The problems of child labour: international organizations and local contexts

MARÍA EUGENIA RAUSKY; LAURA FRASCO ZUKER

South American Childhoods. Neoliberalism and Children´s Rights

Palgrave MacMillan

Año: 2021; p. 73 - 102

In this chapter we seek to discuss some of the suppositions which underlie internationalprograms to eliminate child labour by looking at ethnographic field workstudies with child workers in Misiones and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Along withthe general proposal of this book, we consider that looking at the specificprocesses in the Latin American context (in our case Argentina) in no waydiminishes a global analysis, but makes an important contribution since articulationbetween layers of analysis and comparative case studies can illustrate thetensions inherent between the universal and the specific on child labour. We attemptto address this question, establishing dialogues with a group of universaltopics which the ILO supports to ?eliminate child labour?: 1) the underlyingnotion of childhood from which is derived the idea that child workers will nothave a childhood 2) the idea of exploitation to which child workers will besubjected 3) conflicts with schooling 4) the risks of child labour for health.These four topics of the ILO discourse contrast with the results of ourexperiences of empirical research which show the particular way in which theseideas play out in reality.