A sad balance sheet: According to the data compiled by the Health and Safety Labour Watch * from the events it has access to, at least 42 child workers lost their lives in the first seven months of 2024. It is known that at least nine of the dead children were working within the scope of the MESEM program. ** Amendments to the Vocational Education Law in 2016 and 2021 paved the way for children to be used as cheap labor with a one-day "training" a week that remains on paper.
Workerized children die while working and live a life without workers' rights, subjected to intense violence and physically and mentally injured. We discussed the issue with Ezgi Koman, who has been working in the field of child rights for years and is part of a program focusing on MESEMs at the FISA (Fikir ve Sanat Atölyesi) Child Rights Center. Previously, those who fought against child labor concentrated on the informal sector, fighting against a form of illegality.
MESEMs not only legalized child labor, but legitimized it, normalized it in line with the interests of capital. How do you, those working in the field of children, deal with this situation, where do you build your new field of struggle? It is very difficult to say that we are coping at a time when almost every day a child dies in a workplace homicide. But yes, we have been revising our axis of struggle against child labor for a while.
As FISA Child Rights Center, we have been conducting a program called “Rethinking Child Labor” for th.