In defense of child labor

It's rare to think about where our clothes, computers and various other electronics come from, but when we do, we have to face the uncomfortable fact that our clothes were probably made in sweatshops and, more than likely, were produced by a child - our computers are, as were some of our iPods. Apple Inc. recently caught its suppliers using the labor of a 15-year-old child in one of its factories - China's child legal age of employment and the age Apple will tolerate, is 16 and on a global scale, that's unusually high. The suppliers violated Apple's standards. Apple no longer uses them. This will certainly comfort the thousands of Apple's environmentally conscious consumers, but what of the children? They're out of a job.

Child labor has always been a touchy issue, especially because Americans can be so hypocritical about it. Here, the legal age of employment is 16. Unless you work on a farm, where the age is 14. In Bangladesh, another country with sweatshops and textile factories, the legal age of employment is 14, but its laws are rarely enforced, and many children begin working at a younger age. They work because they, and their families, are poor, and they need money. It's unpleasant to think about, but the 13-year-old child that put that chip into your cell phone, or the tag on your blazer or the keyboard on your computer isn't a child any longer, he's an adult providing for his family.

That situation that wasn't too unfamiliar for American families at the turn of the century. Because, like it or not, our manufacturing industry too, was built by the hands of those without an education, without security and with the need to work at a young age with the only means they know how - by working. They were our grandparents and great-grandparents, and they worked at 13 to produce for us, so we don't have to.

We tend to forget, in our comfortable lives, that not everyone in the world is as lucky as we are in America. Those children in Bangladesh have to work hard to get what they need, not what they want. So when we go abroad and demand that others fall in line with our ideals, our concepts of how things ought to work, and our vision of a perfect society it only makes things more difficult for an already grueling situation. We ask poorer countries to be more like us - and then block the only means they have of achieving that goal. American imperialism can be a blinding thing - we tend to assume that while things work for us here that they'll work anywhere else as well - like democracy in Iran.

Working a 43-hour week at the age of 12 is bad. But working in an unpleasant industry, such as manufacturing, at a young age is certainly preferable to working the streets as a prostitute at any age. In fact, it is the textile industry that saves many Bangladeshi children from doing exactly that. It's appalling to consider a 13 year old working in a factory, but consider the alternatives. If that child couldn't work legally in a factory, then he might work illegally on a farm, or illegally in the drug trade, or God forbid, in a brothel. The sweatshops we distrust so much keep those children out of rice fields where pesticides, poisonous snakes and various other nasty diseases can make a short life even shorter - it keeps them out of the arms of slave traders who starve, beat and sell young boys as camel jockeys. Sure, the textile and manufacturing industry is hardly an improvement, but given the alternatives, it's a safe and secure job. Sure, the reality of child labor isn't pleasant, but neither is the necessity of it.