This Article is Written by an Ex-Slave

An anonymous correspondent has stuck in my mail slot an article on The Gap being “caught using child labor in an Indian sweatshop.”

Actually, though widely reported this way, this is not strictly true. The Gap was not using child labor—one of its Indian suppliers was. When informed, The Gap cancelled the contract, and refused to sell the clothes in its stores. The Gap pointed out that it employs 90 fulltime inspectors to prevent just this sort of thing.

Was The Gap, nevertheless, somehow guilty of using child labour here? I don’t know. Can anyone reading the article be certain they have never bought an article of clothing made with child labor? Are they, like The Gap, employing 90 people in the effort? If not, they should probably pocket their stones.

But again, there is a deeper issue here: is child labor immoral? Is The Gap right to refuse to buy from suppliers who employ children?

My Filipina wife has no doubt. Along, apparently, with the Indian government, she believes the campaign against “child labour” in the Third World is simply a form of protectionism by the First. She sees it as the rich keeping other people poor.

“What else are the children supposed to do?” she asks.

Don’t suppose they have the alternative of going to school. There is no money for schools. Cast out of the factories, they will simply be on the street.

To be fair, the article stuffed in my mail slot anticipates this objection—sort of. “The core of the argument [for child labour],” it admits, “is that anyone who opposes child labor has not witnessed its opposite, which is child unemployment and idleness.” It goes on to mock this idea: “This is what jobless children do: They rub Crazy Glue into their siblings’ hair; they spill apple juice onto your keyboard…”

Right. This is on a level with “let them eat cake.” How many street children in Calcutta have ever seen Crazy Glue, let alone a computer keyboard?

To go back to my wife’s experience: her family was not poor, by local standards, and the Philippines is a middle-income, not a poor, country, by world standards. But she never owned a toy as a child. If there was any extra money at a birthday, food was more important. Apple juice? Never. She loves it now—to her, it is like champagne.

No; let’s be clear. The simple alternative for many of the kids thrown out of work by The Gap’s moral scruples is slow starvation.

Let’s even suppose there were schools for them to go to. Are we so sure this would even be better for them? Are they likely, ever, with more schooling, to find a better job than one in a factory?

Probably not. Factory jobs are the most prized in the Third World. They pay far more for much lighter work than agricultural labour. Factory workers can make more than teachers, doctors, or lawyers. They are something even a child, without much physical strength, can do. When a Japanese factory opened on an island elsewhere in the Southern Philippines, my wife, as a young woman, traveled over a day’s journey in hopes of landing a job there.

So how is more schooling going to be a priority for these children?

“I want to work here,” explains one thirteen-year-old interviewed by The Observer. “I have somewhere to sleep,” he says, looking furtively behind him. “The boss tells me I am learning. It is my duty to stay here. I'm learning to be a man and work. Eventually, I will make money and buy a house for my mother.”

To be fair, the clothing factory described by the present author seems to have been worse than most. According to the original article in Britain’s Observer, some of the children, when interviewed, claimed they were not paid for their work. They had been indentured by their families for a cash fee, and had to work this off during a period of “apprenticeship.” The article stuffed in my mail slot called this “slavery.”

Perhaps. But I have one question. No, three: How much do we pay kids to go to school? Do they have a choice? Do we expect them to do any work there?