The session will highlight how strengthening decent work for adults – through greater voice and improved livelihoods – offers a powerful pathway to ending child labour.
It will also explore experiences in promoting living wages and stronger adult livelihoods as transformative levers for addressing child labour, reducing the economic pressures that push families to rely on children’s work. It will illustrate how these initiatives may enhance family resilience, support children’s schooling, and enable households to transition away from harmful coping strategies. Central to this discussion will be the importance of collective worker voice based on the realization of freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, and collective interest representation in securing fair remuneration, improving working conditions and protecting children from hazardous forms of work, taking into account local contexts, root causes of low pay, as well as economic factors. The session may additionally discuss efforts to advance living wages and living incomes more broadly, in line with ILO principles.