can be resolved by snapshot social audits and conversations between
multinational enterprises and NGOs.

These two emphases – global supply chains and
enforcement against trafficking – emerged in a wider political context: the
recrudescence in many countries of populist ethnonationalism alongside weakened
respect for the rules-based international system and rights-based development.
The Author suggests that, rather than accelerating progress against child labour
as SDG 8.7 demanded, influential populist-ethnonationalist governments, by
conflating forced labour with trafficking and trafficking with migration and
asylum, and by seeking electoral support by demonising refugees and economic
migrants, contributed to slowing progress against child labour.

In
September 2017, at a side meeting at the United Nations in New York, the ILO
launched its 2012-2016 global estimates on child labour and forced labour. 152
million children were in child labour, of whom 4.3 million were in forced
labour (as were 21 million adults).

Several
things stood out at that meeting, including crucial trends that subsequently
continued unchecked and contributed to the recent increase in the number of
children in child labour. The 2017 estimates showed that progress among the
youngest children (aged five to 11) had stalled, and more of them were in
hazardous work. Moreover, despite the efforts of the International Partnership
for Cooperation on Child Labour in Agriculture and the Global March Against
Child Labour to draw more attention to child labour in agriculture (including a
major conference in Washington DC in 2012), the number of children concerned
grew substantially. In addition, sub-Saharan Africa was the only region to
experience an increase in child labour overall and not just in agriculture.

One
might have expected that these figures would have focused discussion on what
had become the predominant typology of child labour (accounting perhaps for 40 million
or more): the African child of primary school age, as likely to be a girl as a
boy, working unpaid alongside their parents on a small family farm producing
for local markets. Such expectation, while justified, would have been dashed.
ILO Director General Guy Ryder (a stalwart supporter of the movement against
child labour) presented the key statistics and called for the necessary action,
yet most of the other speakers barely mentioned child labour, let alone its largest
category.

Those
with a feel for the politics and protocol of the discussion might have noted
the dominance of speakers from Australia and the UK and Ivanka Trump’s
silent presence. They would also have noted that the Australian chair (of the
meeting and the new Alliance 8.7) did not give the last word to the ILO
Director General (the most senior person in the room[2]).
He  gave it instead to Australian mining
magnate Andrew Forrest, whose Minderoo Foundation funded the Walk Free
Foundation[3]
and who emphasised its campaigning against child trafficking, including for
sexual exploitation (Eyewitness account by the Author).

Australia
had by then already sought to deter migrants and refugees by incarcerating
adult and child migrants and asylum-seekers in detention camps on Nauru and
Manus with scant concern for their physical or mental health or rights under
international law. Few Asia-Pacific countries have ratified the 1951 Refugee
Convention. Indeed, Professor Susan Kneebone (2017) had been warning about the
securitisation of refugee and migrant border control in the Asia-Pacific region
through the Bali Process (the “Regional Conference on People Smuggling,
Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime” co-chaired by Australia
and Indonesia), and long before the Australian government sought (and failed,
thanks to International Trade Union Confederation’s alertness) to have it
listed as good practice in the Fourth Global Conference on Child Labour outcome
document (Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour, 2017).

Commercial
sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and recruitment of children for armed
conflict – both specifically referenced in Convention 182 – attract justified
moral outrage and varying degrees of vitally important and useful interventions.
Such moral and religious outrage, however, often narrowed the focus at the
expense of the wider, complex political economy of child labour (ignoring, for
example, life-shortening hazards faced by children exposed to dangerous
chemicals). This narrow focus on CSEC and trafficking for CSEC has also been misused
by some who conflate all trafficking with sex work, and who also commonly: reject
the evidence that constrained economic choices by working people within the
continuum of freedom and lack of freedom in labour markets do not always result in forced labour as
defined by international instruments; deny the agency of adult sex workers as
rights holders; and oppose their right to organise and defend their interests
through collective representation. (In so doing, of course, they also reject
ILO Convention 87’s essential principle that the inalienable right of freedom
of association applies to all workers without distinction).

It
appeared that the Australian government’s main aim at the Fourth Global
Conference in Buenos Aires was to gain support for its migration and asylum
policies by conflating forced labour with trafficking and trafficking with
migration and asylum. However, it was not alone in its eagerness to ignore its
international obligations towards migrants and to demonise and victimise adults
and children seeking safe haven. While Canberra proselytised the Bali Process,
Britain’s Conservative government, in a (still persisting) display of kith and
kin proximity, had already enshrined the same conflation in then-Home Secretary
Theresa May’s “Hostile Environment” against migrants, refugees and asylum
seekers. The Hostile Environment, launched in 2012, was a major cause of the
Windrush Scandal that led to Black British
citizens being unlawfully deported, and it legitimised the ethnonationalist
xenophobia and racism which contributed to the Brexit “mix” (Joint Council for
the Welfare of Immigrants, n.d.). Other countries across Europe and Asia were
also falling prey to resurgent populist-nationalist Islamophobia and
antisemitism: in some, the parties concerned assumed control of government. The
US, meanwhile, was also adopting harsh anti-migrant measures and, after 2017,
began to withdraw from the multilateral system.

Populist Ethnonationalism: The English
“Example” – Racism, the “Hostile Environment`”, Brexit, and the Nationality and
Borders Bill

Perhaps
most notable at the New York meeting (although some might consider it an abuse
of the agenda), was the statement of Britain’s (then) International Development
Secretary Priti Patel that “open borders facilitate crime.” This undisguised
piece of Brexit propaganda reflected the leitmotiv of the UK and Australian
governments’ putative support for SDG Target 8.7 and for the Alliance
established to campaign for it.

Most
recently, Patel as Home Secretary (Interior Minister) moved the UK Nationality
and Borders Bill, which would reduce support for victims of human trafficking
(including children) and weaken systems for identifying them. Criticised for
“excessive cruelty to asylum seekers,” she and the Government have faced
multiple challenges to their attempts to justify the Government’s willingness
to depart from international norms (Townsend, 2021b).

During
2021, more than 28,000 people crossed the English Channel in small boats; a small
number compared to those crossing the Mediterranean (Similarly, far fewer people
seek asylum in the UK than in Germany, France or Spain).

In
a statement on March 20, 2021, the Home Office claimed an “alarming rise in
people abusing our modern slavery system by posing as victims in order to
prevent their removal and enable them to stay in the country” (Home Office,
2021). First leaked to the Sun (a right-wing tabloid in Rupert Murdoch’s media
empire) Patel said: “Our generous safeguards for victims are being rampantly
abused by child rapists, people
who pose a threat to national security, and failed asylum seekers with no right
to be here.” Patel’s revolting conflation of victims of trafficking for forced
labour with child rapists - almost harking back to the medieval antisemitic
blood libel - echoed Trump’s racist electoral campaign trope that Mexican
migrants were drug dealers, criminals and rapists and, indeed, the prurient
rants of Islamophobic racists in England and their counterparts in the RSS in
India - the paramilitaries backing Narendra Modi (whom Patel so admires).

Yet a Freedom of Information (FoI) Act
response to queries by ECPAT (Every Child Protected Against Trafficking) UK,
revealed that the Home Office’s Modern Slavery Unit could not provide data on
child rapists, national security threats or failed asylum seekers referred to
the modern slavery system since 2017[4]
(Townsend, 2021b).

The
response, that compiling the data would require trawling individual case files,
suggested Patel’s claims and policies lacked evidence.

In June, the High Court ruled that Patel had
acted unlawfully in detaining, in former military barracks (which also failed
to meet minimum safety standards during the Covid pandemic), six asylum-seekers
who had been victims of trafficking and/or torture. Her process for selecting
people to be held there was also deemed unlawful (Taylor, 2021b).

In
October, barristers’ legal opinion commissioned by NGO Freedom from Torture
concluded the Bill breached domestic law, articles 31 and 33 of the 1951
Convention, and articles 2, 3, 4, 8 and 13 of the European Convention on Human
Rights, in at least ten ways (Syal, 2021a).

In
November, Patel was exposed as having misled Parliament by seeking to justify
inhumane deterrence measures with false claims that the majority crossing the
Channel were not asylum-seekers but single young migrant men seeking
employment. While refusing a Freedom of Information request to reveal its most
recent “evidence” about asylum-seekers’ motivations (Townsend, 2021c), the
Government also falsely claimed it had reached an agreement with Albania to
“offshore” asylum-seekers while their claims were considered.[5]
This was denied by Albania’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Ambassador to
the UK who, in a BBC Newsnight interview on 19 November, dismissed it as “fake
news”. Analysis by the Refugee Council and Médecins sans Frontiers of Freedom
of Information and Home Office statistics from January 2020 to May 2021 showed
that 91 percent of asylum-seekers were from ten countries riven with conflict,
human rights abuse and persecution; that 98 percent of those crossing the
Channel applied for asylum; 61 percent of those from the ten key countries
would have been granted refugee status following their initial claim (88
percent in the case of Syrians); and of the 39 percent whose initial claim was
refused, 59 percent were likely to be granted on appeal.

From
this research, the Refugee Council concluded that the Government should:

·       Rapidly expand existing
safe routes including both resettlement schemes and refugee family reunion;

·       Establish a humanitarian
visa system to allow people to apply for a visa to enter the UK safely for the
purposes of claiming asylum;

·       Recognise that many people
seeking asylum have no option other than an irregular journey as recognised in
the 1951 Convention, and therefore should be treated fairly and humanely by
being granted a fair hearing on UK soil; and that

·       The government should put
in place an efficient, effective, high-quality and timely asylum
decision-making system so people do not have to wait for months or years for an
outcome (Refugee Council, 2021).

Following
an attempted bombing in Liverpool on 17 November, and despite calls for calm by
politicians and police and warnings that she was inflaming tensions and risked
inciting violence, including against lawyers acting for asylum-seekers, Patel
nonetheless blamed the incident on what she described as an asylum system that
had been broken “in the past” (her Party has been in Government for 11 years).
She also added a clause to the Nationality and Borders Bill giving her
unprecedented power to remove without notification UK citizenship from
dual UK citizens born and raised in the UK, a measure the Race Relations
Council concluded would be used disproportionately against British Muslims.

Other
clauses would also violate international norms, “…including rendering claims
from anyone arriving in the UK by an illegal route inadmissible, while
criminalising them and anyone who seeks to save their lives, and giving Border
Force staff immunity from prosecution if people die in the Channel during
“pushback” operations” (Siddique, 2021). Trade
unions representing UK Border Force staff stated that a policy of turning back
small boats, already rejected by France, would violate maritime law and be
unworkable. In November 2021, the Public and Commercial Services Union announced
it might seek judicial review to challenge its lawfulness (Syal, 2021b). The
Home Office’s lawyers advised that such a challenge would be highly likely to
succeed, and that the union might also take industrial action and support
individual claims under section 44 of the Employment Rights Act, 1996.[6] The
“culture war” now ran so deep that, in August, Nigel Farage and the British
right-wing media dared criticise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI)
for rescuing people – including children – from small boats in distress. The
public, however, responded with vastly increased donations to this venerable
(voluntarily-funded) service.

Also in November 2021, the UK Government sent military
advisors to assist Poland in its enforcement of Fortress Europe borders against
migrants and asylum-seekers who had become victims of the machinations of
Lukashenko’s Belarus regime. In late November, 27 asylum-seekers, mostly Kurds,
drowned trying to cross the English Channel to reach the UK. A week later, the
RNLI website came under cyber-attack and its staff received threatening emails.

In the July 2021 parliamentary debate on Patel’s Bill,
former Prime Minister Theresa May admitted that as Home Secretary she would
have proposed similar measures to deter asylum-seekers by sending them to a
“safe third country” had it not been for “practical concerns.” Whatever May’s
credentials as EU Remainer and intellectual author of the UK Modern Slavery
Act, as author of the Hostile Environment she contributed to the xenophobic
rhetoric of othering that nourished the recrudescence of populist English
nationalism.

This rhetoric is ever more familiar in today’s
“culture wars”. The ethnonationalist political forces seeking to close borders
against migrant workers and refugees and deny family reunion to unaccompanied
children are precisely those that are also promoting neo-colonialist
revisionism - decrying as “woke” and unpatriotic critical historical analyses
of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, Empire, post-Civil War
segregation in the United States, and their links to contemporary migration and
refugee flows.

Speaking
to Conservative Party Conference after the 2016 Brexit referendum, May had
derided mobile people with multiple cultural, linguistic, and ethnic heritage
who identified as Europeans. She said:

Today,
too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common
with international elites than with
the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the
street ... but if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen
of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means (Davis
and Hollis, 2018; Merrick, 2017; The Spectator, 2016; Author’s italics).

Besides
the obvious irony of a Conservative prime minister criticising elites, her
choice of language and (hopefully genuine) ignorance of European history and
the analogy of “international elites” and “cosmopolitans” was chilling. In
November 1933, at the Berlin Siemens Dynamo Works, Hitler had derided:

[the]
clique ... people who are at home both nowhere and everywhere, who do not have
anywhere a soil on which they have grown up, but who live in Berlin today, in
Brussels tomorrow, Paris the day after that, and then again in Prague or Vienna
or London, and who feel at home everywhere[7] (O
Karlsson, 2018).

Within
15 years, “rootless cosmopolitan” became Stalin’s synonym for Jew. Today, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán
shares this lexicon; his government´s crude antisemitism one cause of its increasing
distance from the EU[8] (David and Moos, 2021).

Evidently,
racism and xenophobia alone did not cause Brexit, nor were they sentiments
shared by much of the UK population. However, while other member States
educated children as EU citizens (and publicly celebrated EU membership and
structural and regional fund projects), successive UK governments had fanned
the Brexit flame by blaming the EU for their own failure to respond to
globalisation and deindustrialisation with appropriate industrial strategies
and by failing to highlight the peace, prosperity, and acquis of labour and other rights the EU had underpinned for
decades.[9]
Nonetheless, this foul and foolhardy language contributed to releasing the
racist genie from the bottle, to the Windrush Scandal, and to the toxic
ethnonationalism and xenophobia that, playing on ahistorical delusions of
English exceptionalism, helped build the slight majority[10] in
England and (among non-Welsh voters) in Wales in the (advisory) Brexit
referendum. As the writer and critic Will Self said in March 2019, when
challenged that he was accusing all pro-Brexit voters of racism: “You don’t
have to be a racist or an antisemite to vote for Brexit; it’s just that every
racist or antisemite in the country did” (Gelblum, 2019).

The propagandist conflation of
migration and asylum with trafficking is just one aspect of the growing wave of
populist ethnonationalism around the world led by a New Right. However, it is central
to our discussion because it contributed significantly to diverting attention
from the ten percent of the world’s children still in child labour. Indeed, in
July 2021, amid the pandemic, Britain’s “get Brexit done” government
reconfirmed its disdain for the world’s poorest children by cutting
international development assistance, hitting child nutrition and girls’
education and health, both essential elements in the struggle to end child
labour (McVeigh, 2021).

Northern-Centrism and SDG Target 8.7

Let
us return now from the downward spiral of the UK Government’s
populist-xenophobic rhetoric and (anti-)asylum legislation to the international
stage of the SDGs.  Target 8.7 aims to
“eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure
the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including
recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its
forms” (United Nations, 2015).

With
hindsight, it was probably unwise to put child labour and trafficking (as a
subset of “modern slavery”) together, not least when (to borrow Bertolt
Brecht’s reference to war and the rise of Hitler from his 1941 play, The
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) the ethnonationalist “bitch that bore him was on
heat again” (Brecht,
1978).

In
the late 1990s, some international trade union colleagues feared Convention 182
might be applied in isolation from or even supersede Convention 138. Indeed,
although member States continued to ratify the Convention - and despite
criticism by the ILO supervisory bodies of the Bolivian government’s attempt to
reduce the minimum age to ten years (ILO, 2019) – a coalition of NGOs and
academics still campaigns against Convention 138 and its principle of a
minimum age for work, which is inextricably linked to that of universal
compulsory education. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Target 8.7, when put
alongside the 2014 Protocol to Convention 29 on forced labour, could face
similar risks and that this resurgent populist-ethnonationalist discourse would
distort the crucial campaign against forced labour by conflating forced labour
with trafficking and trafficking with migration and asylum, while the waters
were being muddied further with the newly-invented category of “Modern Slavery”
and misuse of the term “exploitation”.

Unfortunately,
the discourse swirling around the anti-migration juggernaut may also have
sideswiped the campaign for ratification of the 2014 Protocol, despite its
excellent content. The fact that some perceived it as a “trafficking protocol”
probably did not help. The vocal support of the UK and Australian governments
and the UK’s incessant promotion of its enforcement-centric Modern Slavery Act
– fell on barren ground in some developing countries with bitter experience of
UK migration policies (views imparted to the Author by parliamentarians from
South Asia). Protocols are rarely rapidly ratified, although this one
supplemented the second-most ratified ILO Convention. The aim of 50
ratifications by 2018 was not reached until 2020. By comparison, in a similar
period following its adoption, Convention 182 had gathered 157.

Several
factors might have contributed to the formulation of SDG Target 8.7. Of the 152
million children in child labour in 2017, as defined by the Conventions and the
International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ILO, 2018b), 4.3 million were
in forced labour. Some wanted attention focused on child marriage, others on
forced child labour - or “child slavery” as they called it. Although their
narrow concern about what they considered the most egregious form of child
labour was understandable, it risked undermining the strategic, integrated
policy approaches required to deal with the intersectional root causes of all
forms of child labour. Sadly (and mostly unintentionally) it also boosted the
populist-nationalist enforcement discourse. Criminal sanctions against “evil
traffickers” (including those who are not traffickers but facilitate irregular
crossing of closed borders)[11]
sit far more comfortably with populist-ethnonationalist propaganda than complex
discourse on the intersectionality of human rights and sustainable and
equitable socioeconomic development.

True,
some influential colleagues who were not child labour policy specialists erroneously
believed all child labour was forced labour and so both belonged in a single
SDG target. Indeed, until the ILO Convention 182 was adopted, and while
Convention 138 had few ratifications, the ILO Committee of Experts on the
Application of Conventions and Recommendations had derived its child labour
jurisprudence mainly from member States’ reports on the application of the
widely ratified Convention 29. The Experts had held that, because a child could
not give free consent, all child labour was forced labour. However, this
jurisprudence obtained before the adoption of Convention 182, before IPEC
became the ILO’s largest single development cooperation programme, before the
first quadrennial global estimates in 2000 were developed, and before the growing
understanding of the political economy of child labour.

Dominant
Northern perceptions of child labour fuelled by global supply chain campaigns
also showed scant interest in the wider child labour economy. It was and is
right to condemn child labour performed for third-party employers, for example,
in the production of garments, sports goods, surgical instruments, or
agricultural commodities like bananas, tobacco, cotton, and prawns (although
perhaps not pure coincidence that the US initiated some such campaigns when US
farmers or prawn fishers were clamouring for support, as after the 2010 Gulf of
Mexico oil spill). Yet these campaigns were often predicated on the
misapprehension that all children in child labour were under direct,
unscrupulous control of an identifiable enterprise. Although often true, this
narrow focus largely ignored what was and remains the predominant mode of child
labour: unpaid work alongside parents in family farms and micro-enterprises
producing primarily locally-traded goods and services. That (despite its widespread
use of bonded labour of entire families) included brick-making, a textbook
local manufacture. The exception, perhaps, was child labour in domestic work,
although it still accounts for seven million children (2.5 million of them
girls under 11).

One example of conflating forced labour and
child labour in a global supply chain was the headline-grabbing claim that
children trafficked from neighbouring countries produced all West African
cocoa. Untrue when the campaign began in the USA (quickly followed by Europe
and Japan), and still today, it nonetheless sparked the Harkin-Engel Protocol,
which sought to impose measures, especially on Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Although
the US ambassador to Ghana stated publicly that the nationally-determined child
labour priorities were fishing, domestic service, and artisanal mining, the US
maintained pressure on the cocoa/chocolate industry and on the two other governments.
Furthermore, it supported the establishment of a monitoring body operating
separately from the national child labour monitoring system, while rejecting
proposals for tripartite, tri-national oversight.

Significant
funding for IPEC work accompanied this campaign. However, it mostly went to
direct beneficiary projects, partly because the US Government Performance and
Results Act required simplistic correlation of expenditure with results. The US
then had (and still has) not ratified Convention 138 and was focusing
exclusively on the worst forms of child labour (which it unhelpfully termed “exploitative”
child labour, an adjective explicitly rejected by the ILO Conferences in
1998-99). Despite President Obama’s unequivocal call on World Day Against Child
Labour in 2009 for the “elimination of child labour in all its forms” (Peters
and Woolley, 2009), and Senator Harkin’s support for integrated interventions
to tackle the root causes of child labour, resistance came from within the
Administration to integrated fundamental rights and decent work approaches
targeting all forms of child labour and to support for worker and small farmer
self-organisation. This general exclusion of support for public services and
for generalised benefits to communities meant root causes remained largely
untouched.

It
became clear that most children performing child labour (even if hazardous) in
cocoa production had not been trafficked and were not in forced labour. Most were
working on family farms run by their parents as owners, tenants, or
sharecroppers (although, in the last two, conditions could approximate to
forced labour), and might also be engaged in producing other crops or in other
types of labour like domestic work or artisanal mining.

The
“modern slavery” and Target 8.7 discourses deployed another damaging
conflation, perhaps unintentional and based on common but inexact usage: “exploitation”
became a synonym for forced labour. By repeatedly referring to exploitation as
if it existed only in conditions of forced labour, this further hindered
understanding of the mutually supportive and interdependent nature of FPRW at the
heart of the 1998 Declaration and of the mutually aggravating nature of
violations of those rights.

The
Marxist definition of exploitation – extraction of surplus value by capital
from labour, the essential relationship of the capitalist mode of production –
is not universally accepted. However, suggesting that exploitation takes place only
in conditions of forced labour (or to use the term exclusively or primarily in
that context) undermines the struggle for universal realisation of all four
interdependent categories of FPRW: freedom from child labour, forced labour and
discrimination, and, particularly, freedom of association and the right to
bargain collectively. Indeed, the 2012 ILO Conference made clear that freedom
of association and the right to collective bargaining are primus inter pares among these rights. The 1998 ILO Declaration Preamble
proclaims that the purpose of universal realisation of these rights is to
“enable the persons concerned to claim … a fair share of the wealth they have
helped to generate” (ILO, 1998 and 2010). However, if only people in forced
labour are exploited, then all others (including garment, plantation, and
food-processing workers; teenagers in fast-food restaurants and “gig economy”
delivery services; and migrant workers cleaning offices and hotels) must be
receiving their ‘fair share’, and therefore do not need collective bargaining,
and neither do small farmers need associations or cooperatives to negotiate
fair prices.

Abuse
of the specific meanings of the distinct economic and legal concepts exploitation and forced labour not only risks disdain for the universal rights to
freedom of association and collective bargaining. The intrinsic overlap between
denial of these rights and discrimination, social exclusion and disempowerment
on one hand, and forced labour and child labour on the other is effectively
universal (unlike the, mercifully, comparatively small overlap between child
labour and forced labour). The narrow misuse of “exploitation” therefore also undermines
the strategic understanding - enshrined in the 1998 Declaration and subsequent
ILO resolutions - that forced labour, child labour, and discrimination will not
be eradicated without universal realisation of freedom of association and
effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.

Moreover,
several other related and erroneous beliefs are incompatible with an
understanding that the struggle against the root causes of forced labour and
child labour in the real economy requires the collective agency and representative voice of rights holders (if that concept
is understood at all). Prominent among those ideas are that employer
paternalism, “corporate social responsibility”, and social auditing render
trade unions and small producers’ organisations and their principal collective
bargaining function redundant, and that forced labour and child labour can be
eliminated by a combination of donor-funded NGOs, philanthropic noblesse-oblige, draconian migration
curbs, and blunt-instrument law enforcement. Billionaires’ proclamations –
as heard by the Author – that philanthropy would end forced labour in the
21st Century are symptoms of an ahistorical, neo-colonialist pathology
(‘Wilberforceitis’?) clustered in the global North. This peddles the delusion
that white benefactors alone ended transatlantic slavery; denies the collective
agency of enslaved workers; and
ignores their struggle for self-organisation and their rebellions from ancient
Mesopotamia to the Americas and the Caribbean of the 18th and 19th centuries[12] (and
the centuries since, during which slave-owners´ descendants were paid
compensation for “loss of their property”).

Today’s
UK Government appears to be seeking the permanent renewal of
populist-nationalist xenophobic support. It does so by attacking people “traffickers”
alongside seeking to deport “illegal” migrants and “return” “illegal
asylum-seekers” to “safe countries” through which they have passed (although
there is no such thing as an illegal asylum-seeker, and none of those countries
has agreed to accept them); and by stating its intentions to copy the
Australian practice of offshore detention. Thus, the government signals its
intent to breach its obligations arising from ratification of the 1951
Convention, the ILO 2014 Protocol, and Convention 182 to protect child and
adult victims of trafficking, and under the law of the sea (See, inter alia, IMO-UNHCR-ICS, 2015; Røsæg, 2020).

The
UNHCR criticised Australia’s deliberate separation of family members as a
breach of fundamental human – and children’s – rights (Doherty, 2021). The UN
Special Rapporteur on Racism and a large coalition of migrants’ and refugees’
rights organisations have also criticised the policies of the present UK Home
Secretary as incompatible with international law (See, inter alia, Taylor, 2021a; Grierson and Marsh 2021; Townsend, 2021a).

Perhaps
when Alliance 8.7 was established it was no surprise that vocal support for “stopping
trafficking” ran alongside hostility by some governments to migrants,
asylum-seekers and refugees, despite the clear evidence that protected migration and safe routes to
asylum help prevent the vulnerability
to trafficking for forced labour to which migrant workers, asylum-seekers, and
their families may be exposed when denied safe passage. Despite the UN General
Assembly’s adoption in 2018 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular
Migration (but see the record vote: UN Digital Library (2018)), tens of
thousands of people, including infants and children, among them unaccompanied
child refugees, have since died trying to reach safe shores.

Why
pay such attention to this conflation and the wider context of weakened
commitment to international norms in a discussion about child labour trends?
Foremost, because despite some crossovers, forced labour and child labour are
not the same thing. Of the 160 million children in child labour, 155 million
are not in forced labour.

Deficits
in rights-based development make people vulnerable to forced labour, and penal
sanctions against the criminal offence of exacting forced labour are also
essential. However, for most children in child labour, who are working unpaid
in their family’s small farm or micro-enterprise, rights-based development,
social protection, and formalisation of the locally traded informal especially
rural – economy are far more appropriate responses than sanctions against their
parents. Indeed, while there is some
crossover between child labour and forced labour, both are consistently interwoven with discrimination and with denial of
freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively.

Conclusions

The author has attended
every Global Child Labour Conference since the First (Oslo 1997). The Fourth
(Buenos Aires, 2017), followed a severe reduction in progress against child
labour but also the adoption of SDG Target 8.7, becoming a conference on child
labour plus forced labour, plus youth employment. The outcome document
maintained the language of the forced labour Conventions and of the sustained
eradication of child labour; indeed, it was more detailed than the strategic
conclusions of Brasilia. Yet, child labour received slightly fewer references
than forced labour and trafficking, and the document inadequately
differentiated these ills and their required solutions.

The global trade union
movement had proposed an integrated Alliance 8 on decent work, explicitly recognising
the interdependence of all four categories of FPRW. This being denied, and
despite considerable efforts to persuade them to join, key global union
federations declined to bring their crucial sectoral mandates to Alliance 8.7. Indeed,
without the IUF, the global union federation with competence for agriculture,
the Alliance could not convene a credible rural economy working group.

Child labour and forced
labour, with trafficking delineated specifically, were put together and, after the SDGs were adopted, it appeared
that more attention was paid to trafficking than to child labour (indeed,
Australia, Alliance 8.7’s first chair, has still not ratified Convention 138).[13]
This was, in part, fuelled by the policies of ruling parties which, conflating
forced labour with trafficking and trafficking with migration and asylum,
sought electoral support by demonising migrants and asylum-seekers. Future
global estimates on forced labour might indicate whether that has helped or
hindered the fight against “modern slavery”. Already, however, continuing
attacks, in government policies and on the street, on migrants, asylum-seekers,
refugees and people from ethnic minorities, and, in the USA, an attempted
insurrection by white supremacists indicate that the racist genie is now truly
out of the bottle.

The result is an
interesting intersectional equation illustrating how, in an era of
populist-nationalist identity politics and othering, violation of one
fundamental right further hinders the realisation of the others. In this
crucial example, child labour is relegated as certain forces prioritise their
discrimination against migrants,
asylum-seekers, and refugees on the pretext of combatting trafficking. Such
discrimination prevents safe passage and makes trafficking for forced labour
more likely, not less, but is also a tool to divert attention from social and
economic injustice. This weakens opposition to policies that increase wealth
disparities: policies that in turn thrive when freedom of association and
collective bargaining are hindered rather than promoted.

The author is not
suggesting a conscious plot to side-line child labour, although some
governments and some (certainly not all) NGOs in Alliance 8.7 displayed little
interest in the topic. However, the lower priority it received stemmed partly
from the anti-migration and anti-asylum stance of influential governing parties
that deny the interdependent nature of FPRW. In the ethnonationalist discourse,
child labour has no electoral value, unlike children seeking asylum, who gain
it when governments boast fortress borders, denying them safe haven,
incarcerating them, or letting them drown.

In 2013, the author hoped
that replicating the 2008 to 2012 success of Brazil, India and others might
eradicate child labour by 2030. The remarkable absence of detailed analysis of
that extraordinary progress persists. Numerous conflicts - not least in
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, the Sahel, and the Great Lakes
region, the climate emergency, and the Covid pandemic have increased the
challenge. Today 800 million children may be partially or wholly out of school,
many vulnerable to child labour. Families are thrown into poverty: in the
global North queuing at food banks; in the global South, sometimes fleeing
violent persecution, returning from an imploded informal urban economy to seek
food security in home villages.

More recently, the urgency
of SDG 8.7 and the pandemic might have encouraged greater commitment by some
actors to pursue both elements of the target. New national policy initiatives
against child labour are emerging, including in rural Africa. The concept of
SDG 8.7 pathfinder countries, [14] which require support to
demonstrate concrete results, is advancing. There are widespread (though not
universal) efforts to implement the integrated area-based approach against
child labour in supply chains.

Furthermore, given their primus inter pares role in the canon of
FPRW, President Biden’s vocal support for all working people to enjoy their
rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining is encouraging
(Biden, 2021). This could help recreate a climate in which mature labour
relations are understood as normal and essential for social and economic
justice and well-functioning democracies, in turn helping to renew support for
the interwoven promotion of all FPRW.

Targeting the root causes
of child labour has been a powerful convening and entry point for successful
integrated activity to promote all - mutually supportive - fundamental rights
at work. Following the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour,
(ILO, 2021) with the Fifth Global Conference in Durban pending in 2022, the
2025 SDG target demands reinvigorated multilateralism, international
solidarity, tripartite consensus, and partnership to pursue accelerated
implementation of integrated fundamental rights policies to eradicate all child labour. Durban could also
provide an opportunity to promote a wider coalition with the International
Partnership for Cooperation on Child Labour in Agriculture, directing greater
attention to the great majority of child labour in locally traded goods and
services in rural economies (Established
in 2007, the IPCCLA comprises the ILO, FAO, IFAD and the IUF. See FAO, IFAD, ILO & IUF, 2020).

The nine-year-old African girl working unpaid alongside her parents on
the family farm, producing mainly for local markets, perhaps occasionally going
to school but prevented from exercising her right to fulfil her potential,
might not move Northern consumers. Yet, unless we reject the racist diversion
caused by the populist-nationalist conflation of trafficking with migration and
asylum, and refocus attention on her and her parents’ fundamental rights, we
will be unable to resume the integrated strategies required to eradicate child
labour. Instead, we will need to apologise, yet again, for breaking the solemn
promise to the world´s children, repeated time and time again and to which, in
2015, we attached a deadline: to eradicate all forms of child labour by 2025.

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[1] The title could be
clearer: key trends for the youngest children in agriculture and in Africa
began to stall from 2012.

[2] By custom, the
tripartite ILO being the UN’s “senior service” established with the League of
Nations in 1919, its Director General comes second to the UN Secretary General

[3] https://walkfree.org

[4] Formerly
End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, ECPAT UK is a valuable ally seeking to
situate its central campaign within a broader context, and vocal critic of the
British government’s failure to fulfil its obligations to protect child
migrants, asylum-seekers, and child victims of trafficking. See https://www.ecpat.org.uk/

[5] In the same vein, some
government sources had suggested offshoring asylum-seekers on the Falkland
Islands/Malvinas or Ascension Island.

[6] Section 44
provides employees with the right to withdraw from
and to refuse to return to a workplace in which – in their opinion – the
prevailing circumstances represent a risk of serious and imminent danger which
they could not be expected to avert; and permits claims for Constructive
Dismissal and unlimited compensation in the event that an employer fails to
maintain safe working conditions. Cf: https://section44.co.uk for a simple explanation. Full text at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/44.

[7] On
Hitler and antisemitism see inter alia (and especially): Kershaw (1999 and
2001). Domarus’ Hitler Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945 includes only an
edited version of Hitler’s 1933 Siemenswerk speech. However, the full quote
used here was cited by O. Karlsson in an article in the Berliner Tageszeitung
(10.10.2018) reporting criticism by historians Wolfgang Benz and Michael
Wolfssohn of German AfD leader Alexander Gauland for using similar language
resonant of that speech.

[8] Declaration
of interest: the Author’s father and other family members were refugees from
Nazi occupation; the few survivors in post-War Czechoslovakia became victims of
Stalinist antisemitism. The reactions of other “Second Generation” children to
this ethnonationalist-populist “Zeitgeist” are reflected in David and Moos
(2021). In November 2021, the Author chaired an online conference on this
subject: Lord Alf Dubs (leading advocate for child refugee rights in the House
of Lords), Moos and David were principal speakers.

[9] The
Author would also argue that, compared with other EU member states, widespread
(English) monolingualism hindered more people in the U.K. from using their
freedom of movement to work and explore their shared European culture.

[10] The
52 per cent who voted Leave was 37.5 per cent of the registered electorate.

[11] How easy it seems for
some to forget resistance networks in Nazi-occupied Europe that delivered persecuted
Jewish adults and children, resistance fighters, members of the Allied forces,
UK SOE operatives and others to safety across closed borders. The Calais World
War II museum dedicates a room to them. (Trilling, 2021)

[12] See, inter alia, the work on slavery and slave resistance in Brazil by
the late Prof. Dr Dick Geary, former director of the Nottingham University
Institute for the Study of Slavery, and his colleagues: Geary (2016)

[13] The other ILO member
States that have not yet ratified Convention 138 are Bangladesh (believed
to be in process), the Cook Islands, Iran, Lesotho, Marshall Islands, New
Zealand, Palau, St Lucia, Somalia, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and the USA

[14] On Pathfinder countries
and the response to the pandemic’s effect on child labour see, e.g.: ILO (2020)