Labour Party (Netherlands)
The Labour Party is a social democratic political party in the Netherlands. The party was founded in 1946 as a merger of the Social Democratic Workers' Party, the Free-thinking Democratic League, the Christian Democratic Union. Prime Ministers from the Labour Party have been Willem Drees, Joop den Uyl, Wim Kok. From 2012 to 2017, the PvdA formed the second largest parliamental faction and was the junior partner in the Second Rutte cabinet with the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. Since 2016, Lodewijk Asscher has been Leader of the Labour Party; the party fell to only nine seats in the House of Representatives at the 2017 general election, making it only the seventh-largest faction in the chamber–its worst showing ever. The Labour Party is a member of the European Party of European Socialists and the global Progressive Alliance. In the European Parliament, where the Labour Party has 3 seats, it is part of the parliamentary group Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. During the German Occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War a group of prominent Dutchmen of all democratic political ideologies were interned as hostages in St. Michielsgestel by the German occupation authorities.
They came to the consensus that the pre-war fragmentation of Dutch political life, known as "Pillarization," should be overcome after the war in a so-called doorbraak. These people formed the Dutch People's Movement after the war ended in 1945; the new movement promoted the foundation of the Labour Party ) on 9 February 1946, through a merger of three pre-war parties: the Social Democratic Workers' Party, the social liberal Free-thinking Democratic League and progressive-Protestant Christian Democratic Union. They were joined by individuals from Catholic resistance group Christofoor, as well as some of the more progressive members of the Protestant parties Christian Historical Union and Anti-Revolutionary Party; the founding Congress was chaired by NVB-member Willem Banning. The founders of the PvdA wanted to create a broad party, breaking with the historic tradition of pillarisation; the party combined socialists with progressive Christians. However, the party was unable to break pillarisation.
Instead the new party renewed. In 1948 some of the left-liberal members, led by former VDB leader Pieter Oud, left the PvdA after concluding it had become too socialist for their liking. Together with the Freedom Party, they formed the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, a conservative liberal party. Between 1946 and 1958, the PvdA led coalition governments with the Catholic People's Party, combinations of VVD, ARP and CHU, with the PvdA's Willem Drees as prime minister; the KVP and the PvdA together had a large majority in parliament. Under his leadership the Netherlands recovered from the war, began to build its welfare state and Indonesia became independent. After the cabinet crisis of 1958, the PvdA was replaced by the VVD; the PvdA was in opposition until 1965. The electoral support of PvdA voters began to decline. In 1965 a conflict in the KVP-ARP-CHU-VVD cabinet made continuation of the government impossible; the three confessional, Christian-influenced parties turned towards the PvdA.
Together they formed the Cals cabinet, with KVP leader Jo Cals as prime minister. This cabinet was short lived and conflict ridden; the conflicts culminated in the fall of the Cals cabinet over economic policy. Meanwhile, a younger generation was attempting to gain control of the PvdA. A group of young PvdA members, calling themselves the New Left, changed the party; the New Left believed the party should become oriented towards the new social movements, adopting their anti-parliamentary strategies and their issues, such as women's liberation, environmental conservation and Third World development. Prominent New Left members were André van der Louw and Bram Peper. One of their early victories followed the fall of the Cals cabinet; the party Congress adopted a motion that made it impossible for the PvdA to govern with the KVP and its Protestant allies. In response to the growing power of the New Left group, a group of older, centrist party members, led by Willem Drees' son, Willem Drees, Jr. founded the New Right.
They split in 1970, after it was clear that they had lost the conflict with the New Left, founded a new moderate Social Democratic party, Democratic Socialists'70. Under the New Left, the PvdA started a strategy of polarisation, striving for a cabinet based on a progressive majority in parliament. In order to form that cabinet the PvdA allied itself with the social liberal party Democrats 66 and the progressive Christian Political Party of Radicals; the alliance was called the Progressive Accord. In the 1971 and 1972 elections, these three parties promised to form a cabinet with a radical common programme after the elections, they were unable to gain a majority in either election. In 1971, they were kept out of cabinet, the party of former PvdA members, DS70, became a partner of the First Biesheuvel cabinet. In the 1972 elections, neither the PvdA and its allies or the KVP and its allies were able to gain a majority; the two sides were forced to work together. Joop den Uyl, the leader of the PvdA, led the cabinet.
The cabinet was an extra-parliamentary cabinet and it was composed of members of the three progressive parties and members of the KVP and the ARP. The cabinet attempted to radically reform government and the economy, a wide range
Constitution of the Roman Republic
The constitution of the Roman Republic was a set of unwritten norms and customs, which together with various written laws, guided the procedural governance of the Roman Republic. The constitution emerged from that of the Roman kingdom, evolved over the five hundred years of the Republic, was transformed into the constitution of the Roman Empire; the Roman republican constitution can be divided into three main branches: the Assemblies, composed of the people, which served as the supreme repository of political power and had the authority to elect magistrates, accept or reject laws, administer justice, declare war or peace. A complex set of checks and balances developed between these three branches. For example, the assemblies theoretically held all power, but were called and governed by the magistrates, controlling discussion, exercised dominating influence over them. To check the power of the magistrates, each magistrate could veto one of their colleagues and the plebeians elected tribunes who could intercede and veto the actions of a magistrate.
The Republic's constitution evolved over time. Starting from a period of patrician domination, the Conflict of the Orders granted plebeian citizens equal political rights, while creating the tribunate to check patrician power and empowering the Plebeian Council, an assembly composed of the plebeians of Rome, with full legislative authority; the late Republic saw an increase in the centralisation of power into the hands of provincial governors, the use of military power to enforce political changes, the use of violence, combined with exploitation of the suitably bribed or intimidated "sovereign" assemblies, to grant supreme authority to victorious commanders. The increasing legitimisation of violence and centralisation of authority into fewer and fewer men would, with the collapse of trust in the Republic's institutions, put it on a path to civil war and its transformation into the autocratic Roman Empire; the early republican constitution was dominated by the patricians, who monopolised all control of the magistracies, the Senate, the voting blocs of the assemblies.
It developed with a tendency towards greater popular representation at the expense of the patrician class. The main historical sources for the origins of the Roman political system and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, relied on the Roman annalists, who supplemented what little written history existed with oral history; this lack of evidence poses problems for the reliability of the traditional account of the republic's origins. According to this traditional account, Rome had been ruled by a succession of kings; the Romans believed that this era, that of the Roman kingdom, began in 753 BC and ended in 510 BC. After the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic, the people of Rome began electing two consuls each year. According to the consular fasti, a list of the consuls going back to the foundation of the Republic, the first consuls were chosen in 509 BC; some scholars doubt this traditional account, arguing instead that the monarchy evolved into a government led by elected magistrates.
Remnants of the monarchy, were reflected in republican institutions, such as the religious office of rex sacrorum and the interregnum. There, is, however evidence that the early Republic was a time of violent change, with the word rex carrying the same connotations as tyrant and laws which declared forfeit the life and property of any man who plotted to install himself as a king or tyrant; the first assemblies of the Republic emerged during the Kingdom, with their use to ratify regal elections and the repurposing of the comitia centuriata to elect the first consuls. This regime was dominated by the patricians, the sources on the early Republic overwhelmingly focus on the conflicts between the patricians and the plebs, in what is known as the Conflict of the Orders; the early years of the Republic were a time of periodic popular unrest. In 494 BC, under harsh measures from patrician creditors, during a military campaign, the plebeians under arms seceded to the Mons Sacer outside the city and refused to fight in the campaign without political concessions.
With the pressure of an external threat, the patricians were forced to create the office of plebeian tribune who were declared sacrosanct, i.e. that they were declared inviolable and that anyone could be summarily executed for violation of the sanctity of his person. This was the basis of the tribune's ability to veto any political act or to protect any individual from an injustice committed by a magistrate, known as intercessio and auxilium, respectively; the people gave two assistants known as plebeian aediles. Again under pressure from the plebs, a political compromise was reached in which the consuls and tribunes would give place to a commission of ten men, the decemviri, who would be empowered to publish a code of laws for all Rome, the Twelve Tables. According to Livy, it codified all public and private law, but its promulgation did not grant further political rights to the plebs, as it enshrined into the tables a law banning intermarriage between plebeians and patricians. With a short attempt to establish
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. The term is used in connection with national population and housing censuses; the United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory and defined periodicity", recommends that population censuses be taken at least every 10 years. United Nations recommendations cover census topics to be collected, official definitions and other useful information to co-ordinate international practice; the word is of Latin origin: during the Roman Republic, the census was a list that kept track of all adult males fit for military service. The modern census is essential to international comparisons of any kind of statistics, censuses collect data on many attributes of a population, not just how many people there are. Censuses began as the only method of collecting national demographic data, are now part of a larger system of different surveys.
Although population estimates remain an important function of a census, including the geographic distribution of the population, statistics can be produced about combinations of attributes e.g. education by age and sex in different regions. Current administrative data systems allow for other approaches to enumeration with the same level of detail but raise concerns about privacy and the possibility of biasing estimates. A census can be contrasted with sampling in which information is obtained only from a subset of a population. Modern census data are used for research, business marketing, planning, as a baseline for designing sample surveys by providing a sampling frame such as an address register. Census counts are necessary to adjust samples to be representative of a population by weighting them as is common in opinion polling. Stratification requires knowledge of the relative sizes of different population strata which can be derived from census enumerations. In some countries, the census provides the official counts used to apportion the number of elected representatives to regions.
In many cases, a chosen random sample can provide more accurate information than attempts to get a population census. A census is construed as the opposite of a sample as its intent is to count everyone in a population rather than a fraction. However, population censuses rely on a sampling frame to count the population; this is the only way to be sure that everyone has been included as otherwise those not responding would not be followed up on and individuals could be missed. The fundamental premise of a census is that the population is not known and a new estimate is to be made by the analysis of primary data; the use of a sampling frame is counterintuitive as it suggests that the population size is known. However, a census is used to collect attribute data on the individuals in the nation; this process of sampling marks the difference between historical census, a house to house process or the product of an imperial decree, the modern statistical project. The sampling frame used by census is always an address register.
Thus it is not known how many people there are in each household. Depending on the mode of enumeration, a form is sent to the householder, an enumerator calls, or administrative records for the dwelling are accessed; as a preliminary to the dispatch of forms, census workers will check any address problems on the ground. While it may seem straightforward to use the postal service file for this purpose, this can be out of date and some dwellings may contain a number of independent households. A particular problem is what are termed'communal establishments' which category includes student residences, religious orders, homes for the elderly, people in prisons etc; as these are not enumerated by a single householder, they are treated differently and visited by special teams of census workers to ensure they are classified appropriately. Individuals are counted within households and information is collected about the household structure and the housing. For this reason international documents refer to censuses of housing.
The census response is made by a household, indicating details of individuals resident there. An important aspect of census enumerations is determining which individuals can be counted from which cannot be counted. Broadly, three definitions can be used: de facto residence; this is important to consider individuals who have temporary addresses. Every person should be identified uniquely as resident in one place but where they happen to be on Census Day, their de facto residence, may not be the best place to count them. Where an individual uses services may be more useful and this is at their usual, or de jure, residence. An individual may be represented at a permanent address a family home for students or long term migrants, it is necessary to have a precise definition of residence to decide whether visitors to a country should be included in the population count. This is becoming more important as students travel abroad for education for a period of several years. Other groups causing problems of enumeration are new born babies, people away on holiday, people moving home around census day, people without a fixed address.
People having second homes because of working in another part of the country or retaining a holiday cottage are dif
Labour Party (Ireland)
The Labour Party is a social-democratic political party in the Republic of Ireland. Founded in 1912 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, by James Larkin, James Connolly, William X. O'Brien as the political wing of the Irish Trades Union Congress, it describes itself as a "democratic socialist party" in its constitution. Labour continues to be the political arm of the Irish trade union and labour movement and seeks to represent workers interests in the Dáil and on a local level. Unlike the other main Irish political parties, Labour did not arise as a faction of the original Sinn Féin party; the party has served as a partner in coalition governments on seven occasions since its formation: six times in coalition either with Fine Gael alone or with Fine Gael and other smaller parties, once with Fianna Fáil. This gives Labour a cumulative total of nineteen years served as part of a government, the second-longest total of any party in the Republic of Ireland after Fianna Fáil; the current party leader is Brendan Howlin.
It is the fourth-largest party in Dáil Éireann, with seven seats. In November 2018, Labour announced that they were considering running candidates again in Northern Ireland, in response to a potential merger between Fianna Fáil and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, with whom Labour have long had fraternal links; the last time Labour had contested elections in the region was in 1973, shortly after the SDLP's formation. The Labour Party is a member of the Progressive Alliance, Socialist International, Party of European Socialists. James Connolly, James Larkin and William X. O'Brien established the Irish Labour Party in 1912, as the political wing of the Irish Trade Union Congress; this party was to represent the workers in the expected Dublin Parliament under the Third Home Rule Act 1914. However, after the defeat of the trade unions in the Dublin Lockout of 1913 the labour movement was weakened; the Irish Citizen Army, formed during the 1913 Lockout, was informally the military wing of the Labour Movement.
The ICA took part in the 1916 Rising. Councillor Richard O'Carroll, a Labour Party member of Dublin Corporation, was the only elected representative to be killed during the Easter Rising. O'Carroll was shot and died several days on 5 May 1916; the ICA was revived during Peadar O'Donnell's Republican Congress but after the 1935 split in the Congress most ICA members joined the Labour Party. The British Labour Party had organised in Ireland, but in 1913 the Labour NEC agreed that the Irish Labour Party would have organising rights over the entirety of Ireland. A group of trade unionists in Belfast objected and the Belfast Labour Party, which became the nucleus of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, remained outside the new Irish party. In Larkin's absence, William O'Brien became the dominant figure in the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and wielded considerable influence in the Labour Party. O'Brien dominated the Irish Trade Union Congress; the Labour Party, led by Thomas Johnson from 1917, as successor to such organisations as D. D. Sheehan's Irish Land and Labour Association, declined to contest the 1918 general election, in order to allow the election to take the form of a plebiscite on Ireland's constitutional status.
It refrained from contesting the 1921 elections. As a result, the party was left outside Dáil Éireann during the vital years of the independence struggle, though Johnson sat in the First Dáil; the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided the Labour Party. Some members sided with the Irregulars in the Irish Civil War that followed. O'Brien and Johnson encouraged its members to support the Treaty. In the 1922 general election the party won 17 seats. However, there were a number of a loss in support for the party. In the 1923 general election the Labour Party only won 14 seats. From 1922 until Fianna Fáil TDs took their seats in 1927, the Labour Party was the major opposition party in the Dáil. Labour attacked the lack of social reform by the Cumann na nGaedheal government. Larkin returned to Ireland in 1923, he hoped to resume the leadership role he had left, but O'Brien resisted him. Larkin sided with the more radical elements of the party, in September that year he established the Irish Worker League. In 1932, the Labour Party supported Éamon de Valera's first Fianna Fáil government, which had proposed a programme of social reform with which the party was in sympathy.
It appeared for a time during the 1940s that the Labour Party would replace Fine Gael as the main opposition party. In the 1943 general election the party won 17 seats, its best result since 1927; the party was conservative compared to similar European parties, its leaders from 1932 to 1977 were members of the Knights of Saint Columbanus. The Larkin-O'Brien feud still continued, worsened over time. In the 1940s the hatred caused the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. O'Brien left with six TDs in 1944, founding the National Labour Party, whose leader was James Everett. O'Brien withdrew ITGWU from the Irish Trade Unions Congress and set up his own congress; the split damaged the Labour movement in the 1944 general election. It was only after Larkin's death in 1947. After the 1948 general election National Labour had five TDs – Everett, Dan Spri
Roman Republic
The Roman Republic was the era of classical Roman civilization beginning with the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom, traditionally dated to 509 BC, ending in 27 BC with the establishment of the Roman Empire. It was during this period that Rome's control expanded from the city's immediate surroundings to hegemony over the entire Mediterranean world. Roman society under the Republic was a cultural mix of Latin and Greek elements, visible in the Roman Pantheon, its political organisation was influenced by the Greek city states of Magna Graecia, with collective and annual magistracies, overseen by a senate. The top magistrates were the two consuls, who had an extensive range of executive, judicial and religious powers. Whilst there were elections each year, the Republic was not a democracy, but an oligarchy, as a small number of large families monopolised the main magistracies. Roman institutions underwent considerable changes throughout the Republic to adapt to the difficulties it faced, such as the creation of promagistracies to rule its conquered provinces, or the composition of the senate.
Unlike the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire, the Republic was in a state of quasi-perpetual war throughout its existence. Its first enemies were its Latin and Etruscan neighbours as well as the Gauls, who sacked the city in 387 BC; the Republic nonetheless demonstrated extreme resilience and always managed to overcome its losses, however catastrophic. After the Gallic Sack, Rome indeed conquered the whole Italian peninsula in a century, which turned the Republic into a major power in the Mediterranean; the Republic's greatest enemy was doubtless Carthage, against. The Punic general Hannibal famously invaded Italy by crossing the Alps and inflicted on Rome two devastating defeats at the Lake Trasimene and Cannae, but the Republic once again recovered and won the war thanks to Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. With Carthage defeated, Rome became the dominant power of the ancient Mediterranean world, it embarked in a long series of difficult conquests, after having notably defeated Philip V and Perseus of Macedon, Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire, the Lusitanian Viriathis, the Numidian Jugurtha, the great Pontic king Mithridates VI, the Gaul Vercingetorix, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.
At home, the Republic experienced a long streak of social and political crises, which ended in several violent civil wars. At first, the Conflict of the Orders opposed the patricians, the closed oligarchic elite, to the far more numerous plebs, who achieved political equality in several steps during the 4th century BC; the vast conquests of the Republic disrupted its society, as the immense influx of slaves they brought enriched the aristocracy, but ruined the peasantry and urban workers. In order to solve this issue, several social reformers, known as the Populares, tried to pass agrarian laws, but the Gracchi brothers, Saturninus, or Clodius Pulcher were all murdered by their opponents, the Optimates, keepers of the traditional aristocratic order. Mass slavery caused three Servile Wars. In this context, the last decades of the Republic were marked by the rise of great generals, who exploited their military conquests and the factional situation in Rome to gain control of the political system.
Marius Sulla dominated in turn the Republic. These multiple tensions lead to a series of civil wars. Despite his victory and appointment as dictator for life, Caesar was murdered in 44 BC. Caesar's heir Octavian and lieutenant Mark Antony defeated Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC, but turned against each other; the final defeat of Mark Antony and his ally Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, the Senate's grant of extraordinary powers to Octavian as Augustus in 27 BC – which made him the first Roman emperor – thus ended the Republic. Since the foundation of Rome, its rulers had been monarchs, elected for life by the patrician noblemen who made up the Roman Senate; the last Roman king was Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. In the traditional histories, Tarquin was expelled in 509 because his son Sextus Tarquinius had raped the noblewoman Lucretia, who afterwards took her own life. Lucretia's father, her husband Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Tarquin's nephew Lucius Junius Brutus mustered support from the Senate and army, forced Tarquin into exile in Etruria.
The Senate agreed to abolish kingship. Most of the king's former functions were transferred to two consuls, who were elected to office for a term of one year; each consul had the capacity to act as a check on his colleague, if necessary through the same power of veto that the kings had held. If a consul abused his powers in office, he could be prosecuted. Brutus and Collatinus became Republican Rome's first consuls. Despite Collatinus' role in the creation of the Republic, he belonged to the same family as the former king, was forced to abdicate his office and leave Rome, he was replaced as co-consul by Publius Valerius Publicola. Most modern scholarship describes these events as the quasi-mythological detailing of an aristocratic coup within Tarquin's own family, not a popular revolution, they fit a narrative of a personal vengeance against a tyrant leading to his overthrow, common among Greek cities and theorised by Aristotle
Social class in ancient Rome
Social class in ancient Rome was hierarchical, but there were multiple and overlapping social hierarchies, an individual's relative position in one might be higher or lower than in another. The status of freeborn Romans during the Republic was established by: ancestry. For example, men who lived in towns outside Rome lack the right to vote. There were classes of non-citizens with different legal rights, such as peregrini. Under Roman law, slaves had no rights as such. However, some laws regulated slavery and offered slaves protections not extended to other forms of property such as animals. Slaves, manumitted were freedmen, for the most part enjoyed the same legal rights and protections as free-born citizens. Roman society was patriarchal in the purest sense; the patron-client relationship, with the word patronus deriving from pater, was another way in which Roman society was organized into hierarchical groups, though clientela functioned as a system of overlapping social networks. A patron could be the client of a superior or more powerful patron.
In the Roman Kingdom and the early Roman Republic the most important division in Roman society was between the patricians and the plebeians. The patricians were a small elite whose ancestry was traced to the first Senate established by Romulus, who monopolised political power; the plebeians comprised the majority of Roman citizens. Adult males who were not Roman citizens, whether free or slave, fall outside this division. Women and children were not citizens, but took the social status of their father or husband, which granted them various rights and protections not available to the women and children of men of lower rank; the distinction between patricians and plebeians in Ancient Rome was based purely on birth. Although modern writers portray patricians as rich and powerful families who managed to secure power over the less-fortunate plebeian families and patricians among the senatorial class were wealthy; as civil rights for plebeians increased during the middle and late Roman Republic, many plebeian families had attained wealth and power while some traditionally patrician families had fallen into poverty and obscurity.
The first Roman Emperor, was of plebeian origin, as were many of his successors. By the Late Empire, few members of the Senate were from the original patrician families, most of which had died out. Rome continued to have a hierarchical class system, but it was now dominated by economic differences, rather than the hereditary distinction between Patricians and Plebeians. All public offices were open only to patricians, the classes could not intermarry. Plebeians and Patricians were always at odds due to the fact that Plebeians wanted to increase their power. A series of social struggles saw the plebs secede from the city on three occasions, the last in 297 BC, until their demands were met, they won the right to stand for office, the abolition of the intermarriage law, the creation of office of tribune of the plebs. This office, founded in 494 BC as a result of a plebeian secession, was the main legal bulwark against the powers of the patrician class, only plebeians were eligible; the tribunes had the power to protect any plebeian from a patrician magistrate.
Revolts forced the Senate to grant the tribunes additional powers, such as the right to veto legislation. A tribune’s person was sacrosanct, he was obliged to keep an open house at all times while in office; some patricians, notably Clodius Pulcher in the late 60s BC, petitioned to be assigned plebeian status, in order to accumulate the political influence among the people that the office of tribune afforded. The conflict between the classes came to a climax in 287 BC when patricians and plebeians were declared equal under the law. Following these changes the distinction between patrician and plebeian status became less important, by the Late Republic the only patrician prerogatives were certain priesthoods. Over time, some patrician families declined, some plebeian families rose in status, the composition of the ruling class changed. A plebeian, the first of his line to become consul was known as a novus homo, he and his descendants became “noble”. Notable examples of novi homines are the seven-time consul Marius, Cicero, whose rise was unusual in that it was driven by his oratorical and intellectual abilities rather than, as with Marius, military success.
During the Empire, patricius became a title of nobility bestowed by emperors. The census divided citizens into six complex classes based on property; the richest were the senatorial class, who during the Late Republic had to be worth at least 400,000 se
Child labour
Child labour refers to the exploitation of children through any form of work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, is mentally, physically or morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these laws do not consider all work by children as child labour. Child labour has existed to varying extents throughout history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families worked in Western nations and their colonies alike; these children worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories and services such as news boys—some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours. With the rise of household income, availability of schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child labour fell. In the world's poorest countries, around 1 in 4 children are engaged in child labour, the highest number of whom live in sub-saharan Africa. In 2017, four African nations witnessed over 50 percent of children aged 5–14 working.
Worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labour. The vast majority of child labour is found in informal urban economies. Poverty and lack of schools are considered the primary cause of child labour. Globally the incidence of child labour decreased from 25% to 10% between 1960 and 2003, according to the World Bank; the total number of child labourers remains high, with UNICEF and ILO acknowledging an estimated 168 million children aged 5–17 worldwide were involved in child labour in 2013. Child labour forms an intrinsic part of pre-industrial economies. In pre-industrial societies, there is a concept of childhood in the modern sense. Children begin to participate in activities such as child rearing and farming as soon as they are competent. In many societies, children as young as 13 are seen as adults and engage in the same activities as adults; the work of children was important in pre-industrial societies, as children needed to provide their labour for their survival and that of their group.
Pre-industrial societies were characterised by low productivity and short life expectancy, preventing children from participating in productive work would be more harmful to their welfare and that of their group in the long run. In pre-industrial societies, there was little need for children to attend school; this is the case in non literate societies. Most pre-industrial skill and knowledge were amenable to being passed down through direct mentoring or apprenticing by competent adults. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th century, there was a rapid increase in the industrial exploitation of labour, including child labour. Industrial cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool grew from small villages into large cities and improving child mortality rates; these cities drew in the population, growing due to increased agricultural output. This process was replicated in other industrialising countries; the Victorian era in particular became notorious for the conditions under which children were employed.
Children as young as four were employed in production factories and mines working long hours in dangerous fatal, working conditions. In coal mines, children would crawl through tunnels too low for adults. Children worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling matches and other cheap goods; some children undertook work as apprentices to respectable trades, such as building or as domestic servants. Working hours were long: builders worked 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter, while domestic servants worked 80-hour weeks. Child labour played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset brought about by economic hardship; the children of the poor were expected to contribute to their family income. In 19th-century Great Britain, one-third of poor families were without a breadwinner, as a result of death or abandonment, obliging many children to work from a young age. In England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills were described as children.
A high number of children worked as prostitutes. The author Charles Dickens worked at the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with his family in debtor's prison. Child wages were low. Karl Marx was an outspoken opponent of child labour, saying British industries, "could but live by sucking blood, children’s blood too," and that U. S. capital was financed by the "capitalized blood of children". Letitia Elizabeth Landon castigated child labour in her 1835 poem The Factory, portions of which she pointedly included in her 18th Birthday Tribute to Princess Victoria in 1837. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, child labour began to decline in industrialised societies due to regulation and economic factors because of the Growth of Trade Unions; the regulation of child labour began from the earliest days of the Industrial revolution. The first act to regulate child labour in Britain was passed in 1803; as early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day.
These acts were ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831
