‘Children should be playing’: Pope Francis pleads for fight against child labor

FILE PHOTO: Pope Francis looks on as he holds a news conference aboard a plane on his flight back to Rome after visiting Cyprus and Greece, December 6, 2021. Alessandro Di Meo/Pool via REUTERS

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Wednesday urged governments to combat child labor, saying it was terrible that children who should be playing are instead working as adults or scavenging in garbage dumps for something to sell.

Speaking at his weekly general audience the Pope also lamented that in many countries people were being exploited in the unofficial, underground economy, working without benefits or legal protection.

“Let’s think of the victims of work, of children who are forced to work. This is terrible,” he said.

The U.N. International Labour Organization (ILO) said in a 2021 last year that the number of children in labor rose to about 160 million worldwide in 2020.

“Children who are at an age when they should be playing are forced to work like adults. Let’s think of those children, poor little things, who scour in garbage dumps looking for something useful to trade or sell,” Pope Francis said in comments that were mostly improvised.

The ILO report, done with the U.N. children agency UNICEF, said progress to end child labor had stalled for the first time in 20 years at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, reversing a previous downward trend.

Pope Francis said that lack of work was a “social injustice” and that while charity and handouts for the jobless were important, they filled the stomach but did not dispense dignity.

“Governments must give everyone the possibility of earning their bread because this gives them dignity. Work anoints people with dignity,” he said.

According to the ILO, Africa has the largest number of child workers in the world, with about 72 million, about 43 percent of them doing hazardous work.

At the audience, Pope Francis asked for a moment of silence to remember the unemployed, victims of industrial accidents, and those who had taken their own lives after losing their jobs because of the pandemic.