Brazil Misses Child Labor Benchmark

According to a Ministry of Labor report released on October 25, Brazil failed to achieve its goal of eradicating child labor by 2016. At the current pace, Brazil is at risk of not achieving the goal by 2025, which is the deadline set by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Currently, children under 16 are not legally permitted to work in Brazil. However, there are still 2.67 million child laborers in a variety of sectors. Moreover, there has been an increase in children between ages five and nine working in garbage disposal, domestic services, and agriculture.  

Injuries to child workers remain a concern. Between 2007 and 2016, there were over 20,000 occupational injuries among minors and more than 200 fatalities. The report also focuses on how education prevents child labor.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, started in 2012, targeted many areas for possible growth between 2015 and 2030. One of them was the complete eradication of child labor by 2025. However, estimates project that Brazil will have over 500,000 children working in 2025. The report attributes this unacceptably high figure to lax regulation and underfunding.

The report also estimates that Brazil has failed to hold to one of the commitments it made during the Second Global Child Labor Conference at The Hague in 2010: to eradicate the worst forms of child labor, including sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, and slavery. The failure to reach these goals is frequently attributed to a lack of funding for enforcement of anti-child-labor laws. One analyst claimed that the Ministry of Labor has provided barely any resources to supervise child and slave labor.