How can child labour still exist in the EU?
20 June 2025
On paper, the EU has some of the world's strongest protections for children and young workers. It banned the employment of children under 15, pledged to eliminate child labour in all forms by 2025, and recently passed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) to force companies to address human rights abuses in their supply chains.
But on the ground, child labour hasn't disappeared. Reports of children working in agriculture, informal services, and domestic work continue to surface – from Italy's fruit sector to rural areas in Romania, especially among migrant and Roma communities.
Numbers are notoriously hard to get – duh, it's informal and undeclared work – but a 2023 Save the Children survey found 336,000 children aged 7–15 in Italy had work experience, and 58,000 were engaged in detrimental work.
Another EU directive, one on protecting young people at work, sets age limits and safety rules, but experts say enforcement varies widely across member states and is often too weak to tackle informal labour. The same applies to the CSDDD. Now, a new European Commission "Omnibus" proposal seeks to ease reporting burdens on businesses – potentially weakening due diligence and letting exploitative practices, deeper in supply chains, slip by unnoticed.
The biggest blind spot is in agriculture. This sector accounts for 71% of global child labour and remains under-regulated in Europe. Seasonal, family-run, and largely informal, agricultural work is hard to monitor – and often culturally normalised.
The EU's pledge to end child labour by 2025 now seems out of reach. Experts say there's a lack of political will. Tougher enforcement costs money. Stronger protections may raise production costs. And few governments want to appear as overzealous regulators – cracking down too hard.
 | Henrique Tizzot Ultimately, child labour is a symptom of deeper structural issues: poverty, inequality, and exclusion. Even in a wealthy bloc like the EU, not all children grow up with the same protections. Migrant families, undocumented workers, Roma children – these are the communities most affected and least visible in national statistics. Without targeted support, they remain trapped in cycles of precarious work. Ending child labour requires more than laws. It requires political courage, stronger accountability, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths – like the fact that the EU, for all its human rights rhetoric, has yet to solve a problem it vowed to end. |
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