Ethics and Social Responsibility

Part 2: Ethics and Social Responsibility

The exploitative children employment is called as child labor. The child labor is drawn from many sectors of businesses including manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and some domestic services. There are many reasons for the child labor like social norms, poverty, lack of work opportunities, lack of education, migration, recessions, break down of law and order, and emergency situations. The child labor is very common in India, Bangladesh, and China. It is beneficial to these countries’ economies to hire children for working on their projects and tasks. The more number of children are participating in working in India. It is a source of cheap labor in India. The practices that are related to macroeconomic factors encourage growth, which in turn increases the supply of child labor. Outsourcing a project to India will bring the cost reduction for the western countries’ business. The products and services are unable to be banned just because they are involved the children labor, hence enabling the companies in India to practice child labor for reducing their costs of production.

In many situations, the families are dependent on their child earning for their survival. So in this regard the child labor practice can be justified ethical. In this regard the decision to hire a child for your labor is an ethical practice and firing him as a judgment would be an unethical practice. Moreover, the child labor can also be justified as an ethical phenomenon provided that the multinational companies can also provide the food and education to the children along with the work, in the third world countries like Nike had initiated an education program in the Vietnamese firms to provide the education and the food for the children along with their work.

As a whole the child labor is unethical and it has many negative effects – the children work under harsh conditions, they are paid at low rates, sometimes they are locked in rooms for several hours and so on. Some of the children are sold or abused as well. Some employers beat the children at work very badly. There are also the high chances of diseases in the children working under these conditions.  Many laborers contract tuberculosis, silicosis, and a variety of other diseases from their co-workers. They are also at risk to long- term emotional damage and injury. More often, these children are either killed or severely injured while they are at work. There are many remedies that have been proposed so far, for the child labor. The India has ordered local authorities to raid factories that employ children and to prosecute the employers, which may mean levying fines against violating employers and/or two to five years in prison. The 20 percent of GNP of India is contributed by child labor. There are many families in India which are earning an insufficient income to fulfill their basic financial needs. There is also a burden of debt on these families that forces such families to put their children in child labor. The low literacy rate is another reason for the child labor in India. There is saturation in the job market of India for adults, so their children will then have to work for their families at low costs. The families are large in numbers and the family incomes are very limited; hence to feed all the members the child labor becomes essential in India. The agricultural products are paying at the rate of productions, so it encourages the children to work in fields to earn an income to feed their families. The poor families are unable to send their children in schools so as an alternative they get involved to put their children under work. The families are unfamiliar with the children rights, hence sending them to work instead of sending their children to school. There are also some families in India who thinks that the schools will not be helping their children to survive so they send them to work.  The children of migrant families are unable to live in one place for long, so their children becomes unable to continue their school education therefore such children are sent to work in fields with their parents.