They don't give enough detail in the article (Wikipedia has some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk), but based on the chart I suspect it's something like this:
Imagine someone goes to a casino, and play a game where you flip a coin 20 times in a row, and win if they're all heads. There's about a 1 in 1 million chance of flipping 20 heads - so people are suspicious that the person cheated.
However, imagine that during that same time period, 10 million people played that game. Looking at that, you'd expect there to be 10 winners of the game. Suddenly it's not suspicious at all.
So I think the argument is that this is the chance a nurse experienced this many deaths is 1 in 45 - so with 45 nurses, you'd expect one to experience it.
To add: there are over 4 million nurses in the US.
First, hopefully you can agree that, fundamentally, the company paying these child workers is trading money for labor. (This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a fact of labor markets.)
Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.
Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.
Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action.
Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out & undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives.
With these predicates laid out, my point: The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.
The rawness of the deal only becomes apparent when we start to inspect why material conditions are such that this deal — trading an hour of labor for $2 to a company serving a multi-billion-dollar market — is enticing to children.
In other words, this article, in my analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.
But that's also where some of the poorest people live! You know, the people who would benefit the most from having jobs like this.
>The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.
It is! In the 90s senator Tom Harkin proposed the Child Labor Deterrence Act:
>According to Harkin's website, "This bill would prohibit the importation of products that have been produced by child labor, and included civil and criminal penalties for violators."
This was a bill that never got anywhere, but simply talking about it had this impact:
>In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act.
>UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act
Things might be different nowadays, but people from poor countries don't have as many opportunities. Taking some away, might be taking all they have.