College of Business Administration

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Langdon Winner

The Destruction of Childhood High Technology Review, November/December 1996: 66

The interwoven, global economy connects us to countless people whose names and faces we will never know. Seldom do we acknowledge these distant others or ponder our role in their well being. Yet every time we buy a product manufactured in a developing country or purchase shares in a global mutual fund, we implicitly endorse conditions of production that affect how people live in other parts of the world.

Headlines of the past year have provided glimpses of the dark underside of the international marketplace. An embarrassed Kathie Lee Gifford tearfully admitted that her line of clothing was produced by sweatshops in Honduras. Michael Jordan smiled and nodded, seemingly unperturbed by criticisms of the brutal Indonesian factories that crank out the pricey sneakers bearing his name. Beyond these media bombshells, however, is deeper, more troubling evidence about the plight of workers, especially children, in the Third World.

A recent survey by the United Nations' International Labor Organization (ILO) revealed that some 78 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 were substantially or fully engaged in labor in 1990--often toiling long hours in physically hazardous and socially abusive conditions. In farms, workshops, mines, and households, children accompany their parents as unpaid laborers, enlisted in the family's struggle to rise from poverty. Given little schooling and scant means for physical and intellectual growth, these young workers are robbed of their childhood and face bleak prospects in their adult lives.

Such exploitation frequently involves the reintroduction of slavery, as children come to be regarded as assets to be bought and sold. The world's economy now includes "tens of millions of child slaves," according to the ILO report. Sometimes adult workers sign contracts that promise the availability of a child; sometimes a child is exchanged for a sum of money that is described by the employer as an "advance on wages."

Extreme advocates of the free market sometimes argue that these practices will vanish as developing societies achieve prosperity. Child labor, in that view, is a temporary problem, one that will be overcome as families work, marshal their resources, and move up the economic ladder. According to one classic argument, children are the best capital families have in their quest for upward mobility, because their "nimble fingers" make them superior to adults for certain kinds of work--rug knotting and electronic assembly, for example.

But such arguments have no validity. What is true for our own children is true for the world's poor as well: the way to improve one's lot in life is through education and the cultivation of higher skills. Varieties of labor that prevent this from happening are bound to perpetuate poverty. Moreover, there is no scientific evidence showing children to be more dexterous in production than their elders are--even if that mattered.

Most countries already have enacted laws that ban or strongly regulate child labor. Over the years, however, governments and whole industries have chosen to look the other way as new generations of youngsters are fed into the meat grinder. Thus the continuing exploitation and abuse of children in the workplace still festers in the shadows of "development."

For now, the most effective initiatives against child labor arise from consumer groups who mobilize public opinion, pressuring governments and business firms to protect the rights of children. A collection of church, labor, and consumer action groups known as the Child Labor Coalition was galvanized by the rebellion and subsequent assassination last year of 12-year-old Iqbal Masih, who had worked in Pakistan's rug factories since the age of 4. The coalition established the Emancipation Proclamation and that child-labor abuses stopped with the laws and court decisions of the early twentieth century. Our woes about the global economy focus myopically on matters of national competitiveness and the rise or fall in our own standard of living. How small these concerns seem when confronted with evidence of the suffering of the world's children. We must be vigilant that our wealth and comfort do not rest on a secret inhumanity.

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