OSV STORY FOR AUGUST 11

Suffer the little children

Child labor is once more on the rise in the Third World -- and in America

By William Bole

"The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labor. As early as he may get at labor the more beautiful, the more useful does his life get to be."

That was the opinion of Asa G. Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola Co., around the turn of the century. But the view from below, on the factory floor, was less pretty, as one woman testified after finding children as young as 5 amid the looms of South Carolina's textile mills.

"It is 8 o'clock when the children reach their homes -- later if the mill-work is behind-hand and they are kept over hours. They are usually beyond speech.

"They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep."

This comes from Milton Meltzer's "Bread and Roses," a history of American labor. It is the kind of scene that shocked Americans of the past and triggered movements to abolish child labor. Now, the pictures are coming back to haunt Americans, not in history books, but in the present reality of global economics.

By all accounts, child labor is on the rise, even in the United States.

Worldwide, as many as 200 million children under 15 years old toil on farms and in factories, mines and other workplaces, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency.

Experts believe the problem has grown with industrialization in poor countries, especially Asia, and deepening pockets of poverty in affluent countries such as the United States.

In some countries, children are sold to employers to pay off the debts of their parents.

Hundreds of thousands of these children are enslaved in the loom sheds of India and Pakistan, weaving Oriental rugs bought by U.S. importers and then sold at exorbitant prices to American consumers, according to the Child Labor Coalition in Washington.

These new conditions of child labor have begun to draw condemnations from Catholic leaders.

The protests have come from bishops and laity in countries such as Bangladesh, where children produce clothes and other goods available on the shelves of Wal-Mart and other chain stores.

Pope John Paul II has added his voice to this outcry.

"In some countries, children are forced to work at a tender age and are often badly treated, harshly punished and paid absurdly low wages. Because they have no way of asserting their rights, they are the easiest to blackmail and exploit," the Pope said earlier this year in his annual message for the World Day of Peace.

"In other circumstances, children are bought and sold so that they could be used for begging or, even worse, forced into prostitution, as in the case of so-called sex tourism."

The cries of exploitation are sounding an echo of times past in England and the United States when children of the working class often inhabited a Charles Dickensian world of hard, constant labor.

In that era, Catholic reformers such as Father John A. Ryan campaigned against child labor, "this reproach to our country," as he called it.

But Church leaders in the early part of this century were not of one mind on the matter. In Boston, Cardinal William O'Connell called the movement against child labor "nefarious and Bolshevik."

Those Catholics who opposed a federal ban on child labor did so out of fear that it would carve out "an opening wedge for government invasion of individual and parental rights," as Jesuit Father James Hennesey, a historian, explains in his book "American Catholics."

Most U.S. Church leaders came around to supporting an end to all but the most benign forms of child labor. To this day, however, child labor has its defenders, or at least those who see no alternative for some of the poorest children on earth.

"If you prohibit it [child labor] outright, you'll have problems like child starvation," said Jagdish Bhagwati, an Indian-born economist who teaches at Columbia University. "It could be good for your conscience, but it could have dire consequences."

On this ground, free-trade advocates such as Bhagwati have staked their opposition to a proposed ban on American imports of goods made by children in factories and mines.

Robert Senser favors such a ban. He is a retired U.S. Foreign Service labor attaché who lives in Reston, Va., and writes on issues of international work for Catholic journals. He counters the arguments of Bhagwati and others that if these children don't work, they won't eat.

"A lot of them aren't eating now. They earn little or nothing right now," said Senser, noting that child carpet workers in India barely survive on their rations of bread, onions and salt.

On top of this, he said, they are subjected to cruel treatment, such as "being chained to a loom, being beaten, being prevented from seeing their parents for years."

Few will ever get an education, which means the cycle of poverty is perpetuated, he added.

Imports and policy aside, one thing is clear: the issue of child labor is coming home.

The public embarrassment of television personality Kathie Lee Gifford, whose Wal-Mart line of clothes turns out to have been made by child sweatshop workers in Central America, has helped focus Americans on the plight of child laborers.

Gifford earned kind words from Msgr. George Higgins, the U.S. Church's leading authority on labor questions, for moving swiftly to correct the abuses.

The priest gave little absolution, though, to Michael Jordan, another celebrity at the center of a child-labor controversy.

The Chicago Bulls' star had this to say when asked by The New York Times about charges that Nike's line of Air Jordan sneakers are made by children and other exploited workers in Indonesia: "I don't know the complete situation. Why should I? I am trying to do my job. Hopefully, Nike will do the right thing, whatever that might be."

Writing as a Chicago native ordained in the archdiocese there, Msgr. Higgins said in his syndicated column:

"I must say that Jordan's response to these questions was a miserable cop-out unworthy of a fabulously wealthy athlete who, from all accounts, is also an admirable human being and a devoted family man. The public has every right to ask these questions, and Jordan should either answer them or stop shilling for Nike."

Bole is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

The 'Grandma Moses' of social justice

The widely documented abuses of child labor have galvanized people like Louise Bogle, a retired nurse in New Jersey who sees her new activism as growing out of her Catholic faith.

"I'm not a person who gets up on soap boxes. I don't go marching in Washington," said Bogle, 76.

Nonetheless, when she heard that children work as bonded laborers -- slaves -- in the carpet industries of South Asia, Bogle went into action.

She started calling up stores that sell hand-knotted Oriental rugs, asking owners to begin ordering carpets that bear the "Rugmark" label. This label, devised by nonprofit groups in India, certifies that a rug has been made without child labor.

Several U.S. importers have agreed to distribute Rugmark rugs, the trademark of which is the smiling face of a child.

Bogle now preaches the Rugmark gospel to all who will listen, including members of her rosary society at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lyndhurst, N.J.

She sees the crusade against child labor as an extension of the Church's mission to aid the needy of foreign lands.

"As Christians, we believe children are most precious in God's eyes -- and that has to include the foreign child," said Bogle, who had to cut short a recent phone interview to attend a noontime Mass dedicated to ending partial-birth abortions. -- William Bole

Closing 'the gap' between rich and poor

Ann Nicholson recalls when she and other students at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., learned that blues jeans and blouses sold at The Gap clothing stores had been made by child-sweatshop workers in El Salvador.

"We went through our closets, and realized how much of what was in there came from The Gap," said Nicholson. "It was sort of horrifying."

At the time, she and her roommates formed a group called The Closet Activists, which hooked up with a nationwide campaign that targeted The Gap.

Last December, the young women put on a mock fashion show in the student union building of the Catholic college. They modeled Gap cloths bearing oversized price tags that read "made with child labor" and "56 cents an hour is not a living wage."

In three days they drummed up 120 personal letters written by students to The Gap.

Nearby, in a suburb of Minneapolis, 300 more letters came from Catholic students at St. Benilde-St. Margaret High School. The interest began with a "world awareness" prayer service held at lunch time, followed by classroom discussions of child labor, said Connie Zimney, who heads the religion department there.

She said the school didn't just hop on the bandwagon. "An important piece of the information was that the Church in El Salvador was working on this issue [of child labor in the garment industry]. That's when we knew it was something we should support," Zimney said.

The message was heard, from St. Paul and elsewhere. Earlier this year, The Gap agreed to independent monitoring of the so-called maquiladora factories in Central America, where its clothing is made.

The sweatshops have been set up in free-trade zones by subcontractors of The Gap.

The clothing retailer is now back in the good graces of Nicholson and her friends.

"I do respect The Gap because they're the first to recognize the fact that consumers have a social conscience," she said. -- William Bole

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor 1996; from the August 11 edition

HEADLINES FOR AUGUST 11

Ethics anonymous (editorial)

An American bishop's challenge to the papacy

A last relic of Christ?

Fighting to take the life out of their party

Paul Johnson's God quest

Military spending: What the two parties agree on