Poor working conditions have been a persistent problem for centuries. Over the last 50 years, large corporations from the United States have moved a large portion of their factories overseas to circumvent the strict working regulations within the United States. The third world countries such as india, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, South Korea, and Taiwan provide access to readily abundant cheap labor. These corporations could now reap the benefit of the United States consumer market, while keeping their costs extremely low in offshore production. The media has awakened the public to this fact and several prominent corporations have come under fire lately for the malpractices.
The term “child labor” is often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical-mental development. It refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children, and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, obliging them to leave school prematurely or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work. There are an estimated 186 million child laborers worldwide. The 2001 national census of India estimated total number of child labor aged 5–14 to be at 12.6 million. Small-scale and community-based studies have found estimated prevalence of 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous occupations.
The culture icon of Nike has been the corporation most under fire since the media outburst. Nike has had child labor accusations since the 90s with a regular resurgence of the same controversies at regular time intervals. The CEO has been adamant about fixing the problems after the 2005 scandal for the world cup balls made by child laborers surfaced in Pakistan again. Nike has since tried harder to fix worker exploitation problems by changing the glue they used to reduce air pollutions and using a different type of rubber for the soles. Nike is also the first company to release a detailed document with all the locations of its manufacturing partners in developing nations. On a similar note Reebok, which is owned by Adidas since 2006, had many such controversies relating to child labor accusations predominantly in Cambodia and china. Sports firms like Nike and Reebok still have their manufacturing firms contract the work to smaller “sweatshops” where a worker works in atrocious conditions for long durations of time and receives terrible pay.
In 2010 Apple inc had its most significant related to labor exploitation when working conditions at Foxconn factories in china were exposed. Apple has been auditing its manufacturing firms and partners in its Supply chain to determine the number of underage employers. These numbers have amounted to over 300 since 2006. but firing the supplier was clearly not enough, given the questions the company was facing. Its executives decided to adopt a program designed in 2008 by Impactt, a social-responsibility consultancy based in the UK that operates in China, India, and Bangladesh. The plan calls for Apple to make any transgressing supplier pay not only for the education of any child laborers it is found using, but also keep paying them wages until they graduate (thus removing their incentive to stay out of school). Apple follows up with the former workers to ensure they are still in school. In Apple’s most public child-labor incident—and the only one to date where it has named and shamed its supplier—auditors discovered in 2012 that a company called Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics had hired 74 underage workers after a labor agency, Shenzhen Quanshun Human Resources, helped families forge proof-of-age documents for their children. Apple terminated its contract with the supplier, and made the company return the children to their families, as well as offering them its remediation program. Incidents like these are still a regular occurrence and companies are trying their hardest to fix these problems in their supply chain.
Nestle faced a similar problem in Africa where working conditions were exposed through the media. At this very moment, hundreds of thousands of children are working in fields around the world to cultivate chocolate’s main ingredient: cocoa. This is not because they have nothing better to do with their time (like go to school), it is because the price their parents are paid for growing and harvesting cocoa is too low for a family to survive. Therefore, kids must work too. Nestle claims to have taken steps to solve these problems by announcing new 40 schools in Cote d’Ivoire over 2012-2016. These claims according to scholars don’t actually solve the problem of child labor.

Rising wages have put pressure on manufacturers to move inland, automate, or even get out of the country altogether. But for second- and third-tier suppliers who don’t have those options, cheaper labor may be all that’s left. That’s one reason that Asia remains the world leader in child labor—though there as in other regions, the phenomenon is declining, thanks to industrialization.
As the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (2004) has indicated, the road to a balanced globalization inevitably lies in better global governance. However, this road is long and rocky since the asymmetries that characterize the present globalization and the resulting distributive tensions reflect the intrinsic characteristics of politics and the political economy of the world today. The roots of Youth employment problems are deeply rooted in the culture of factory workers in developing nations. It needs to be eradicated since it’s socially unacceptable. it has to be acknowledged that programs aimed at improving youth employability risk having no or only limited impact in a low growth environment.
Improving youth employment outcomes requires a combination of targeted policies and programs for current youth cohorts with a longer term strategy for stimulating employment intensive growth in most countries this will include reforms ranging from business and labor regulation to economic diversification and industrial and trade policies. Effective policy design and evaluation require stronger labor market information and analysis systems, particularly in low income countries Youth and private sector representatives will need to be included throughout the process of policy design, implementation, and evaluation.