So you want to talk about morality? Lets talk about the immorality of American companies that have taken jobs from Americans and gone overseas so they can pollute the atmosphere with impunity, violate workplace safety, wage and hour laws and use children and slaves so they can avoid a fair days wages for a days hard labor. But the prices are cheap so does that justify this because in economic jargon it is efficient?
Lets take a look at what global competitiveness really means. A German shoe maker earns an average of $18.40 an hour while a Mexican shoe maker earns $1.70 per hour. In today's global economy they are both competing for the same job. It shouldn't take too long to guess who gets the job? But a child laborer can be paid even less than that.
There are about 250 million children working world wide. 179.4 million children are involved in the worst forms of child labor, slavery, debt bondage, soldiering, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities. Ultimately it is all about holding down costs of labor.
Most Human Rights groups define child labor as involving at least one of the following characteristics:
1.) Violates a nations minimum wage laws
2.) Threatens a child's physical, mental, emotional well being
3.) Involves intolerable abuse such as child slavery, child trafficking,debt bondage, forced labor,
4.) prevents children from going to school
5.) Uses children to undermine labor standards
Child labor exists in almost every industry. Two thirds of the children that are involved in the worst forms of child labor are between 5 and 14 years old.
Poverty is the fertile field for use of child labor. The Global Capitalists excuse for child labor is that it has always been part of an economies development. They argue that it provides opportunity and economic development and as the economy grows child labor will be ended, though there is no proof for this happening. In our history it was reform and hard fought labor laws and rights against Corporations that ended the abusive practice, not some economic evolution to a higher state of development.
Poor parents send children to work out of economic need. It denies the child an education setting in motion a generational cycle of poverty. Poverty will never be eradicated by forced low wage labor. Poverty will not be eradicated until children are provided a good education. That was the rationale for the American public school system.
In 1989 the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in which article 32 asserts that the rights of children should not be engaged in work deemed to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to their health. It has been very hard to enforce these goals because many countries benefit from child labor and the importation of low wage jobs.
The International Labor Organization attempts to monitor child labor and hopes to achieve elimination of the worst forms of child labor by 2016. Unfortunately, 10 countries have not ratified the ILO conventions. India and China are two of the worst violators. The most recent headlines document the use of children to make soccer balls in India and Pakistan. But child laborers can be found even in the U.S in sweatshop conditions.
Failure to confront the use of child labor and the United States often repeated avoidance of its own guiding principals is a highly emotionally charged issue. Consumers are sensitive to the track record of globalization in driving labor costs and workplace standards to the bottom. The Gap, Nike and others have been caught using child labor in sweatshop conditions.
The problem with public boycotts is that it often does end in the closure of the offending factory but this ends up in a devastating loss of family income while not really addressing the causes of child labor. Like wise attempts to certify some goods as child labor free often aren't. Investigation has shown children sewing child labor free certifications on soccer balls in both India and Pakistan.
Our government could begin to make a difference by starting to ratify trade treaties that codify our highest values. We could begin to ratify trade treaties that respect human rights, work place rights, and begin to address environmental issues. The problem is that our government is in the thrall of economists who believe in a sort of naive, misty eyed economic theory called Free markets where everything is scientific and rational even though everyone else who is victimized by this global fiction knows better.
Globalization itself is not really the problem. We need to understand that there are other models than the sweatshop wage model. America was at its strongest and greatest when in fact we had a model of capitalism where because it was managed, most Americans shared in the prosperity. We have been a nation in severe decline to the extent that our leaders have forsaken a managed model for the unfettered Free market model.
Economics is amoral. Its greatest good is deemed to be the most efficient production of the highest profits even if the methods by moral standards would judged as despicable.
In the language of Free markets child low wage labor is efficient because it cuts costs and increases profitability. In point of fact it is part of a justification for profits before people that is completely bankrupt morally.
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