Along the way, he would see other children his age all heading to school. “I envied them, but I had to work and help my family or we would starve,” says Jun. Jun would go home with about $2 in his pocket, enough to feed the family with four young children for a day. As he and his siblings got older, Jun had to find risky jobs, like packing fertilizer and pesticides in a factory. Now, at 16 years old, Jun is just entering high school while other children his age are already preparing for college. This child worker case is not uncommon in the Philippines. Amerina Cabanes admits that all her six children are child workers. “I ask my children to help because we honestly need help,” she says. The whole family wakes up about 2 a.m. and roams the city picking up garbage. Her only daughter started working when she was only five years old. She is now 12 and continues to help the family earn a living. The family earns just over $4 a day. There is a law that is supposed to protect children from engaging in “any work or economic activity … that subjects him or her to any form of exploitation or is harmful to his or her health and safety, or physical, mental or psychological development.” However, the law does not seem to be working, with government listing some 431 child laborers in the Davao region alone, while Davao City has the highest number of child workers at 332. A survey by the National Statistics Office in 2011 shows that there are 5.59 million child laborers in the Philippines, almost all of them working in hazardous conditions. The survey shows that out of 29 million Filipino children aged 5-17 years old, about 19% or 5.59 million were already working. Of those 5.59 million children, just over 3 million were considered child laborers while 2.9 million were reported to be exposed to hazardous working conditions. “What is important is for the government to come up with programs that will address the problems being faced by parents of children who are into child labor,” says Florie May Tacang, executive director of the children’s advocacy group, Kaugmaon, for children’s rights and social development. “It is very challenging to stop the practice,” she says, adding that Filipino culture is “supportive of child labor.” Tacang says Filipinos do not see and consider child labor as a form of abuse. “It is a poverty issue and is an accepted practice that must be addressed by the government,” she says. The government has, so far, identified 609 of the country’s poorest municipalities and some 80 villages that have the highest incidence of child labor.
Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who has exposed how prevalent child labor is in the provinces, says “much is still to be done by the Government. We need to see more government people checking on companies that hire children,” the senator says, adding that the Government needs to support the rehabilitation of the children and the parents. Many parents blame themselves, including Amerina. “I must admit that it’s my fault, our fault as parents,” Amerina says. “But they [the children] also want to help us because they also feel our needs. We are family,” she says.
