'Stop Child labour - School, the best place to work' has published an Action Plan for Companies to Combat Child Labour.

The action plan contains 15 recommendations:

1. Make explicit in your company’s formal policy or code of conduct that all forms of child labour falling under the two ILO Conventions will be avoided and, if need be, combated. Read more.

2. Make sure that company policy is based, at the very least, on the international conventions against child labour – and comply with national and local legislation if their standards exceed those of the international conventions. Read more.

3. Make it explicit in contracts with Contractually require your supplier(s) that they should eradicate child labour and realise labour rights across all sub-contracted operations. Read more.

4. Ensure that children hitherto employed at the company’s own plants, plantations or service operations, or in outsourced or sub-contracted operations across the entire supply chain, are transferred to regular schooling at no cost to their families. Read more.

5. Protect children in the ages of 14 to 18, who are permitted by international agreements to engage in paid work, against potentially hazardous and dangerous types of work as specified in ILO Convention 182, and comply with agreements (required by the Convention) on dangerous work between governments, labour unions and industry umbrella associations. Read more.

6. Involve your own staff and your suppliers in combating child labour: inform them and involve them in your company’s action plan against child labour. Read more.

7. Collaborate and team up with other segments of society, for example trade unions and local and/or national governments, to realize full-fledged schooling for former child labourers. Read more.

8. Make a special effort where needed to address the specific challenges faced by children from discriminated and marginalised groups so that they, too, can make the transition from work to school. Read more.

9. Ensure that the authenticity of age certificates is adequately verified, and jointly with other parties urge that reliable birth registration systems are set up in areas that don’t have them. Read more.

10 Combating child labour must always go hand in hand with compliance with the ILO’s other three fundamental labour standards and other broadly agreed-upon workers’ rights.Read more.

11. Pay a procurement price to suppliers that enables them to avoid using child labour and hire adults (or youngsters over the age of 15) instead, offering them decent pay and conditions. If need be, also adjust other elements of your company’s sourcing policy with a view to implementing your company’s ‘no child labour’ policy and ensuring that fundamental workers’ rights are complied with.Read more.

12. Whenever possible, try to transfer the job hitherto done by children to their parents or other close relatives, or offer them alternative suitable employment.Read more.

13. Create, independently or working with others, facilities such as crèches and day-care centres for employees, to help them keep their children out of child labour.Read more.

14. Plan and implement pro-active investigations, a solid in-house monitoring system, transparency on policy and practice, independent monitoring and verification, and involve those directly concerned and/or affected (the ‘stakeholders’).Read more.

15. Participate in efforts to combat child labour in industries where child labour is rampant (stone quarries, tourism, cocoa, cotton (seed) and garment production, commercial agriculture -coffee, tea, rice, flowers etc. etc, through a so-called multi-stakeholder intiative and/or join, if your company is a multinational, an ‘International Framework Agreement’ with one of the sectoral global unions.Read more.

Finally …

… not a recommendation but an appeal: don’t allow yourself, as a company, either to be lured or fooled into thinking, or implored, convinced or told that child labour is a fact of life and that the company does something good by employing a child.

Employing even one child helps to perpetuate child labour. Combating child labour helps to create more jobs and better wages for adults and thus also to alleviate poverty!

Sometimes, local social pressure or heartbreaking individual circumstances may seem to suggest that the most humane or easiest remedy is to give employment to a young child that should be at school. But doing so would undermine the efforts of those fighting child labour and seeking to confirm and put into practice as a standard that societies should not tolerate it. Moreover, even in the direst of circumstances, the best solution is to hire a parent or other adult relative who would be entitled to a higher wage, can support the child, and can see to it that it receives a proper education.