Children as a Reserve Labor Force

Abstract

It is clear that children develop into workers from an early age but there’s considerable variability in the age at which they might be expected to make a significant contribution to the cost of their own provisioning. That is, even as workers, they are dependent on others. It is equally clear, however, that children could be more productive—the skills may be there but not the necessity. Under adverse circumstances—migration, death, serious illness, armed conflict, and natural disaster such as drought or the plague—adolescent and adult workers may be removed from the workforce. And, characteristically, children, constituting a “reserve labor force,” step up to fill the vacancy. This may mean increasing their output in the domestic economy such as doing more work in the fields, gathering more tubers, handling more of the care for livestock, or entering the market economy as laborers, street sellers, sex workers, and the like. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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