Dr Ellen Holtmaat, Guest Teacher and former LSE Fellow in the Department of International Relations, argues that multinational companies focus comfortably on the margins of reducing child labour, but conceal the deeper causes they may themselves be part of.

Multinational companies (MNCs) may prefer appearing to solve problems, than actually addressing problems’ root causes. By focusing comfortably on the margins of a problem, they conceal the deeper causes they may themselves be part of.

Over a year ago I joined a UN Global Compact meeting on child labour in the resource extraction industries. Global Compact is a UN initiative to which multinational companies can become a member and work on improving their social and environmental conduct. In this meeting, extracting companies, under the UN flag, discuss how to address child labour within their supply chains. The companies seemingly addressing a problem and striving for humanitarian causes, meanwhile the countries and their people allowing children to work instead of going to school. This image obscures the role these resource extracting companies play in creating the conditions why families let their children work. The MNCs are well off doing ‘business’ abroad, extracting resources and cheap labour. They claim to be addressing the problem, whereas they may be structurally causing it.

If these companies are serious about ending child labour, then a more systematic analysis might be required taking the role of MNCs in creating the conditions for child labour into account, rather than only focusing on rooting out child labour within their supply chains.

If these companies are serious about ending child labour, then a more systematic analysis might be required taking the role of MNCs in creating the conditions for child labour into account, rather than only focusing on rooting out child labour within their supply chains.

Child labour is well understood as something ‘bad’ in our global norm system. It is almost a taboo to even question it. On the other hand, using corporate power to extract resources while leaving countries polluted, depleted and under-compensated in the process is not. Is it not ironic that the MNCs that take resources without proper compensation, are so worried about child labour? And that the UN Global Compact meeting addresses child labour as a problem that is seemingly independent of these excessively wealthy companies extracting resources from countries left with a lower GDP than the annual sales of many of these companies?

In other words, isn’t child labour at least partially a symptom of under-compensation of the countries and their people for the resources these companies extract and the pollution they create?

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for example provides about 70% of worldwide cobalt used in the production of electric vehicles and good for lavish profits of the mining companies. Meanwhile the DRC is one of the poorest countries in the world. Glencore, world’s largest mining company by annual sales from Switzerland and a member of UN Global Compact, got access to DRC cobalt via Dan Gertler, a friend of DRC’s former president Joseph Kabila. Dan Gertler provided Glencore with the mining concessions from DRC at only a share of its market value. By a Swiss company buying into such a construction that keeps people in the DRC poor, Glencore is contributing to a situation in which the people are left in such a state that they resort to child labour. A narrow focus on child labour, without addressing the conditions that these companies help create, is unlikely to solve the problem.

Isn’t child labour at least partially a symptom of under-compensation of the countries and their people for the resources these companies extract and the pollution they create?

Likewise, Shell, a company which achieved advanced level in the UN Global Compact, extracted oil from Nigeria under a production sharing agreement which gives Nigeria access to only a small share of the oil. Not only is Nigeria scarcely compensated for its resources, the oil extraction is also polluting the Niger delta and the otherwise fertile Ogoniland, leaving people with few options than to resort to child labour (and crime). Similarly, Shell discusses the sabotage of the pipelines by the local population, as if this means the local population is itself causing the problem, instead of reflecting on the underlying causes Shell creates to give people few other options than to resort to crime.

A UN meeting that narrowly focuses on addressing a problem, without reflecting on the structural conditions at least partially created by the multinational companies present in the meeting gives the impression that these companies rather appear to be addressing a problem than to find real solutions.

This article represents the views of the author, and not the position of the Department of International Relations, nor of the London School of Economics.

Photo © Julien Harneis on Flickr. Licence CC BY-SA 2.0.