While I agree with the basic premise of child-labor not necessarily being slavery or even bad, I disagree on the finer points that you do not address. I haven't yet voted on your article because I'd like to see what develops. I cannot tell if you are naive or underinformed, but you do not provide a balanced presentation.

Some of the reasons that child labor may not be bad include:

• Children MUST work because their parent(s) have medical problems that keep them from working, or they are orphans without reliable support from others.
• Their parents' income is so low that they MUST work to help supplement it.
• They live in a primarily agrarian society in which children play a key role in keeping a farm going (the Laura Ingalls Wilder books are a great example, especially the one about Alonzo).
  -They live in a hunter-gatherer culture where resources are fairly scarce and idle hands mean someone will starve.
• Historically, in many situations, children started working at a fairly young age. In some cultures, they start working as adolescents but, in others, at even younger ages; it really depended on the resources available, the risks associated with that time and place, and many other factors as to how long the "adults" could afford to keep their children sheltered from responsibility.

Some of the reasons child labor might be bad include:

• The child has no real choice but to accept the risks and working conditions because the alternative is starvation, eviction, etc. They are, in effect, slaves because of their situation.
• The children do not have any way to seek justice for their situation.
• The wages paid to the children may be well below the average for their area/nation, which means that the business owners, investors, etc. are getting cut-rate labor by taking advantage of naive/desperate children.
• The wages are subsistence-level for where they live, which prevents them from ever bettering their situation.
• The work situation is rigged in such a way that workers become indebted to their employers and find it almost impossible to extract themselves from this slippery slope (see the history of miners in the US for an example).
• The employers know that the working conditions are very dangerous and could easily afford to provide solutions to keep the kids safe but choose not to for the sake of increased profits.

These are just a few of the two sides of the argument. We do not need to compare their situation with our own in order to make a valid judgment.