Informal Economy and Child Labour

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Business Ethics, Corporate Ethics, grade: 1,3, Berlin School of Economics, course: Workers' Rights in the Informal Economy, language: English, abstract: Child labour is a term that has been loaded with many emotions in the past. In industrialised countries, people have a very gridlocked opinion about this topic. Especially the recent discussions about sweatshops or other industries children work for, have brought up the question, if Western societies can really adopt their concepts on the developing world. As many of the jobs, children work in are in the informal sector, the author chose to put another emphasis on this topic. This paper will first define the terms 'informal economy' and 'child labour'. In section 3 the concept of fundamental labour and social standards is introduced and the different organisations dealing with labour standards are presented. Proximately the approaches in child labour abolition are shown and exemplary demonstrated by the relevant conventions of the International Labour Organization. In section 4 a worst case and a best case example in combating child labour are presented.