Last Friday night, 16-year-old Onika Luke was carrying out her duties as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant at Better Hope, East Coast Demerara when she was shot in the chin by a lone gunman who apparently attempted to rob the restaurant.
Miss Luke, it was later learned, is a student at St John’s College in the city and lives at Vryheid’s Lust on the East Coast, not that far from her place of employment. It was revealed by a relative that Miss Luke began working at the restaurant about three months ago and that she took the job to be able to afford to complete her high school education. The relative in later interviews said that the family is poor and things are tight.
According to the relative, Miss Luke’s working hours were 5 pm to 10 pm daily, yet according to the information supplied by the police, the incident occurred at 10.45 pm, raising questions as to how often she worked overtime and whether this ever occurred on a school night. Miss Luke is to be lauded for attempting to complete high school while working 25 hours a week, possibly more, at night and as a waitress. But she also deserves a great deal of empathy for being in a situation where she is obviously has no choice in the matter.
At 16 years old, Miss Luke should be either in fourth form of fifth form in school, as long as she is on par with her peers. The former means that she should be in preparatory mode for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination. This is the stage at which students would have already been placed into the arts, business or science streams and would be working on honing their knowledge of the subjects they would write at the examination next year. The latter means she would be writing the exams right now. Either way, this is an extremely busy time in a student’s school life, where focus on academic work trumps everything else.
Other questions that should be answered include how working for five hours every day after school would have affected Miss Luke’s performance in school, whether she was able to study and complete homework and whether she was able to concentrate on her lessons or was she too tired after being on her feet serving patrons for hours at night. Did the Chinese restaurant serve alcoholic beverages as most do? And was this 16-year-old serving beer and other such drinks to patrons? Did she also work weekends and if so, what were her hours? These are among the other questions that would have arisen.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), not all work done by children and adolescents (aged 5 to 17 years) should be classified as child labour as there are considerable differences between the many kinds of work children do. While some are difficult and demanding, others are more hazardous and even morally reprehensible.
The ILO defines child labour as work which deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity and is harmful to their physical and mental development.
The term child labour is defined as work which “is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children; interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school; obliges them to leave school prematurely; or requires them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.
The ILO says too, “Whether or not particular forms of ‘work’ can be called ‘child labour’ depends on the child’s age, the type and hours of work performed, the conditions under which it is performed and the objectives pursued by individual countries. The answer varies from country to country, as well as among sectors within countries.”
So what are the parameters in Guyana as regards child labour? Can the minister with responsibility for labour say? And did Miss Luke’s work constitute child labour? Are there other children in similar circumstances whose situations will go unnoticed unless something dire occurs? So far, there has been silence on the issue from the ministries that should be concerned: Education and Social Protection. Meanwhile, Miss Luke remains hospitalised, missing out on a chunk of her education. And as at the time of the writing of this column, the police had not yet found her assailant.
