Hi all, I'm an American spending the summer in the Philippines, and having seen children (under ten years old) working here, I feel I got some insight into why child labor laws exist, from a radical leftist perspective and how it supports our views on work itself.
I'm staying in rural area, and there are two types of work in particular I've seen small children doing. One is at the local “mall”, they put cardboard covers on the seats of parked motorcycles and scooters, and riders give a voluntary 10 peso (about 20 cents US) tip, some may pay more if it's raining. The other is near the beach in a tourist area, they carry around trays of cheap souvenirs which they sell at a significant markup.
At first I naively thought, ah, well, this is a cultural difference. But they are bringing in a decent daily haul compared to the minimum wage here, it's not so bad, right?
Wrong.
They don't keep the money. Eventually I've seen that in both cases they have a boss they hand all the money to. The boss does little or no work, and presumably pays them a small fraction of the proceeds, even though it is nearly pure profit, and the actual wage paid must be far below the actual minimum wage.
The horror that comes with this realization is akin to that of reacting to cancer, murder, or SA of children. That is to say, these are all things that we all agree are bad, but are especially horrific when suffered by children. In other words, child labor isn't bad because work is ok but there's some special reason that children should be exempt; child labor is egregiously bad because work is inherently exploitative.
To drive the point home further, only children work in these jobs (and the odd teen single mother with the souvenir trays) because the startup costs are so low that only children don't have the means to start such a business, while anyone who is in a position to run such an operation would never care to labor in the sweltering tropical sun for such paltry wages, but they find it worthwhile to have children earn the profit for them. I.e. work only exists as an institution when workers cannot control the means of production.