Firms told to involve staff

Companies are to be urged to make greater efforts to bring their employees into the fight against child labour.

A draft 15-point action plan says too many businesses fail to keep their employees informed of or involved in their anti-child labour programmes, so that there is little follow-up on what might be sound policies.

The action plan, being drawn up by the Utrecht-based India Committee of the Netherlands in consultation with companies worldwide, says that businesses have a much better chance of making their policies succeed if they can capture the hearts and minds of all staff members, even those not directly involved in anti-child labour efforts.

It gives the example of the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private sector arm, which has begun to counter the use of child labour in projects it finances by providing training on its policies for all senior staff, cultivating a core group of staff as ‘champions’ of the issue and establishing awareness programmes and a mechanism for the confidential reporting of violations. It has also laid out lines of accountability by assigning clear responsibilities right down to junior posts together with incentives for eliminating child labour.

The India Committee of the Netherlands, a non-governmental organization working with deprived groups on the subcontinent, has made the recommendations to provide a framework for corporate efforts.

A final version will be published in November, after which the committee and other NGOs will formally put the recommendations to companies as part of a new civil society campaign called Stop Child Labour – School is the Best Place to Work.

The plan, as it stands, urges companies to:

team up with trade unions and local government to provide schooling for former child workers, rather than trying to do this alone
create creches and day care centres for employees’ children;
pay higher prices to suppliers to enable them to avoid using child labour
transfer jobs done by children to their parents or other close relatives, so that the income stays in the family
ensure that children found working directly or indirectly for the company are transferred to regular schooling at no cost to their families.

The plan says businesses can learn from multinationals such as Bayer and Monsanto, which are now tackling child labour among cotton seed producers in India by sharing information about suppliers, forming inspection committees jointly with NGOs, and paying bonuses of up to five per cent to suppliers that do not use child labour.

It suggests that releasing the names and full contact details of suppliers and subcontractors to the public, as the sportswear retailer Nike has done, is one of the best ways of countering child labour because it opens up the supply chain to greater scrutiny.

One senior director at a multinational that has a strong anti-child labour programme in several developing countries told EP: ‘Engaging all staff in CSR-related topics in general is what you need to build a responsible culture in a company, so I’m not sure that such engagement is a specific child labour issue.’