CHILD
LABOR IDENTIFICATION
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CHILD
LABOR IDENTIFICATION
Auditors’ Stance Towards Child Labor
Under the assumption that the auditors’ awareness on child labor could be associated with their effective identification and / or handling of child labor cases, we looked at why they think child labor should be prohibited. It is interesting to see that the top two reasons for preventing child labor are from a child rights perspective:“ it deprives children of the right to education” and“ the workplace activities can be dangerous and
harmful to children”. Combining these two options with“ it pushed children and their family to a downward spiral of poverty”, we created a new variable called“ child rights awareness”, and found that it had a significant correlation with the number of child labor cases auditors encountered and confirmed. Based on the available data, we obviously cannot establish a causal relationship that the auditors with higher
• 37 % auditors think child labor should be prohibited because it is against their principles
child rights awareness are more prone to discovering child labor cases or vice versa. However, this is still an interesting connection and worth considering in future trainings for auditors.
Significantly more auditors from China than other countries( 42 % vs. 25 %) regarded child labor as being against their principles and, thus, should be prohibited. However, we haven’ t found a strong enough
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• 84 % auditors from China believe a worker under the age 16( but over 15) is not acceptable under any circumstances
association between their personal position on child labor and the number of child labor cases they discovered. If it were against their principles, only the auditors outside of China tended to discover more suspected child labor cases. However, this result was not the same for confirmed cases. The minimum legal working age in China is 16. Even though the vast majority of auditors have zero tolerance for child labor even when the child is older than 15, they have conflicted feelings about the impact on children if they are merely removed from work.
“ If the child laborer is from poor family and the family is desperately in need of his / her income, suggestions of removing the child from factory and sending them home will only worsen their family’ s economic situation and drive the child to less regulated factories with worse working conditions”- An auditor from China.
It is not surprising that this is the view held by many auditors we interviewed in China. We tried to understand the ethical dilemma the auditors face by asking them if they believe their discovery of child labor might have a positive or negative impact on the children’ s lives. Out of the 30 auditors we interviewed, only seven or 23 % believed their work would bring positive impact on the child’ s life. 13 % stated quite pessimistically that their discovery of child labor would mostly affect children in a negative way, and 64 % thought it could be both positive and negative depending on the situation.
Best Response: Auditors’ Insights on Child Labor in Asia 10