Stolen Youth

Brutalized children, Globalization,
and the Campaign to End Child Labor

by Robert Weissman

Multinational Monitor, January / February 1997

"We cannot possibly gravitate from a condition of agriculturalism to a condition of industrialism without the employment of minors."

So testified Lewis Parker, a South Carolina cotton mill owner, before the U.S. House of Representatives Commit tee on Labor in 1914, in opposition to legislation that would have outlawed the use of child labor in the United States.

Parker was on the wrong side of history. By the time he testified, most U.S. states had already adopted legislation limiting the use of child labor. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law an act regulating the use of child labor in industry. The Supreme Court struck down the law in 1918, but in 1938, with adoption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the United States banned the use of child labor altogether. While the ban still suffers from serious enforcement problems, the widespread use of child labor in the United States has been effectively eradicated.

Now, six decades later, the child labor debate is being replayed on a global scale-with some Third World business interests and their supporters echoing Parker's arguments- as the world suddenly awakens to the ongoing scourge of child labor.

With economic globalization tying national economies more closely together, awareness of the incidence of child labor in Third World nations is growing rapidly in the industrialized countries, as Northern consumers respond with discomfort to reports showing that the clothes they wear and the toys with which their children play are made by child workers. At the same time, the globalization process which is spurring the new Northern awareness of child labor is putting strains on the economies and social structures of countries in the global South-and, in many ways, intensifying the problem of child labor.

Forced labor and hazardous conditions

Approximately 120 million children under the age of 14 labor full-time, according to a 1996 estimate by the International Labor Organization (ILO) that is widely viewed as the most informed ever. If those for whom work is a secondary activity are included, the number of working children rises to 250 million.

The majority of child laborers live in Asia, although Africa has a higher rate of child labor. The ILO estimates that 40 percent of African children between the ages of five and 14 work.

The majority of the 120 million full-time working children labor in the commercial agricultural sector. Child labor is not confined to any particular economic sector, however. Children work as domestic servants, in mining, as divers in deep-sea fishing, in construction, as prostitutes, in toy, shoe and garment factories, as cigarette makers, as rug weavers, in charcoal making, in glass and ceramics factories, as sports equipment and surgical instrument makers, in the match and fireworks industries and in many other jobs.

The most appalling circumstances of child labor involve forced labor and children working in hazardous conditions.

The most common form of forced child labor is debt bondage, a practice by which parents pledge their children's work to pay off debts. The debts are often minuscule, but the children may work for their entire childhood-indeed, for their entire lives-to pay them off because of fraudulent accounting mechanisms employed by debt holders.

In Nepal, where bonded laborers are known as "Kamaiya," the accounting schemes can keep families in debt for generations. "Since Kamaiyas are generally not paid enough to meet their basic needs, many have no choice but to take loans from their master," explains "By the Sweat and Toil of Children," a 1995 U.S. Department of Labor report. "Many also carry inherited debts, sometimes going back for three or four generations, in addition to their own."

Debt bondage and other forms of forced child labor are most pervasive in India, Pakistan and Nepal, where they are supported by longstanding traditions and cultural biases against low castes or minority ethnic groups. Human Rights Watch estimates as many as 15 million children in India may toil as bonded laborers.

Bonded and unbonded child laborers are frequently employed in shockingly brutal and hazardous conditions. Consider the following examples highlighted by child labor activists in recent years:

1) Children in the Asian rug industry often work in cramped quarters, hovering over their work in poorly lit rooms. They frequently develop spinal deformities from persistent crouching; weakened eyesight; and respiratory ailments from chronic exposure to dust and wool fluff in poorly ventilated quarters. Many of the child laborers receive no wages at all.

Carpet weaving is among the industries employing a high proportion of bonded children laborers. Bonded children in the Asian rug industry toil in the most horrifying conditions, working up to 20 hours a day, every day, and living and working in the same small, damp room.

A 1994 U.S. Department of Labor report cites studies indicating child rug weavers may number as many as 150,000 in Nepal, one million in Pakistan and 400,000 in India.

2) Hundreds of boys in Colombia work in labor-intensive coal mines. With low and narrow passageways, the mine owners-often parents of the workers-view children as ideally sized to slip through tunnels and pick at small coal exposures. Hunched over and straining for breath, the boys carry heavy sacks of coal on their backs. They are exposed to high levels of dust, risking permanent lung damage and disease.

3) In Cambodia, children work in brick-making factories, where they generally work bare handed, and often barefoot. The children are regularly cut by the bricks, and often drop them on their hands or feet. Some of the children work with heavy machinery; and many of them cut their hands or fingers on the machines. More than half of the child brick workers interviewed for a study by the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI) indicated they were in debt to their employer. The high incidence of injury and the substantial debts notwithstanding, AAFLI found, "the children's biggest complaint was fatigue."

4) Trafficking in young girls sold into prostitution is on the rise, especially along the Burma-to-Thailand, Nepal-to India, Vietnam-to-Cambodia and internal Thai routes. Other important routes include: from Latin America to Europe and the Middle East; from Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine to Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states or to West Europe; from the Philippines and Thailand to Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan; from Southeast Asia to Hawaii and Japan.

The girls are often sold into prostitution by their parents. They are moved from rural to urban areas, or to new countries altogether, where they face a life of exceptional violence and danger. Customers and brothel operators frequently rape the girls, and subject them to extreme forms of physical and psychological abuse. The girls are at high risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and of having unwanted and early pregnancies.

5) Visions of pastoral serenity notwithstanding, commercial agriculture work is as difficult and dangerous as any. For children, the physical demands of cutting, harvesting and hoeing on poorly mechanized farms or plantations can be overwhelming. "In Brazil's sugar plantations, for example, children cut cane with machetes, a punishing task putting them at constant risk of mutilation," according to UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 1997. "They make up a third of the workforce in some areas and are involved in over 40 percent of the work related accidents."

Pesticides pose a serious danger to children working on plantations. In addition to the problems which adults face from the "intended," as well as the excessive, use of pesticides, children are especially susceptible to pesticide exposure-related disease and death, because of their developmental stage. In its 1996 "Child Labor: Targeting the Intolerable," the ILO cites a study which concludes that, in rural areas, more children die of exposure to pesticides than from the most common childhood diseases put together.

Child labor in less severe conditions can also be brutal and interfere with children's physical, intellectual and emotional development.

"The physical harm is ... the easiest to see," explains The State of the World 's Children. "Carrying heavy loads or sitting for long periods in unnatural positions can permanently disable growing bodies. Hard physical labor over a period of years can stunt children's physical stature by up to 30 percent of their biological potential."

"Children are also vulnerable psychologically," the report continues. "They can suffer devastating psychological damage from being in an environment in which they are demeaned or oppressed."

Searching for causes

It is obvious that poverty and child labor are intertwined. Brutalized child laborers are almost exclusively poor. Children typically work to earn money for their families or to help pay off family debts. And wealthier families do not need or permit their children to labor at the expense of education and physical, intellectual and emotional development. But poverty is not, by itself, the cause of child labor. The fact that rates of child labor vary dramatically between countries of similar levels of economic development proves this point most clearly. In China, for example, there has been little child labor in recent decades, according to U.S. diplomatic sources. Even though extremely poor until recent years, China made a political decision to put its children in school, rather than on the work rolls. Similarly, Kerala State, in India, the country most famous for abuse of child labor, has virtually abolished child labor.

The lesson which emerges from the China and Kerala examples is that child labor can only exist where it is treated as politically and culturally acceptable.

Many countries have strong traditions of tolerating child labor, points out Pharis Harvey, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Fund, and these traditions often combine with prejudices against ostracized populations. The result is widespread child labor among certain poor ethnic groups.

Similarly, discriminatory attitudes toward women and girls may undergird parents' willingness to send their daughters off to prostitution, or to be domestic servants.

Where education is compulsory, available and understood to be relevant, child labor rates decline. "Education is one of the keys that will unlock the prison cell of hazardous labor in which so many children are confined," says The State of the World's Children. "It is almost impossible to overemphasize this point."

On the demand side, "research shows that many children are hired because they are more easily exploited than adults," according to the U.S. Department of Labor's "By the Sweat and Toil." "Employers prefer children because they are docile, incapable of collective bargaining and willing to work to support their family or simply to survive."

At least since England's industrialization, employers have justified their reliance on child labor by claiming children offer unique skills-"nimble fingers"-in certain areas. But the ILO reports that its research in hazardous industries in India, including carpet-making, glass factories, mining, lock making and gem polishing, has shown this argument to be "entirely fallacious." "Even in the hand-knotting of carpets, which calls for considerable dexterity, an empirical study of over 2,000 weavers found that children were no more likely than adults to make the finest knots," notes the ILO's "Child Labor: Targeting the Intolerable."

Globalization and child labor

All of these factors-poverty, cultural traditions, prejudice against ethnic, religious or racial groups, discrimination against girls, inadequate access to education and employer desires for cheap and docile labor-have existed for centuries. What is new in the child labor equation is economic globalization.

The most obvious contribution globalization is making to the increase in child labor is its intensification of price competition for global consumer markets. "This competition makes everyone look for any way they can lower costs," says Oded Grajew, director and president of the Abrinq Foundation for Children's Rights in Brazil. To have child labor means lower costs; because the wages are very low, children never complain, and they work long hours with no overtime pay."

This unregulated competition is responsible in significant part for children sewing garments in Haiti, Guatemala and Honduras for labels and retailers such as Disney, Kathie Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart and Phillips-Van Heusen, or making toys for sale in the U.S. market-the instances of child labor receiving the greatest attention in the United States in recent years. Even in China, where child labor has long been minimized, there are reports that child labor is increasing rapidly in the low-wage export industries of the Pearl River Delta in the southeast.

The number of children working in the export-oriented sectors of the economy is small in proportional terms, however. The U.S. Department of Labor pegs it at approximately 5 percent, although international price competition- including for goods sold domestically in competition with foreign imports and as inputs for products to be exported- may raise the proportion somewhat.

There are other, less obvious but still important ways that globalization is contributing to an increase in child labor.

Cheap agricultural exports to the Third World and promotion of export-oriented agriculture in developing countries have rocked the social structure in rural communities across the globe. Relying on violence, coercion or sometimes impersonal market forces, plantation owners have ejected many rural families from their land, depriving them of their livelihood and leaving them with narrow economic options. Some have taken work on plantations, where children are likely to be employed as well; some move to urban slums, where children may search for jobs to support their family; and some send their children to urban areas to earn cash to support the family.

In Brazil, reports the U.S. Department of Labor, the agricultural sector "underwent a major transformation" in the 1980s. "Large-scale plantations became increasingly mechanized and export-oriented, and land became increasingly concentrated in the hands of large agricultural businesses," states the 1995 edition of "By the Sweat and Toil." "Both resident workers on plantations and small farmers expelled from their land joined the ranks of migrant and temporary workers that became known as 'boias-frias' or 'volantes.' Because the earnings of many families diminished considerably, they increasingly employed children to bolster family income. Today, child 'boias-frias' and 'volantes' comprise a large number of Brazil's child workers."

In Southeast Asia, urbanization and impoverishment of rural economies are important factors encouraging families to sell their girls into prostitution.

The rise in child prostitution is also linked to the growth of international sex tourism, a particularly unsavory manifestation of globalization. At the macro-economic level, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank imposition of structural adjustment policies on Third World economies has strengthened many of the trends contributing to child labor. As a condition for receiving further loans, the IMF and World Bank instruct indebted Third World countries to promote exports and cut government spending.

In many cases, governments pressed by the IMF and World Bank to reduce spending have reduced expenditures for education. In recent years, however, the World Bank in particular has recognized the importance of education and health care, and has urged governments to maintain programs in these areas as "investments in human capital." Now, says Peter Fallon, a World Bank economist currently reviewing the Bank policies relating to child labor, "the Bank trie[s] to protect those sectors insofar as possible."

Asked about the overall effect of structural adjustment programs in undermining social protections and government social spending, Fallon says, "There have been statements that in one or two countries, the Bank's structural adjustment programs have [increased] the incidence of child labor." But these claims are "hard to justify," he says, "because they do not ask what the counterfactual is." Fallon argues that the countries "would have been even worse off" and registered higher rates of child labor if they had not followed Bank advice.

The World Bank has also encouraged governments to charge students for attending school, or for books and supplies-a so-called "cost-recovery approach." Even small fees prevent poor families from sending some or all of their children to school, however, and those unable to afford school frequently work.

Fallon says the Bank's "cost-recovery approach has been targeted to secondary and post-secondary education, and that you are most concerned about primary education" in seeking to combat child labor.

The myth of inevitability

Given the multiple, overlapping causes of child labor, no single approach will end the scourge. Most serious analysts agree that complementary approaches are needed.

Yet the belief that child labor is an inevitable consequence of poverty-perhaps necessary to help countries develop economically-and that economic growth is the key to eliminating child labor persists. In June 1996, for example, USA Today editorialized that "the West's own history has shown" that for "backward nations seeking to rise from desperate poverty," it is mechanization and industrialization that solve child labor.

From a rather different vantage point, an international gathering of child laborers meeting in India in November 1996 urged those concerned about child labor to work to alleviate the harsh conditions under which children work, rather than to eliminate child labor altogether.

Pharis Harvey of the International Labor Rights Fund argues that the USA Today editorial writers and the child workers at the India meeting have succumbed to the same, mistaken "fatalistic" view of child labor. "Those people believe child labor is the product, rather than a cause, of poverty. "

In fact, Harvey argues, "child labor perpetuates poverty, generates it and regenerates it." Children who work become sickly adults, and a drain on national economies. With little if any education, they are less productive workers as adults. And, children fill jobs that adults would otherwise occupy; in every country with high rates of child labor, there is a severe unemployment problem, with adults' skills, creativity and labor power wasted.

Conscious and purposeful intervention is needed to make meaningful inroads in eradicating child labor.

Some Third World non-governmental groups have taken direct action in workplaces, conducting raids to rescue bonded and forced child laborers. While these raids cannot directly reach a significant proportion of child laborers, they have focused attention on the issue. The experience of these groups has also revealed the importance of establishing rehabilitative programs for children removed from brutal laboring conditions; the children need access to educational facilities, physical treatment and psychological counseling.

Third World national governments have the most important role to play in eliminating child labor. They must enforce national laws banning the use of child labor, provide quality universal education for children and ensure that cultural traditions and prejudices are not allowed to override national commitments to child-free workplaces. The examples of China and Kerala State show what developing countries can do in this area, if they choose.

Rich countries and poor, working children

Most have not chosen to crack down on child labor, but there are increasing possibilities to bring pressure to bear on those who do not act on their own. With national economies becoming more interwoven, the children stitching clothes in Haiti or India or Thailand are more likely than ever before to be doing it for U.S. or German or other industrialized country consumers. That fact gives industrialized country governments and consumers the power to influence Third World country child labor practices.

As Northern consumers have expressed increasing concern about the conditions under which the products they buy are made, many corporations have adopted codes of conduct for their overseas operations and especially for over seas contractors. For its 1996 report, "The Apparel Industry and Codes of Conduct," the U.S. Department of Labor surveyed 42 major garment manufacturers, designers and retailers. It found that 36 had adopted codes of conduct-many or most in recent years-with provisions specifically prohibiting the use of child labor in the manufacture of goods they imported.

These corporate codes may be having little effect, however, because they are poorly monitored. While "monitoring is critical to the success of a code of conduct," says the Department of Labor, "most of the codes of the respondents do not contain detailed provisions for monitoring and implementation, and many of these companies do not have a reliable monitoring system in place." Virtually none of the corporate codes call for independent monitoring. Perhaps the sole exception is a 1995 agreement which The Gap negotiated with the New York-based National Labor Committee. The agreement grants human rights and religious groups the authority to inspect The Gap's Salvadoran contractor, the Taiwanese-owned Mandarin International, and to ensure it upholds The Gap's code of conduct. Absent assurances from independent monitors and publicly available reports, consumers have little guarantee that codes are being meaning fully implemented.

A potentially more reliable means of purging goods made with child labor from international commerce are labeling programs. The most prominent child labor-related labeling scheme is the Rugmark program, an international project which certifies carpets are made without use of child labor. Independent inspectors validate that carpet looms do not use child labor; certified carpets bear the Rugmark smiley face logo; and a slight additional charge for Rugmark-approved carpets goes to fund not only inspections but programs to put children who might otherwise be weaving rugs into schools.

Rugmark rugs have captured 30 percent of the German rug market, the world's largest carpet consumer market. Rug suppliers are increasingly eager to earn the Rugmark label. Thirty to 40 percent of Nepalese carpet producers are Rugmark certified, according to Pharis Harvey, with an additional 30 to 40 percent seeking certification. Fifteen to 20 percent of carpet looms in India are under Rugmark license, Harvey says.

Three major U.S. wholesalers sell Rugmark carpets, according to Harvey, whose organization coordinates Rugmark's U.S. operations, but Rugmark rugs are still not widely available in the United States. With the increasing supply of Rugmark rugs, Harvey hopes to see Rugmark products more widely available in the United States in the near future.

Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Representative George Miller, D-California, have introduced a Child Labor Free Consumer Information Act which would facilitate voluntary labeling schemes for clothing and sporting goods imported into the United States.

Not all internationally traded goods lend themselves to labeling, however, and despite Rugmark's considerable success, the delays in getting the program off the ground and the voluntary nature of the program suggest the labeling approach will not be a comprehensive solution to child labor, even in international markets.

A different, more direct approach does hold out the possibility of a comprehensive solution: a flat-out ban on the importation of goods made with child labor. In the last several sessions of the U.S. Congress, Harkin and Brown have introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act (commonly known as the Harkin Bill), which would enact such a ban in the United States, and funnel $10 million to ILO programs to eliminate child labor.

"Without the passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act," says Darlene Adkins, coordinator of the Washington, D.C.-based Child Labor Coalition, "the best we can expect is a piecemeal approach to curtailing the import of items made by exploited children, and consumers who want child labor-free products will remain frustrated in the market place . "

The Harkin Bill has generated substantial controversy. Many Third World governments and some Third World non-governmental organizations have denounced it as a form of protectionism unfairly penalizing poor countries. And many non-governmental activists in particular argue that a sudden ban on child labor-made imports would throw working children out of their current jobs and into even more brutal working environments.

The primary support for this claim is the experience of the Bangladesh garment industry. Fearful of the potential effect of passage of the Harkin Bill, the Bangladesh garment industry in 1993 fired an estimated 50,000 child workers, approximately two thirds of the child workers in the garment sector. Many of those thrown out of work ended up in stone crushing jobs and hustling on the streets, according to UNICEF, although Harvey says the UNICEF and similar reports are anecdotal.

But the Bangladesh example seems ultimately to illustrate the power and effectiveness of the import ban approach. The mere possibility of passage of the Harkin Bill focused industry and nationwide attention on the issue of child labor. That heightened awareness led not only to the sudden decrease in child labor in the garment industry, but to an agreement, reached in July 1995 between the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), UNICEF and the ILO. The BGMEA member companies agreed to remove all remaining children from their work rolls and to place children removed from the garment factories in appropriate educational programs, with stipends.

Even if the political will is generated in the U.S. Congress to pass the Harkin Bill, however, there is an impediment to implementation. Because the bill would condition imports on the process by which the imported goods were made, it would run afoul of the rules of the World Trade Organization. Both the Congressional Research Service and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have acknowledged the WTO-illegality of the Harkin Bill.

Under the rules of the WTO, if the bill were passed, countries affected by the legislation could challenge it as a non-tariff trade barrier at the WTO. The United States would be forced to abandon the legislation altogether, or accept trade sanctions - fines or tariffs levied on U.S. exports-equivalent to the sales which countries lost in the United States due to the child-labor import ban. The only way the United States could avoid this dilemma would be to quit the WTO altogether.

Challenging child labor

U.S. adoption of the Harkin Bill approach would go a long way to eliminating child labor from the production of goods intended to enter into international trade. But child laborers in export-oriented production make up only a small portion of child laborers.

A comprehensive approach to abolishing child labor will require not only intervention by industrialized country consumers and governments, but strong political commitments by Third World governments. Whether they can muster that political commitment in an era when the pressures of globalization are exacerbating the conditions leading to the use of child labor remains to be seen.

Defining child labor

Not all child labor, of course, is as repugnant as the most hazardous and exploitative forms. Even the most ardent anti-child labor advocates recognize that appropriate work tasks may teach children skills and responsibility, bind families together and contribute to family incomes. In assessing the scope of child labor and shaping solutions, it is critical to define child labor, and to distinguish exploitative child labor from appropriate forms.

UNICEF has developed a set of rough criteria to determine if child labor is exploitative. It designates child labor as inappropriate if it involves: full-time work at too early an age, too many hours spent working, work that exerts undue physical, social or psychological stress, work and life on the streets in bad conditions, inadequate pay, too much responsibility, work that hampers access to education, work that undermines children's dignity and self-esteem, such as slavery or bonded labor and sexual exploitation, work that is detrimental to full social and psychological development.

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child-signed by every country except the Cook Islands, Oman, Somalia, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United States -obligates governments to protect children "from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development."

Nearly 50 countries have ratified ILO Convention 138 on minimum working ages. Convention 138 establishes more stringent guidelines than the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It sets 15 as the minimum acceptable working age for industrialized countries, and 14 for developing nations. It permits children to perform light work-an undefined term-at age 13 in industrialized countries and 12 in poorer nations. The convention prohibits work likely to jeopardize health, safety or morals by children under 18.

The FoulBall campaign

They are the toys of children, manufactured by the exploitation of children.

Much of the world's supply of sporting equipment is made with child labor. In Pakistan, the world's leading exporter of soccer balls (supplying more than 60 per cent of the U.S. market), for example, more than 7,000 children under the age of 14 toil at stitching soccer balls. The children receive about 60 cents per ball they stitch, and even older children can only stitch three or four balls a day. With the support of then-U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and other prominent politicians, a coalition of international trade union federations and non-governmental labor rights organizations launched the FoulBall Campaign in June 1996 to ensure that "children would no longer kick around the balls made by impoverished children half a world away," in the words of campaign director Dan McCurry. The campaign seeks to eliminate the use of child labor in the manufacture of soccer balls. The FoulBall Campaign's first target was the Federation of International Foot ball Associations (FIFA), the international soccer coordinating body which places its stamp on high-quality soccer balls, including those used in professional soccer leagues. The campaign asked FIFA not to permit its stamp to be used on balls made with child labor.

Assisted in the United States by support from Reich, and powered in Europe by controversy following revelation of the soccer ball-child labor connection during the European soccer championship in June, the FoulBall Campaign immediately garnered considerable publicity. Thousands of young soccer players in the United States and Europe wrote to FIFA and other soccer governing bodies, asking that child labor be eliminated from soccer ball manufacturing. Following negotiations with the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federations and other international union federations, FIFA announced in August that it would demand all of its licensees adhere to an extensive labor code as a condition of using the FIFA label. The labor code prohibits the use of child labor and other exploitative labor practices. Monitoring of adherence to the code is to be done by international trade union organizations.

Now, "that FIFA symbol [is] to stand for 'no child labor,"' says McCurry.

In the United States, the FoulBall Campaign continued to pressure youth soccer federations to endorse an anti-child labor stance. In early January 1997, the U.S. Youth Soccer Association and the American Youth Soccer Organization endorsed the FIFA labor code.

With repressive labor practices in their shoe-making factories in Asia under intense scrutiny, Reebok and Nike quickly sought to ensure that child labor was not used in soccer balls manufactured under their labels. In November 1996, Reebok announced its soccer balls would begin bearing a "Guaranteed: Manufactured ' without child labor" label by spring 1997. That same month, Nike and a Pakistani firm opened a soccer-ball stitching plant in Pakistan that Nike said would not subcontract its work and would not use child labor.

The FoulBall Campaign is now planning to expand its focus to baseballs, tennis balls, volleyballs and other sports balls, to ensure child labor is not used in their manufacture, according to McCurry. The organizations supporting the campaign are also preparing to launch a Fair Ball Foundation to support the education and rehabilitation of children freed from laboring at ball making.

And, building on the success of the FoulBall Campaign, the trade unions and non-governmental groups who supported it are now gearing up for a Freedom Rings Campaign to end the use of child labor in Olympic sports.

New Global Economy