Any community which engages in child labour robs itself now, and robs itself for the future. It robs itself now, because if there is child labour it follows that there is work to be done, and it means that this work done by children ought to be done by someone else.

The records we have show very clearly that those countries which have the highest incidence of child labour are at the same time those countries where unemployment of adults is highest. But that is not even the worst part of it. The worst part is that the community robs itself of its future, because the children who ought to be going to school, who ought to be receiving education and training in order to make a better future for the community as a whole, those children get enslaved into a future that frequently is worse than the future of their parents. In this way, the society can continue to be impoverished, never managing to lift itself from the position where the community currently exists, at levels of deprivation, levels where work is not decent, levels where the society is not one where people can feel proud and take their place as independent adults in a world of other independent adults.

So we rob adults of the opportunity to work; we deny the children the opportunity to gain education which is the most liberating influence in the entire world; and we rob them of the opportunity for advancement for themselves and for their own families.

Without the trade unions we would not have the level of social consciousness about this issue that we now have. Trade unions must not sit back and believe the job was finished when we got the adoption of Convention No. 182 in Geneva in 1999. They have to recognize there are responsibilities that have been placed on the shoulders of everybody.

Trade unions have to work at several levels. In the first place, they have got to be able to persuade governments and employers organizations to work with them in establishing time bound programmes for getting the worst forms of child labour to become a thing of the past. Governments must not be expected to do so on their own. The employers and the trade unions are the institutions that should press for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour.

Governments are supposed to establish national committees which have the responsibilities to ensure that they do more than only pass laws, but that we sit together and work out a national programme, country by country, not in the ILO now, but country by country, so that every trade union must, within that trade union's own local community, work with the government and the employers, and establish a framework for having the worst forms of child laour and have child labour totally removed. In order to accomplish this, for the trade unions to go further, it means that they have to educate their own members, so the trade union has to be part of the watchdogs of society, or the watchdog element, I should say, in the society which we create.

Geneva, 15.11.00