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“STATEMENT BY MARYANN SCHRUPP REGARDING CHILD LABOR” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1247-E1248 on June 18, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
STATEMENT BY MARYANN SCHRUPP REGARDING CHILD LABOR
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HON. BERNARD SANDERS
of vermont
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, June 18, 1997
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, for the benefit of my collegues I would like to have printed in the Record this statement by a high school student from Vermont, who was speaking at my recent town meeting on issues facing young people.
Ms. Schrupp. It is estimated that between 100 million and 200 million children of the world under the age of 15 work. The concern is for children exposed to hazardous working conditions, for those who are exploited and endangered mentally and physically. These children make barely or under subsistence level wages and work without any proper benefits or hope of receiving an education. This education can lift them out of their present state of living and this is the education that is not available to them.
This is not a new phenomena, one that has recently become a priority for global consideration and global course of action. Unicef's 1997 report on the state of the world's children has focused specifically on the problem of hazardous child labor. Western media has started informing Americans of the conditions of soccer ball workers, soccer ball assemblers in Asia, rug makers in Pakistan, glass makers in India and textile workers in Asia and Central America. These workers are children hired for their low cost and expendable nature, their small fingers, and their inability to organize or question.
The fact that some of these children are working for American-based transnational companies has put the pressure on these companies to discontinue condoning the practice of child labor. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's report on the apparel industry and codes of conduct, corporate codes of conduct under business guidelines prohibiting the use of child labor are becoming more common as consumers as well as religious, labor and human rights groups are increasingly calling upon companies to take responsibility for the conditions under which the goods they sell are being manufactured.
Codes of conduct for American industries such as sports equipment and textile manufacturers are essential to stopping the importation of goods made by child labor either correctly or indirectly. Huge and popular names like Disney, Gap, Nike, Getz, Arizona, Eddie Bauer, and Gitano have been directly linked to overseas and in some cases national sweatshops where they can take advantage of the cheap and hard working supplies of local labor.
The most obvious examples of overseas sweatshops owned by American-based companies are the Maquiladoras of Central America where textiles are manufactured. 15-year-old girls who work in the Maquilas of Honduras tell how they're forced to take birth control bills on a daily basis and are required to pay for an expensive abortion injection if they do become pregnant. These girls are not allowed to leave each day until they fill a production quota. If a rush order for clothes came in, observers would note these girls entering the Maquilas at 7:00 a.m. and not returning until sometimes as many as 23 hours later. That's a 23-hour workday.
In China, Indonesia, and Pakistan, sporting equipment used in the United States is manufactured by child laborers. Jonathan Silvers wrote the following report in the Atlantic Monthly on soccer ball factories in Pakistan. No amount of preparation could have lessened the shock and revulsion I felt on entering the sporting goods factory in the town of Sialkot where scores of children, most of them aged five to ten, produce soccer balls by hand for about a dollar and 20 cents a day. The children work 80 hours a week in near total darkness and total silence. A partial list of infractions for which they may be punished is tacked to a wall near the entrance. It's a document of dubious utility. The children are illiterate. Punishments are doled out in a storage closet at the rear of the factory. There children are hung upside down by their knees, starved, caned or lashed. The punishment room is a standard feature of a Pakistani factory, as common as a lunchroom at a Detroit assembly plant.
Eighty percent of the soccer balls sold in the United States are imported from Pakistan. These are the same soccer balls that were used in the 1996 summer Olympic games and all professional sporting events. The Fowl Ball Campaign, a campaign launched by a coalition of non-governmental organizations, cannot prove that any soccer balls manufactured in Pakistan are not made by children.
Still, these reports show only a fraction of the picture. Most cases of child labor do not involve western companies but occur in domestic households unseen and unregulated. The more sinister forms of child labor such as child prostitution and the virtual slavery of bonded labor are often far removed from western markets and influence. They remain a national issue for these developing companies, many of which protest sovereign rights to run their nation's factories as they see fit. Most of the time, however, the children are employed at ages ruled illegal even by their country's governments.
For this reason, the United States needs to take responsibility for more than direct involvement with child labor. Countries, companies, and non-governmental organizations around the world are working together to not only eliminate child labor but to create conditions in developing countries which will prevent the exploitation of children.
The Convention on the Rights of a Child was signed into international law by the United Nations in 1990. It is the most widely ratified treaty in history signed by all but six members of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention expresses the conviction that children have rights, the same full spectrum of rights as adults, civil and political, social, cultural and economic. The United States is one of the six countries that has not yet signed this Convention.
American taxpayers' dollars are used to fund free trade zones which contribute to an environment of poverty for the people of developing countries. It is this kind of environment that supports the exploitation of children by national, international companies. Often a free trade zone means no corporate taxes, no income taxes, no regulations and no unions. GAT and the World Trade Organization are influenced heavily by the U.S. and it is here that the United States must take some responsibility for the fact that they support organizations which do not recognize child labor as a relevant issue.
Other organizations which receive support from the United States are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These organizations are responsible for massive government adjustment into developing countries. The structural adjustment programs primarily consist of spending cuts that hurt social and educational programs. These cuts hurt the lower classes of the country and make the cycle of child labor all the more difficult to break. It is a cycle, one perpetuated by poverty and employees willing to exploit the poor and the helpless.
The greatest setback for these children is their lack of education. Everyone agrees that the key to ending child labor is in mandatory education legislation. This is important because while many people express the need for economic sanctions and boycotts, large-scale sanctions cannot be imposed on developing countries until safe and productive alternatives are developed for the children who would lose their jobs.
What then is the solution to this problem? What can we do to ensure that children are not exploited throughout the world? There are many factors of influential power in the United States. The most important one is the power of the individual. The incredible accomplishments of NGOs, that's non-governmental organizations, across the world were all put into action by individuals who wanted to make a difference. The death of child activist Icbow McSee sparked the birth of Free the Children, an organization dedicated to children's rights.
Free the Children is run by students ages 8 through 18. The group of school children in Quincy, Massachusetts who raised
$144,000 to build schools and educational programs in Pakistan in order to help fulfill Icbow McSee's uncompleted dream is another example of this incredible power.
Even in the simple choices of the consumer, the individual can make a statement about what methods of production they will and will not support. Educating others about the situation is also an individual source of power. The media is a valuable tool in expressing individual opinion. Disney and Gap in particular received enough negative publicity to publicly embarrass the companies into amending their production methods.
Bob Herbert wrote recently in the New York Times that Nike is important because it epitomizes the triumph of monetary values over all others and the corresponding devaluation into peculiar interests and values we once thought of as human. Corporations do not like to create this kind of name for themselves.
Secondly, the pound of influence of the private sector should not be underestimated. Transnational companies like Rebok and Levi Strauss have been positive forces in using safe and non-exploitive methods of production. All corporations should adopt such codes of conduct as an essential step towards eliminating child labor.
The government of the United States has the potential to be a powerful force in the fight against child labor yet presently the government does not seem to be taking the appropriate actions necessary. If corporations can be called on to adopt codes of conduct, the more (unclear) the government of our country. The United States must sign a convention on the rights of a child. The government must work to regulate our nation's companies to ensure that child abuse is not a human resource in our nation as well. The government must include the basic rights of children as part of their agenda when forming free trade zones and when interacting with organizations such as the World Bank.
I call on the U.S. Government to take a stance, to show us that hazardous child labor cannot be acceptable in any form for any reason. The exploitation of the world's children is an international crisis for democracy and justice and we need to do our part.
Companies will go to the third-world countries where they can hire and they want to hire children because they can work faster and their hand-eye coordination is actually better when they're, you know, aged between 12 and 15 and they don't have to pay them anything. These people are being paid piece wages about 12 cents a garment. If it's a choice between paying someone 12 cents to make a garment in a place where there are no environmental conditions, no social regulations, nothing like that outside of the United States regular like restrictions on companies, they don't need to follow any of these rules.
Bonded laborers--Icbow McSee is actually an example of one of these. Most of them are in Asia and China, Indonesia and Pakistan. If a parent needs to pay off debts, what they'll often do is they will sell their children to manufacturers who will collect these children around the ages of sometimes as young as four or five where they can never make any wages because they spend their entire lives paying off the debt of their parents, and often these children are made, forced to stay in their factories by being chained to looms, especially in the oriental rug market.
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