Labor Report Offers List of Goods Made With Child & Slave Labor

We hear about forced and child labor, reading about specific instances in the news, and we may wonder whether those shoes and bananas we bought last week, or the cellphone we're using, or the fireworks we used on the 4th of July (in the U.S.) is made with the hands of children or slaves; it can be hard to know for sure.

Recently the U.S. Department of Labor released a report focused on "a list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor" as a requirement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Acts of 2005 and 2008.

According to the report, it contains a "list of 122 goods from 58 countries" that the DOL "has reason to believe are produced by forced labor or child labor in violations of international law."

You can read the complete 194-page report online, which provides details of how the data was gathered, what definitions of "forced labor" and "child labor" were used, why countries might have been included/excluded, and so on, but some of the highlights include:

• More goods were found to be made with child labor than forced labor.
• Agriculture is the largest category of child/forced labor, followed by manufactured goods and mined or quarried goods.
• The most common goods listed include "cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice, and cocoa in agriculture; bricks, garments, carpets, and footwear in manufacturing; and gold and coal in mined or quarried goods."

The report emphasizes that a country's absence from the report doesn't mean that child/forced labor isn't occurring in that country (The U.S. isn't listed, for example.). The report also mentions the differences in interpretation of "forced" or "child" labor that some cultures may have.

If you want to reduce the number of products you buy that are made with slave or child labor, then this report is a good place to start. It offers lists both by country and type of item, so that you can see, for instance, that Christmas decorations from China are on the list, as are garments from India, cattle from Brazil, and gold from 17 different countries.

It's not always easy to find fair trade and socially just items (though strategies like thrift stores, clothing swaps, borrowing, sharing, making yourself, etc., are always an option), so even when there's no MOGO choice available for, say, your laptop computer or your bananas (except not to buy them), you can also choose to contact those with the power to change the systems and express your views and values. The more of us who do so, the more quickly lists like these will shrink until they are no longer necessary.

~ Marsha

Image courtesy of v i p e z via Creative Commons.


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