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03/07/2007
According to a national survey, child labour is increasing in Bulgaria. About 6.5% of children aged between five and 17 years work in the private sector, 32.3% are unpaid workers in the household and family-owned businesses, and 41.8% do some domestic work. Other sources confirm this trend. The General Labour Inspectorate issued twice as many work permits for underage workers in 2006 as in 2003.
The increase in child labour in Bulgaria is documented in a number of studies and reports by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB), the United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF, and the country’s General Labour Inspectorate (GLI). It is also among the findings of a national survey on child labour, which was carried out in 2000 with the financial support of the International programme on the elimination of child labour (IPEC) of the ILO. According to the survey findings, 6.5% of all children aged between five and 17 years – that is, 83,000 children out of a total of 1,294,000 children – work in the private sector; 32.3% of children, corresponding to 418,000 children, work in the household or in family businesses; and 41.8% of children, or 611,000 children, do domestic work.
The survey shows that 94.1% of economically active children work without an employment contract and receive very low remuneration for their work. According to the ILO definition, economically active children are children who carry out paid or unpaid activities in the labour market. Other sources also confirm the increase in child labour in Bulgaria. In 2003, a UNICEF report on human trafficking in southeast Europe indicated that 69.2% of the Bulgarian victims of human trafficking are children. Moreover, the legal use of child labour has also increased: while the GLI issued 2,821 work permits for hiring minors in 2001, this number grew to 8,465 work permits in 2006.
Source: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions
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