ABSTRACT
At about the age when most European children start full-time schooling, hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries start a lifetime of drudgery in the factories and fields of the Third World. By the hour at which the average European adult climbs out of bed, thinking of the eight-hour day ahead, many of those child labourers in the Third World will already have put in several of their 12 to 16 daily hours. For them there is no overtime payment, no weekend off, no holiday and no future to speak of. These are not children doing a part-time paper-round to earn pocket money before going to school. They are the poor of the world; they work to save themselves and their families from starvation, and their number is increasing. While the consumer revolution floods the Western world with surplus food, inessential goods and labour-saving devices, the poorest parts of the world are getting poorer, not least where their leaders have been lured into a desire for the trade and trappings of the West.
