Despite decades of progress, child labor remains deeply embedded in global supply chains, with millions of children engaged in hazardous and exploitative work to produce everyday goods. The scope of the problem is truly shocking. 

According to data from the United Nations, there are an estimated 152 million children between 5 and 17 years old engaged in child labor globally, half of whom are working in hazardous conditions. Nearly 90% of those children can be found in Africa, Asia or the Pacific, with the remaining 10% spread across North America, Europe, Central Asia and the Arab States. 

As scrutiny intensifies, corporations face growing pressure to enforce ethical sourcing practices, ensuring their profits are not built on the backs of vulnerable children.

It's a tough job, however, to root out something so pervasive.

"Companies should really just assume that it's in their supply chain — whether it's child labor or exploitative practices, it's very likely to be there," says Kelsey Morgan, co-founder and CEO of anti-exploitation nonprofit EverFree. 

Although substantial progress has been made in the last decade, the totals have largely plateaued, having consistently sat between 150 and 160 million in each year since 2016, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). Morgan believes that this can be traced back to a few factors, as supply chains have become more complex and unwieldy, and intersecting geopolitical crises have left many communities vulnerable to exploitation. 

"You have poverty as a driving factor, and you have kids who are often lured into exploitation through promises of either money to take care of their family, or an education," Morgan says. 

Morgan also cites the meteoric rise of the fast fashion industry led by companies such as Temu and Shein, both of which have been accused of using exploitative labor practices to support their ability to sell a wide range of products priced well below market value. UNICEF asserts that the industry at large "has engendered a race to the bottom," where companies are competing with each other to find cheaper and cheaper sources of labor, and consumers have become conditioned to expect low prices regardless of the human cost.

Read More: Low Prices, Human Costs — Has Online Retail Crippled the Ethical Supply Chain?

The practice of employing child labor is also especially rife in the agriculture industry, which accounts for 70% of the world's child laborers between the ages of 5 and 17, as well as 82% of child laborers in sub-Saharan Africa. That sector also happens to have the most hazardous jobs, exposing children to dangerous chemicals and pesticides, harmful outdoor temperatures, and occupational diseases spread by insects and other animals. 

In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana alone — which together produce nearly 60% of the world's cocoa — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Affairs says there are roughly 1.56 million children engaged in child labor. A 2024 investigation from BBC News also found a "significant number" of children younger than 15 years old picking jasmine flowers in at least four different locations in Egypt, where nearly half of the world's supply of the popular perfume ingredient is produced. Those flowers were then sent to factories known to export jasmine oil to international fragrance houses owned by subsidiaries of L'Oreal and Estée Lauder. 

Even children in more developed countries haven't been spared, with the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws in the U.S. having increased by 35% between 2021 and 2024. Now, at least 14 states have recently either enacted or proposed laws rolling back child labor protections, by easing limits on hazardous work for minors, introducing sub-minimum wages or, in the case of Iowa, allowing teenagers as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries, and letting 16-year-olds take on roofing, excavation, and demolition jobs. 

When it comes to mitigating the problem, it's easy to say that improving visibility into supply chains is the answer. But for smaller companies, Morgan says, it can be a costly affair to audit and track multiple tiers of suppliers to ensure that facilities halfway across the globe are compliant with even the most basic of ethical labor standards. For larger corporations who have the necessary resources, efforts have often focused more on the appearance of compliance. 

"We have seen that major brands and retailers publicly disclose the most information about their policies on human rights, and significantly less about the results, outcomes and impacts of their efforts," said labor nonprofit Fashion Revolution in its 2021 Fashion Transparency Index report. In that report, the group found that less than half of brands disclose details about their manufacturing facilities, while nearly three-quarters fail to disclose the wet processing facilities and spinning mills deeper in their supply chains. And even while more companies have been created to consult with corporations to gain better visibility into their suppliers, "it's not nearly enough," says Morgan.

"There need to be policies and laws that meet these gaps where companies are not being held accountable, where they're not being transparent, and where there should be better enforcement," adds Krisha Mae Cabrera, EverFree's advocacy and communications manager.

On the consumer side, it starts with looking at the growing cultural reliance around cheap goods. In a supply-and-demand economy, a person's buying decisions matter, as became clear in the case of Nike in the 1990s, when growing public outcries over the company's use of sweatshops eventually made its brand "synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse," then-CEO Phil Knight admitted in 1998. In the years that followed, Nike performed hundreds of factory audits, made repeat visits to facilities deemed problematic, and published reports detailing the conditions inside each factory it contracted with. 

In the years to come, Cabrera says that, from a business perspective, "it's to the benefit of companies to get ahead of this," or risk facing penalties from any laws that may come into force in the future. More importantly, Morgan adds, the current trajectory of the world's child labor crisis simply isn't sustainable.

"Really looking at the economics of this, we will bear the cost of it eventually," she cautions. "We are bearing the cost of it, not only in human capital, but in our environment and our communities."