Yes indeed, and it's also a disgrace that children lack the freedom to work! Many children want to work in factories, why let the state interfere? Absolute bollocks.
If you were to invade Myanmar today, and impose a social democratic government that bans child labour, the result would be an increase in mortality.
Child labour only became unnecessary as a result of economic development increasing the average level of wealth in society.
Going back to the article, it's telling that you're trying to justify the authoritarian prohibition by comparing adults to children. Your ideology sees ordinary people as effectively children, and the state as their parent.
You're free to frame this argument in terms of individual rights or "economic competitiveness" or state paternalism. Unfortunately it amounts to little more than economic handwaving. At worst it's a disingenuous ploy to undermine the interests of the labour class, deluding workers into thinking you're giving them economic rights and freedoms ("you should be able to choose when you work!") when really you're just justifying your extraction of an even bigger share of their labour.
The common labourer has no economic power. The state, the firm, and (to a diminishing extent) unions do. I hate paternalistic states (and unions) as much as you do, but when you place no limit on firms' ability to extract labour from their workers, you end up in twisted situations where people are being paid sub-livable wages and expected to be on call 24 hours. Not because it's an economic "inevitability" (child labour inevitable? You seriously believe that?), but because it's the most amenable socioeconomic arrangement for the capitalist class.
I recommend you study a bit of economics.
Start with Adam Smith:
>It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Then read this:
This isn't free market dogma. This is what 400 years+ of economic history shows us, and what any economist would confirm.
Wages and benefits improve as the wealth of society increases, and wealth increases as a part of the normal course of history, particularly when market institutions are strongly in place. Wage growth slowed as a result of the institution of economic-growth-destroying socialist laws and programs in the US and Europe.
And putting all of this aside, you have no moral right to violate another person's right to freely contract to increase your own wages. So even if economies didn't work as they do, such authoritarian prohibitions would be unjustiable.
That is what all the statistical evidence suggests.
Anecdotally, I've spent a fair bit of time in the developing world, and to me at least, it's obvious that the root source of the difference in working and living conditions between the developing world and the developed world is the comparatively lower levels of capital (tools, equipment, machinery, social capital, skills, knowledge) in the developing world.