A Case against Child Labor Prohibitions 对禁用童工的一个反对意见 作者:Benjamin Powell @ 2014-07-29

译者:Eartha(@王小贰_Eartha)

校对:辉格(@whigzhou)

来源:Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulletin/case-against-child-labor-prohibitions Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory.1 She works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she feels “very tired and exhausted,” and sometimes falls asleep standing up. She makes 53 cents a day for her efforts. Make no mistake, it is a rough life.

哈丽玛是个十一岁的小女孩，在孟加拉的工厂里给Hanes牌内衣修线头，每天工作八小时，每周六天。① 她每小时需要处理150套内衣，工作时觉得“非常劳累”，有时站着就睡着了。而这样的努力工作每天能换来53美分。毫无疑问，这种生活非常艰苦。

Any decent person’s heart would go out to Halima and other child employees like her. Unfortunately, all too often, people’s emotional reaction lead them to advocate policies that will harm the very children they intend to help. Provisions against child labor are part of the International Labor Organization’s core labor standards. Anti-sweatshop groups almost universally condemn child labor and call for laws prohibiting child employment or boycotting products made with child labor.

任何一个正派人的内心都会对像哈丽玛这样的童工充满同情。但遗憾的是，人们的情绪化反应常常指引他们支持错误的政策，这反而会伤害那些他们原本想帮助的孩子。禁用童工条款是国际劳工组织的核心劳工标准的一部分。反对血汗工厂的团体几乎一致谴责使用童工的行为，呼吁通过禁止雇佣童工的法律或是抵制使用童工生产的商品。

In my recent book, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, I argue that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement agitates for would harm workers and that the process of economic development, in which sweatshops play an important role, is the best way to raise wages and improve working conditions. Child labor, although the most emotionally charged aspect of sweatshops, is not an exception to this analysis.

在我的新书《走出贫困：全球经济中的血汗工厂》中，我认为反血汗工厂运动的许多诉求将会损害工人们的利益，经济发展才是提高工资与改善工作环境的最好办法，而血汗工厂在其中发挥着重要作用。虽然在情感上，雇佣童工是血汗工厂最受世人谴责的方面，但它在上述分析中也不例外。

We should desire to see an end to child labor, but it has to come through a process that generates better opportunities for the children—not from legislative mandates that prevent children and their families from taking the best option available to them. Children work because their families are desperately poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives. When U.S. activists started pressuring Bangladesh into eliminating child labor, the results were disastrous.

我们期望看到童工的终结，但是这需要一个过程，要能为孩子们提供更好的机会，而不是通过法令阻止儿童和他们的家庭做出最佳的可行选择。儿童去工作是因为他们的家庭陷入了极度贫困，尽管收入微薄，但这对于整个家庭的生存来说通常是必要的。通过商业法规或政府管制来禁止雇佣童工常常只是在逼迫儿童们进入更糟糕的环境。美国的活动家们开始对孟加拉施压要求消除童工之后，显现的结果是灾难性的。 Effects of Child Labor Bans 童工禁令的效果 In 1993 Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have banned imports from countries employing children. In response, that fall Bangladeshi garment companies let go approximately 50,000 children. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors.”2

1993年，爱荷华州的民主党参议员汤姆·哈金提出了《童工慑止法》（the Child Labor Deterrence Act），意在禁止从雇佣童工的国家进口商品。那年秋天，孟加拉服装制造业对此作出反应，解雇了约50,000名童工。据美国劳工部的信息，“普遍认为，这些被解雇的儿童大部分在其他服装工厂，更小的、未经注册的转包作坊或是其他行业里找到了工作。”②

That makes the introduction of the bill seem simply ineffective. The Department of Labor is sugarcoating the situation. Paul Krugman summarizes what happened more bluntly: “The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets—and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.”3

提出这部法案看起来毫无作用。劳工部的说法是在粉饰现实。保罗·克鲁格曼作了更直白的总结：“直接结果是孟加拉的纺织工厂停止了雇佣童工，但是这些孩子就此回到学校了吗？他们回到快乐的家里了吗？至少根据乐施会的资料，并没有。他们发现这些被解雇的童工最终找了更加糟糕的工作，或是流落街头——其中相当多的孩子被迫出卖身体。”③

Based on the information they have, families tend to choose the best available job for their children. Taking that option away does not eliminate the necessity of work; it forces them to take a less-desirable job. As repulsive as a child working in a sweatshop may be, it is not nearly as repulsive as a child forced into prostitution through the actions of unthinking Western activists.

基于所拥有的信息，每个家庭都想为自己的孩子在可选职业中挑出最好的。剥夺了那个选项并不等于消除了工作的需求，反而逼迫他们选择一个没那么好的工作。一个儿童在血汗工厂里工作，这确实让人反感，但这远远比不上看着一个孩子因为不动脑子的西方活动家而被迫出卖身体来的让人厌恶。

The Bangladesh story is a dramatic one, but it illustrates the general point that when children lose factory jobs they find less desirable jobs to replace the jobs they lost. In countries where sweatshops locate, child labor is often the norm, and most of the children work in less remunerative sectors with fewer opportunities for advancement than manufacturing, such as agriculture or domestic services.

孟加拉的故事有些极端，但它展示了一个要点：当儿童们失去了工厂里的工作之后，他们会寻找稍次的工作作为替代。在那些血汗工厂所处的国家里，雇佣童工是个惯例，并且大部分儿童工作的行业，如农业与国内服务业，酬劳没有制造业那么多，晋升机会也比较少。

In 2003 the World Bank measured the percentage of children aged 10 to 14 that were working in most countries.4 As Table 1 shows, child labor is not uncommon. Rates of child labor range from a high of nearly 27 percent of children in Bangladesh to a low of 3.3 percent in Costa Rica.5

2003年，世界银行调查了大部分国家中10至14岁儿童中童工的比例。④如表一所示，童工并不罕见，比例高可至孟加拉的几近27%，低的如哥斯达黎加的3.3%。⑤ The World Bank also collects data on the economic sectors in which children are employed. Figure 1 presents the distribution of employment of economically active children between the ages of 7 and 14 by sector.6

世界银行也从雇佣童工的各个经济部门收集数据。表一依照经济部门展示了7-14岁年龄段中参与经济活动的儿童在各行业中的分布情况。⑥ In seven of the nine countries for which data exists, most children were employed in agriculture, often by a wide margin.7 In the two exceptions, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, the leading sector employing children was service. India had the highest proportion of children employed in manufacturing, and there it was a little over 14 percent.

有数据可查的九个国家中，七个国家的大部分儿童受雇于农业部门，远超其他行业。⑦ 哥斯达黎加与多米尼加共和国是两个例外，雇佣童工最多的是服务业。印度制造业雇佣童工的比例在各国中最高，略超过14%。

Protests against sweatshops that use child labor implicitly assume that ending child labor in sweatshops by taking away the option to work in a factory will, on net, reduce child labor. Evidence on child labor in countries that have sweatshops indicates that is wrong. It is not a few “bad apple” firms exploiting children in factories. Child labor is common. Employment in agriculture is not necessarily safer, either. A 1997 child labor survey showed that 12 percent of children working in agriculture reported injuries, compared with 9 percent of those who worked in manufacturing.8

对雇佣童工的血汗工厂进行抗议，这种行为暗含了一种预设，即通过除去儿童在工厂工作的选择从而终结血汗工厂里的童工现象，童工数量就会出现净减少。从拥有血汗工厂的国家所获取的证据显示，这是错的。真相并不是个别“害群之马”在工厂里剥削儿童。雇佣童工的现象是普遍的。而且，在农地里工作也并不必然更加安全。一份1997年的童工调查显示，农业部门有12%的童工曾遭伤害，制造业则是9%。⑧ Child Labor and Economic Development 童工与经济发展 The thought of Third World children toiling in factories to produce garments for us in the developed world to wear is appalling, at least in part because child labor is virtually nonexistent in the United States and the rest of the more developed world.9 Virtually nowhere in the developed world do kids toil long hours every week in a factory in a manner that prevents them from obtaining schooling.

第三世界的儿童们在工厂里辛苦劳动，为我们这些发达地区的人生产服装——这种念头让人惊骇，至少部分原因在于童工事实上并不存在于美国及其他发达地区。⑨ 事实上，没有发达国家会允许儿童们每周长时间地在工厂里辛苦工作，以至于无法接受学校教育。

Children typically worked throughout human history, either long hours in agriculture or in factories once the industrial revolution emerged. The question is, why don’t kids work today? Rich countries do have laws against child labor, but so do many poor countries. In Costa Rica the legal working age is 15, but an ILO survey found 43 percent of working children were under the legal age.10

纵观人类历史，儿童其实一直都在工作，不管是长时间在农地里劳作，还是工业革命之后进入工厂工作。真正该问的问题是：为何今天儿童不工作了？富裕国家确实有禁止童工的法律，但是很多贫穷的国家也有。哥斯达黎加的法定工作年龄是15岁，但是国际劳工组织的一项调查发现有43%的童工低于法定年龄。⑩

Similarly, in the United States, Massachusetts passed the first restriction on child labor in 1842. However, that law and other states’ laws affected child labor nationally very little.11 By one estimate, more than 25 percent of males between the ages of 10 and 15 participated in the labor force in 1900.12 Another study of both boys and girls in that age group estimated that more than 18 percent of them were employed in 1900.13 Economist Carolyn Moehling also found little evidence that minimum-age laws for manufacturing implemented between 1880 and 1910 contributed to the decline in child labor.14

同样，在美国，马萨诸塞州在1842年最先对童工加以限制。然而，那部法律连同其他州的法律对于全国范围内的童工情况影响甚微。⑾ 有人估算过，1900年10-15岁的男性中超过25%的人参与工作.⑿ 另一项研究将同年龄段的女性也纳入了估算范围，结果发现1900年有超过18%的儿童参与了工作。⒀ 经济学家卡洛琳·莫和林也找不到证据证明1880至1910年间针对制造业实施的最低工资法起到了减少童工的作用。⒁

Similarly, economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz examined the period between 1910 and 1939 and found that child labor laws and compulsory school-attendance laws could explain at most 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollment.15 The United States did not enact a national law limiting child labor until the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. By that time, the U.S. average per capita income was more than $10,200 (in 2010 dollars).

经济学家克劳迪亚·戈尔丁与拉里·卡茨仔细调查了1910至1939年间的情况，发现童工相关的法律与强制入学的法律最多只能解释5%的高中入学率增长幅度。⒂ 直到1938年《公平劳动标准法》通过，美国才有了全国性的限制童工的法律。在那时，美国人均收入已超过10,200美元（以2010年美元计算）。

Furthermore, child labor was defined much more narrowly when today’s wealthy countries first prohibited it. Massachusetts’s law limited children who were under 12 years old to no more than 10 hours of work per day. Belgium (1886) and France (1847) prohibited only children under the age of 12 from working. Germany (1891) set the minimum working age at 13.16

此外，如今的富裕国家当年第一次出台法律禁止童工时，其定义要比现在狭窄的多。马萨诸塞州法禁止12岁以下儿童每天工作超过10小时。比利时（1886年）与法国（1847年）只禁止12岁以下儿童工作。德国（1891年）将最低工作年龄限定在13岁。⒃

England, which passed its first enforceable child labor law in 1833, merely set the minimum age for textile work at nine years old. When these countries were developing, they simply did not put in place the type of restrictions on child labor that activists demand for Third World countries today. Binding legal restrictions came only after child labor had mostly disappeared.

英格兰在1833年通过了第一部童工法，将纺织业的最低工作年龄仅仅设在9岁。当这些国家处于发展阶段，他们通过的限制标准可比不上今天这些活动家对第三世界国家所要求的。有效的法律约束只有在童工几近消失之后才会到来。

The main reason children do not work in wealthy countries is precisely because they are wealthy. The relationship between child labor and income is striking. Using the same World Bank data on child labor participation rates we can observe how child labor varies with per capita income. Figure 2 divides countries into five groups based on their level of per capita income adjusted for purchasing power parity. In the richest two fifths of countries, all of whose incomes exceed $12,000 in 2010 dollars, child labor is virtually nonexistent.

富裕国家的儿童不工作的主要原因就是他们比较富有。童工比例与收入之间的相关性是显著的。通过前文提到的世界银行关于童工比例的数据，我们可以观察到童工比例是如何随人均收入的变化而改变的。经购买力平价调整后，图2按照人均收入水平将各国分成五组。最富有的两组国家人均收入超过12，000美元（以2010年美元计算），童工几乎不存在。 It is only when countries have an income less than $11,000 per year that we start to observe children in the labor force. But even here, rates of child labor remain relatively low through both the third and fourth quintiles. It is the poorest countries where rates of child labor explode. More than 30 percent of children work in the fifth of countries with incomes ranging from $600 to $2,000 per year. Economists Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik econometrically estimate that 73 percent of the variation of child labor rates can be explained by variation in GDP per capita.17

只有当一个国家的人均年收入低于11,000美元时，我们才开始观察到童工。即便如此，在第三与第四组国家中，中等及中等偏上收入家庭的童工比例相对来说也很低。而在穷国，童工比例暴增。最为贫穷的那组国家中，人均年收入在600美元到2，000美元之间，童工比例超过了30%。经济学家Eric Edmonds 与 Nina Pavcnik 运用计量经济学测算，认为童工比例差异中的73%可由人均GDP差异来解释。⒄

Of course, correlation is not causation. But in the case of child labor and wealth, the most intuitive interpretation is that increased wealth leads to reduced child labor. After all, all countries were once poor; in the countries that became rich, child labor disappeared. Few would contend that child labor disappeared in the United States or Great Britain prior to economic growth taking place—children populated their factories much as they do in the Third World today.

当然，有相关性不代表存在因果关系。但是当我们思考童工与财富之间的关系时，最符合直觉的解读就是财富的增长减少了童工。毕竟，所有国家都有过贫穷的阶段；在那些富裕起来的国家里，童工就消失了。鲜有人认为美国或者英国的童工在经济发展之前就已经消失了——就像今日的第三世界，工厂里到处都是儿童。

A little introspection, or for that matter our moral indignation at Third World child labor, reveals that most of us desire that children, especially our own, do not work. Thus, as we become richer and can afford to allow children to have leisure and education, we choose to.

我们对历史所做的一些反省，抑或出于对第三世界童工现象的道德愤慨，这些其实都反映了我们中的大部分人不希望孩子们去工作，尤其是自己的孩子。因此，当我们变得有钱，能够为孩子们提供闲暇的生活与教育之时，我们就这样做了。 Conclusion 结论 The thought of children laboring in sweatshops is repulsive. But that does not mean we can simply think with our hearts and not our heads. Families who send their children to work in sweatshops do so because they are poor and it is the best available alternative open to them. The vast majority of children employed in countries with sweatshops work in lower-productivity sectors than manufacturing.

让儿童在血汗工厂里工作的想法令人厌恶，但这不意味着我们就该简单地让同情心泛滥，而舍弃大脑的思考。家长把孩子送去血汗工厂里工作，是因为他们太穷了，而这已是可选的选项中最好的选择。在有着血汗工厂的国家里，大多数童工所在行业的生产能力比制造业更低。

Passing trade sanctions or other laws that take away the option of children working in sweatshops only limits their options further and throws them into worse alternatives. Luckily, as families escape poverty, child labor declines. As countries become rich, child labor virtually disappears. The answer for how to cure child labor lies in the process of economic growth—a process in which sweatshops play an important role.

出台贸易制裁措施或其他法律，将这些儿童的工作机会夺走，这只会进一步限制他们的选择，陷他们于更糟糕的境地之中。值得庆幸的是，当这些家庭脱离贫困之后，童工就减少了。随着国家慢慢富裕起来，童工在事实上就会消失。如何解决童工问题的答案就在经济发展的过程之中，而血汗工厂则在其中扮演了重要角色。 Notes 注记 National Labor Committee, “Child Labor: 11 year-old Halima Sews Clothing for Hanes,” 2006. A video of this interview with Halima is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTIfY9SmJdA. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 1994 Child Labor Report, Bangladesh, http://www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/sweat/bangladesh.htm Paul Krugman, “Reckonings; Hearts and Heads,” New York Times (April 22, 2001), p. 17. Similarly, UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/ , reports that many of these children turned to prostitution. World Bank, World Development Indicators, CD-ROM (Washington: World Bank, 2005). Mauritius is excluded from Table 1 because it is an outlier that is not representative of the general situation as I explain in Out of Poverty. For each country, an average was taken for all years between 2000 and 2009 for which data are available. The World Bank database does not include data for Vietnam, but Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, “Child Labor in the Global Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 204, report that 92 percent of children working in Vietnam in 1998 worked in agriculture. Kebebew Asshagrie, Statistics on Working Children and Hazardous Child Labour in Brief, Geneva: International Labor Organization (1997). The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 18 percent of children aged 5 to 14 are economically active worldwide. Of these, it estimates that 94 percent of them are in low-income countries, and only 2 percent are in what it classifies as developed countries. ILO, Every Child Counts: New Global Estimates on Child Labour, Geneva: ILO (2002). International Labor Organization, Summary of the Results of the Child and Adolescent Labour Survey in Costa Rica, Geneva: ILO (2002), http://www.ilo.org/ipec/ChildlabourstatisticsSIMPOC/Questionnairessurveysandreports/lang—en/index.htm. The remainder of this paragraph and the next draws on research found in Joshua C. Hall and Peter T. Leeson, “Good for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards and Comparative Development,” Journal of Labor Research 28, no. 4 (September 2007): 658–76. Robert Whaples, “Child Labor in the United States,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. R. Whaples, retrieved from http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.childlabor. Samuel Lindsay, “Child Labor in the United States,” American Economic Association 8, (February 1907): 256–259. Carolyn Moehling, “State Child Labor Laws and the Decline in Child Labor,” Explorations in Economic History 36, no. 1 (1999): 72–105. Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, “Mass Secondary Schooling and the State: The Role of State Compulsion and the High School Movement,” NBER Working Paper No. 10075 (2003). France and Prussia both had earlier laws prohibiting child labor, but they were not enforceable. See Hall and Leeson (2007). Edmonds and Pavcnik, (2005): 210. （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。 ——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——