Child Labor Laws in Bangladesh.

The world community criticized the nature of child labor laws in Bangladesh over the past fifteen years but statistically, the percentage of children in the workforce remains high. Due to a combination of poverty and persistent social aloofness to the necessity of stringent child labor laws, this trend will likely continue. Although several labor laws and federal agencies exist predicated on the elimination of children from the workforce, many families require the extra income while poverty-stricken regions of Bangladesh have little to offer in terms of education and skilled job training.

During the 1990s estimations of children in the Bangladesh workforce ranged from a couple million, upwards to 20 million, of children working in low-paying factory jobs. Following years of negligence by the fashion industry, outside pressures finally began forcing businesses to stop alienating the absence of strict labor laws. Regardless of new labor laws, children continue to be exploited as cheap unskilled labor as the string of poverty that forces young children into the workplace will not simply disappear. Children growing up in poor regions throughout Bangladesh lack access to educational institutions or job training that could end the circle of poverty that places children in extremely dangerous situations. Even with the passage of child labor laws, some traditional Bangladeshis see no problem with children in the workplace and refuse to comply with national findings. The link between education and child labor rates illustrates the need for a new focus on children education to work in conjunction with the stricter labor laws.

Bangladesh understands the need to hamper the nonconformity to labor laws, but the level of integration of children in the workforce poses inherent difficulty in phasing out this problem. Children beginning as young as 8 years old often work in garment factories, food-service, hotels, and essentially any factory setting. The initial measures to enforce child labor laws in Bangladesh focus on the creation of a uniformed policy the explicitly supplies working age and restriction. In addition, Bangladesh has ratified several recommendations passed on from the world community with regards to enforcing child labor laws.

The enactment of legislation in Bangladesh will prove inconsequential if the society at large fails to address the concern. To encourage citizens of Bangladesh to adopt an anti-child labor mentality, promises of education and vocational training need to become reality. Bangladesh needs to band together as a nation to eradicate continued child exploitation.

In the globalize world, such gross affronts to human rights rests not only on the governing nation but every country that handles imports, exports, or any business transactions with them. Bangladesh embraced the notion that labor laws need to reflect safe practice, specifically for children. On a public level, Bangladesh has begun addressing child labor laws but until the unregulated businesses of Bangladesh stop receiving money from international companies preferring the cheap child labor, no final steps will ever be made in the right direction.