Feature

All work and low pay

The government believes the health and safety of children at work is adequately protected. Mandy Garner looks at the facts

The government is recommending that Britain opt out of a new EC draft directive which would strengthen authorities’ powers to protect children from exploitation and danger in the workplace.

Using the anti-Social Chapter argument - the need to protect jobs - the UK sent out its veto recommendation in a circular to local authorities, business organisations and other interested bodies in December 1992, following the adoption of the draft directive by the European Parliament.

The Department of Employment is now discussing the replies it received to this circular. The government questions the need for any additional legislation, arguing that the proposed directive ‘fails to comply with the principle of subsidiarity’, and that ‘the proposed restrictions would reduce young people’s employment opportunities and add to employers’ costs’. It believes the UK has effective protection for the health and safety of young people at work.

However, unlike the Social Chapter, the UK cannot veto proposals relating to health and safety. The directive only requires a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers to become law. Although Britain has a fairly large share of votes in the Council of Ministers, it would require several countries to block the directive for it to fail and, if the directive is passed, the UK could be sued if it was found to have fallen foul of its laws.

Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties, has put forward a motion at its annual meeting supporting British endorsement of the EC draft directive. It feels endorsement would ‘strengthen and bring up to date the Children’s and Young Persons Act 1933, and render its enforcement consistent throughout the country’. Under the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act, local authorities have the power to set and police bye-laws on employment of young people. These bye-laws improved on the minimum standards of the national laws.

Parliament passed the Employment of Children Act 1973 following a survey by Dr Emrys Davies into the effects and extent of child employment. The act aimed to raise local authority standards on child employment but it was never implemented.

A recent survey in Birmingham by the Low Pay Unit showed that 40 per cent of school-age children work and that, in the majority of cases, the work they do is illegal according to current UK law - that is, it is done before 7am or after 7pm, is carried out by children under the age of 13 or, most worryingly, is work which involves lifting or moving heavy objects which may cause injury.

Thirty five per cent of the 1,827 children involved in the survey, the largest since that of Emrys Davies, had had an accident at work in the previous year. The highest number came from cycle accidents, followed by heavy objects falling on to children and cuts and abrasions. One child remarked: ‘I was making a kebab. When I put it in hot oil, it fell on my feet. It melted through my trainers and my feet went red hot. It burnt through my skin.’

The survey points to one of the main reasons employers turn to children: low pay. The Low Pay Unit found that many children employed in jobs which are normally also done by adults are paid well below minimum rates. This is sanctioned by the 1986 Wages Act which abolished the right to a minimum wage for those under 21. One 14-year-old in the survey worked an eight hour week for a hairdressers for 67p an hour.

Under the proposed EC directive, existing laws on safety would be improved and it reccommends that children get an ‘appropriate wage... compared with the work performed by adults, and that this pay is protected in accordance with the principle of equality’. However, there are concerns over who would enforce the new laws.

The Anti-Slavery Society is highly critical of the present position. ‘Current UK employment law is a mess. It is left to individual local authorities to police. There are standards, but some councils enforce them more tightly than others. Due to changes in local boundaries, you can have one standard in one street, and a much more lax one two streets away.’

The Low Pay Unit is calling for a new Employment of Children Act to take account of changing dangers faced by children in the workplace due to new forms of employment.

Local authority spending cuts are an additional cause for concern. The Anti-Slavery Society points out that there are not enough local authority staff to enforce the existing laws and that many have been made redundant, or are likely to lose their jobs in the near future. A survey by Norwich Council last year showed that the existing law was not adhered to and that employers regularly forgot to register 13-16-year-olds working for them.

There have been very few prosecutions under the 1933 Child and Young Persons Act against employers infringing the law. For example, only 22 convictions were made in 1988. The Low Pay Unit says that half of these were due to special efforts by one local authority. The year before, only eight convictions were recorded.