Types

Children carry out a wide range of jobs, from mining silver to stitching footballs, and conditions often vary even within the same type of work. The types of jobs depend on factors such as the age of children, kinds of work available for adults and geographical environment.

Children tend to work in the ‘informal economy’ where their working life is not formally recognised. This is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to estimate the true number of working children worldwide.

There are four main types of work that children do:

• Agricultural
  69 per cent of all working children under 15 years of age in the world are in the agricultural sector, which includes harvesting crops and caring for livestock. Some of these children and adolescents work with their families and live at home. Others work outside the family for local employers or landowners.
• Manufacturing and production
  Children also work in manufacturing, producing a variety of goods: clothes, toys, matches, footballs, etc. Most of these units of production are small and employ intensive labour. Children may also produce goods in their homes, making simple objects, or even whole carpets, such as the Eye to Eye children in Pakistan.
• Industrial
  Children’s work in this sector includes mining, factory work and construction. Of the total number of working children in the world, nine per cent work in the industrial sector. Such work is likely to be hazardous. Find out about Hazardous and Harmful Work
• Service sectors
  This broad category includes children who work as domestic workers in other peoples’ homes, or who work in restaurants, hotels and shops, in small workshops, or do jobs like cleaning shoes or work as porters in the market, or who work with their families at home (for example a family-run shop). Children who work in the street are often sellers of a vast array of small items. Many of these children live at home with their families, but some live in the street with little or no contact with their families.

The working children who took part in the Eye to Eye project come from three quite different types of work.

In India the children are involved in child domestic work (service sector), in which children are employed to do household tasks. As Mumtaz, who used to be a domestic worker, describes: “I had to take my master’s son to tuition and then back home. Then I had to wash utensils, cook vegetables, sweep and mop the floors, then buy things from the market.”

• Find out more about child domestic work in India

In Bolivia the Eye to Eye children are slightly older and are occupied in jobs like being wheelbarrow boys in the market, washing windscreens at traffic lights, working in shops and shoe-shining (also service sector).

• Find out more about market work in Bolivia

In Pakistan the children are involved in weaving carpets (manufacturing and production), usually because of the family’s debt to a moneylender who ‘bonds’ them to the work as a form of debt repayment.

• Find out more about carpet weaving in Pakistan

Conditions in different types of work

Whatever the type of work, most working children lack any job security, receive no pay if they are absent or ill and cannot seek any protection if they are abused or mistreated by their employer. In general, children do not keep the money they earn (unless they live on their own) but the money they take home is often essential for the survival of the family.

In some jobs, it is the conditions that make the work either unacceptable or acceptable for an adolescent to do. If you look at market work, for example, working 12-hour days with little break, and carrying loads that are physically harmful is different from light jobs selling or unpacking goods part time. Some jobs, however, such as mining, children simply should never do.

• More on the difference between acceptable and harmful work