Through an Act that aims to eliminate child labour, Bolivia legalises child labour for children who are 10 years old or older. A poor country that seems to refuse to evolve.

As staffingamericalatina stated during last January, http://staffingamericalatina.com/bolivia-informalidad-trabajo-infantil-y-posiciones-poco-claras/, what seemed to be a picture from a very Antique newspaper has now become a reality.

Bolivia has enacted a law that allows child labour from 10 years old on. President Evo Morales used once again an argument linked to social consciousness and his own experience of being a worker as a child: “working when being a child develops a higher social consciousness”.

The Act was passed after reaching consensus among every political sector of the country. It establishes a series of requirements, starting with a requirement can be easily discussed: “the voluntary choice” in the case of 10 years old children.

Reading the ridiculous arguments used by Bolivian deputies causes indescribable feelings. Deputy Javier Zavaleta, one of the promoters of the Act, said that “extreme poverty is one of the causes, though not the principal, for child labour”. According to his eclectic point of view, the target of the Act is to eliminate child labour by 2020. President Morales states that child labour must not be forbidden, but that the State must look after and protect children.

Opposed to ILO’s Convention 138, which sets the minimum age to start working at 14 years old in developing countries, Bolivia is offering to exchange education and play for work for children who wish to do so.  President Morales seems not to be aware that the labour world has changed a lot when compared to the labour market of his childhood. Nowadays, knowledge is an essential condition to access the formal labour market.

Surely in times when the World Cup is taking place, Bolivian children would choose to play football or to obtain more and better education instead of working (due to extreme necessity and not voluntarily).