Foreword by Saskia Bricmont

Foreword by Saskia Bricmont

50 billion Euros. This is what I call the “European child labour footprint”. In 2019, we imported goods tainted with child labour to fulfil our needs as consumers for an amount representing close to 100 Euros per European. Yet, the 50 billion figure does not capture the full extent of the child labour phenomenon since most children (about 80%) work on familybased farms producing goods that do not enter global supply chains.

When taking office, President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made the strong pledge of “zero tolerance towards child labour”. Two years have passed, and to be honest, we have not witnessed any meaningful steps to make this commitment concrete. We are now in 2021, the UN Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, which unfortunately coincides with a reversal of the global downward trend in child labour. Years of progress will be wiped out by the pandemic that will increase millions of working children due to school closures, job losses and deepening poverty.

This scourge is usually viewed through the lens of development and cooperation policy. Here, it is worth noting that the commitment taken by the EU and its Members States to devote 0.7% of their GNP in official development assistance has not been honoured: the EU27 collective effort peaked at 0.49% of EU Gross National Income (GNI) in 2016 before sliding to 0,41% in 2019. Only three Member States met their ODA commitments: Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark.

In front of the Members of the European Parliament, Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis, then candidate for the trade portfolio affirmed that “in today’s world, trade is about much more than just trade. European trade policy must do more to help us meet the great challenges of our time.” And as rightly stated by the European Commission, “the EU as a main global trade partner has a crucial role to play towards the elimination of child labour in global supply chains.”

Taking these assertions at face value, I commissioned this study to follow up on President von der Leyen in view of coming forward with proposals putting the EU at the forefront when it comes to the achievement of SDG 8.7 on the eradication of child labour, forced labour and modern slavery by 2025 and in the context of this UN Year.

It is worth noting that against the backdrop of the UN Year, the EU is about to strike deals with two countries flagged among the main countries featuring child labour: China (EUR 37 billion) and Brazil (EUR 908 million). It would be a missed opportunity and a moral failure not to tackle child labour in these contexts.

This study demonstrates that a mere prohibition of the entry into the EU market of goods produced with child labour may lead to a counterintuitive outcome: an outright prohibition would push children further away in informal and dangerous activities in countries where enforcement activity is defaulting and where there are no worthy alternatives such as education and basic social protection.

Internationalisation can lead to a lowering of child labour participation firstly by increasing incomes. Therefore, increasing tariffs as a sanction of badly behaving countries may even aggravate the problem while they are intended to deter countries from using child labour.

The study also shows the importance of decent working conditions for women to avoid that children are put to work. A 10% increase of their wages can lead to a 10% decrease of the need to send girls to factories, mines or fields. The textile, leather and footwear but also the agriculture sectors, where they comprise a major portion of the workforce, are a case in point.

Therefore, it would make sense to enlarge the range of conventions referred to in TSD chapters of our FTA’s (Free Trade Agreements) or in the GSP Regulation (that already covers the Convention n°182 on Worst Forms of Child Labour) to Conventions n°138 on the minimum age for employment, n°189 on domestic workers, n°156 on workers with family responsibilities, n°190 on violence and harassment. The EU could help trade partners and countries in implementing these instruments properly and foster capacity building, including when it comes to collecting data to monitor progress. Drawing the lessons of the report of the panel of experts that settled the dispute on social rights between the EU and South Korea and drawing on the approach adopted in the political cooperation agreement with Vietnam, it is important that trade agreements and the likes contain a roadmap with milestones and concrete and verifiable objectives to come to terms with child labour.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has disruptive consequences, climate change could also exacerbate child labour. The expected increasing number of natural disasters like floods or droughts as well as severe and extreme heat events will cause even more temporary or chronic emergency conditions, jeopardising family incomes and imperilling school infrastructure.

The study opens different avenues to feed future legislative initiatives. Autonomous EU measures could be designed along the lines of the U.S. Tariff Act of 1930, amended by the U.S Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015. Up to 15% of children at work are estimated to be active in global value chains. This is an issue that should be properly addressed in the forthcoming due diligence legislation.

A surgical blacklisting approach targeting individuals and companies could be grounded on the new EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime adopted in December 2020.

The EU is putting in place a robust framework for its climate and digital revolution. Yet, for this to happen, the EU needs to secure its supply of raw materials, for which we are highly dependent on the rest of the World. The EU identifies 30 raw materials as strategic, but 7 of them are indicated as child labour-tainted in the U.S. List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor (Cobalt, Coking Coal, Fluorspar, Natural Rubber, Tantalum, Tungsten, and Natural Graphite). The recent EU action plan for critical raw materials evokes that “high supply concentration in countries with low standards of governance not only poses a security of supply risk, but may also exacerbate environmental and social problems, such as child labour.” Therefore, to be coherent, it is also urgent that our trade relations with countries richly endowed with such resources duly tackle this risk, for instance by designing provisions in agreements in liaison with the ILO and local civil society organisations.

Objective 8.7 could be pursued through a plurilateral, innovative and trade-based initiative backed by the EU and the members of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in the first place, since they represent about 45% of all import of goods and services and host many multinational decision centres topping global value chains. The next stage could be to gather the support of like-minded countries like Australia and New Zealand and possibly Japan and South Korea. These four countries are close to the Eastern and South-Eastern Asian region where child labour is the most prominent and members of the recent Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, along with problematic countries.

Technology transfer fostering mechanisation in some sectors could decrease the demand for child labour in some countries. This is where investment agreements come in that promote such FDI. I note also that the authors “recommend lifting protection for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into sectors steeped with child labour through the reform of Investment Protection Agreements (IPAs).”

I am very grateful to the dream team of Development International e.V., their network of committed researchers for this landmark study, and for their inclusive work that benefitted from comments of leading experts from the ILO, UNICEF and NGOs.

I sincerely hope that this very valuable report and the recommendations will contribute to making Europe the first “fair and ethical trade” continent.