Minister of Labour Manzoor Nadir has announced that he is considering changing the legislation to facilitate children from the age of 13 working in some jobs as the laws currently state that children must be 15 or older to be employed.
In 1994, the government had moved the age of persons working from minimum of 14 years to 15 years and as such anyone who employs a child under the age of 15 is breaking the law.
“When we moved our laws to ensure that children who are under the age of 15 years cannot be employed we also created a problem for us,” the minister said.
According to Nadir, in other jurisdictions children from as young as 12 years old are allowed to work for limited hours in certain jobs and he emphasised that Guyana does not have a problem with child labour.
“I am seriously considering going backwards, I am seriously considering once again revising the legislation with respect to children … to allow children… between the ages of 13 and 15 in Guyana’s case to do light work for a specific period per week,” the minister told members of the media on Wednesday.
The minister recalled that in years gone by the bag bays at supermarkets were manned by children and he said it would be better to have children work for limited hours and not during school hours instead of having an absolute position.
The minister pointed out that with the absolute position when the statistics are created there are different numbers being produced.
He said the forms of child labour that are considered to be the worst internationally – such as slavery, trafficking of children, forced and compulsory labour, child prostitution, offering children to traffic in drugs and work that harms the safety and morals of children – are not practiced in Guyana.
Speaking at a press conference, which the minister said he called primarily to correct misconceptions of child labour mostly in some sections of the media, he said that child labour is not only a sensitive issue but one which is very often misunderstood.
He pointed out that the children are allowed to work in family businesses – such as on a farm – but parents cannot take their child out of school to work on a full-time basis.
The minister said contrary to what a Government Information Agency (GINA) recently said child labour is not a “major problem” in Guyana, a statement which was attributed to him.
And based on the records of the Ministry of Labour there have only been three reported cases of child labour in the past three years. “Child labour per se is not a big problem because we have a very poor understanding of what child labour is; what the law says in respect to the worse kinds of child labour and what child work is,” the minister said.
In one of the cases the employer of the child is currently being prosecuted in courts and that case only came to light after the child lost three fingers on a machine he operated and his mother took him into the ministry. The other cases – one in Essequibo where two children reportedly work in their grandfather’s trucking business and another of a child working in a restaurant in Berbice – have not been independently confirmed by the ministry.
“We haven’t seen and we haven’t found at work places, but we are not going to stop looking because if there is one child engaged in illegal employment it is our job to stamp it out,” the minister said.
Nadir revealed that his ministry is in the process of developing the capacity of its labour inspectors to ensure a better quality of inspection and this has seen two officers being involved in an intense training programme in Italy on labour inspection and child labour.
According to the minister, his officers recently completed inspections of 18 sawmills in Berbice and found no child working at these establishments. He said the ministry did not announce beforehand that the officers would visit these establishments, but did say that labour inspectors would be in Berbice. He said every business between Port Mourant and Rose Hall was expected and almost every business in Skeldon and no cases of child labour were found.
According to the minister, his inspectors go out on inspection everyday and as it is right now there are 18 inspectors and four senior officers. There are vacancies for about six other inspectors.
The minister said confusion surrounds the issue of truancy, which he admits is a big problem locally, and child labour as persons just conclude that when a child skips school s/he is employed.
Some 30 per cent of the country’s children do not complete their formal schooling – a figure the Ministry of Education hopes to cut in half this year.
“I would say it publicly; we have no intention, from cabinet and any senior official of this government to hide any social problem that we have in this country. The one mandate we have is that if there is any social problem we must find solutions to it,” the minister said.
He said his ministry has zero tolerance to having children in the work place and while one can say “if you have an issue with truancy and children are not going to school then what are they doing they could be involved in child labour, there is a potential for children labour,” it does not mean it has to be so.
“I think people tend to lump everything under child labour, so if you have child work, meaning chores, meaning children are allowed to work in their family business, then it become s not child work but child labour. If you have on the other hand the worst form of child labour that is very low…” the minister said.
Meanwhile, the minister announced that his ministry will soon be involved in another assessment in an effort to ascertain the type of work children are involved in. He said through its ‘tackle’ programme and with some assistance from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) the ministry’s labour market information system and the staffers are going to be conducting rapid assessments in six communities in Guyana.
“If we find that there is child labour we are going to move condignly with dealing with it,” the minister said adding that he is confident that the survey will not find any high incidence of the “worst forms” of child labour.
According to the minister about ten years ago Guyana moved to ensure that “every single child” has a good quality education and ought to be in school up to the age of 15. Nadir said it was up to his ministry and the Ministry of Human Services & Social Security to seriously tackle the issue of child protection, which saw them setting up the Child Protection Agency coupled with a series of legislations.
The minister announced that soon the agency would be in a building of its own instead of it being located at the ministry.
