Today's BBC website has this shocking report on the use of child labour in - yes - Switzerland, even in the years after World War II.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29765623

I'm not sure why you're shocked? I mean, we should all be shocked by the injustices done to children wherever they are but why is the fact that this was in Switzerland surprising? I don't know a huge amount about that country but I do know it's not the best country in which to be poor so I wasn't surprised at all.

I heard a broadcast about this on the BBC World Service last night. What I found genuinely surprising was not the fact that it took place in Switzerland but that it continued for so long.

I know quite well that poor children in the UK used to be "apprenticed" to factories or "fostered out" to the dominions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I've never heard of anything of the kind here in my own lifetime. The Swiss practice of "Verdingung" seems to have continued to operate within the law into the 1970s and possibly the 1980s. Of course poverty exists in Switzerland as it does in just about every country, and we still have a certain amount of hidden child labour in much of western Europe, but the open State approval for the Swiss practice seems to be out of step with most of the developed world in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Agreed. What shocks me in particular is: (1) that this went on for so long and broadly within the law; (2) that it happened in what was probably the most prosperous country in Europe at the time (excluding micro states).

There is a long history, in Europe and the United States, of helping those poor, unfortunate, mostly urban children who came from a family suffering from poverty or single parent households. And a sure fire cure for helping those wretches was to send them to the healthy rural areas with all that fresh country air to a farm. Because on a farm, where food is raised, food must be abundant, right? And hard work is good for the moral development of these children that must be living in less than moral circumstances. Because, after all, if they came from upstanding families, they wouldn't be poor or living in a single parent household.

So these kids were used as slave labor for the back breaking labor of farm work. Even better, the family they were stolen from had to pay for this privilege. That's the part that really surprised me. The family was impoverished, their children were taken away to "help" the family, then the family had to pay the host family. Yeah, that sure would help the family finances!



Please Note: sarcasm was used in the composition of the above message.

^^^ You don't say?..... Hahaha

Many years ago I interviewed an applicant from Switzerland for a place at the University of ___________. As she didn't live in the U.K. or any other EU country she also had to document her ability to pay the full fees, and as the nature of the documentation was somewhat unorthodox it fell to me to check it (in the first instance, anyway).

The actual interview went well. She was highly competent and had a wonderful sense of humour. While going through the documentation with her after the actual interview she remarked casually at one point, "The trouble is that I'm rather hard up". In view of her sense of humour I came up with a reply that I would not have done with any other applicant. I said, "Doesn't it count as a crime to be poor in Switzerland?" She was tickled by this, roared with laughter and then said, "Almost, but not quite. I know what you are getting at, though". [Namely, that in Switzerland a 'good citizen' is expected to be well off]. Oh, Switzerland!

Wow. What's interesting is that you didn't realize how close to the truth your joke was, bloomsby. I bet she did though.