Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies this week voted to amend the Constitution and raise the minimum working age in the country from 14 to 15.
Legislators said the move represents a significant advance for Mexico’s child labor laws and is likely to reduce the numbers of young people dropping out of school.
The measure passed comfortably with 426 votes in favor, none against and seven abstentions.
“In an ideal world, no child should ever work,” said Abel Salgado Peña, coordinator of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) majority in the lower house.
The measure also obliges authorities to provides incentives for children to stay in school.
A World Bank-sponsored study in 2013 estimated that 870.000 minors under the age of 13 are actively employed in Mexico. The research showed that children and youth who worked had a lower school performance, and were more likely to drop out of school and have a difficult future.
Almost twice as many children work in the countryside than in urban areas, according to the World Bank. Far more work in southern states such as Guerrero (where 12 percent of six-to-13-year-olds work), than in Chihuahua in the north (where only 1.4 percent of children work).
The United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO) recognizes that there are considerable differences between the many kinds of work children do. “Children’s or adolescents’ participation in work that does not affect their health and personal development or interfere with their schooling, is generally regarded as being something positive,” its charter says. However, the ILO says work that “deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development” should be eliminated.This includes work that is “mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous” or that “interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school or obliging them to leave school prematurely.”
The Constitutional amendment means that Mexico moves in line with the ILO’s Convention 138, an agreement that this country yet to ratify. Under the convention’s provisions, light work is permitted for children aged from 13 to 15 as long as it does not harm their health or school work.