Child labour in Switzerland

Child labour in Switzerland was a fact in rural areas to the 1960s, at least tolerated by the Swiss authorities referring to the so-called Verdingkinder, as up to 100,000 children were needed as cheap workers mostly on farms the decades before.

Referring to the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful. As of the 2010s, the practice of Child labour in principle is still tolerated, as at least small family-owned farms in Switzerland do need the help of their children on occasion of the harvests in late summer. That's the reason why in the more rural cantons there are still much more longer summer holidays, granted by the governmental public schools, then in the urbanized cantons where there are usually five weeks summer holidays in July and August.

As in many other countries, child labour affected among the so-called Kaminfegerkinder ("chimney sweep children") also children working p.e. in spinning mills, factories and in agriculture in 19th-century Switzerland. In the Swiss pre-industrial society, as well in other European countries, the children often were part of the family economy, earlier were integrated into the worker process and often indispensable contributed income. The industrialization forced family members to look for an income outside the traditional housekeeping. Work on the machines was often easy and physically not very challenging, what favoured the 'use' of women and children. Thus, the exploitation of the labor of children took new forms and extended dimensions, and spread at the beginning of the 19th century rapidly, particularly in the canton of Zurich and in Eastern Switzerland. In the cotton mills, six- to ten-year-old children worked in miserable conditions, up to 16 hours per day and often at night. Child labour became a social problem on which the authorities responded with investigations, so in 1812 in the canton of St. Gallen and one year later in the canton of Zürich. In the latter, the regulation because of underage youth at all and the spinning machines especially (In German: Verordnung wegen der minderjährigen Jugend überhaupt und an den Spinnmaschinen besonders) was issued in 1815; night work and factory work before the finished ninth birthday was prohibited and the daily working time limited on 12 to 14 hours. These rules were not to enforce in practice, but marked the beginning of the child protection legislation, followed by laws in Zürich (1837) and in the other cantons.

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