By the sweat of kids' brows: using market power to end child labor.

You will read this in the week of the "Stand for Children" demonstration here in Washington. It seems an appropriate time to revisit the subject of my column of last September subtitled "Let's End Child Labor" (September 22, 1995). I thought then that we could if we tried.

In that column I wrote of a coalition, funded in part by German organizations and supported by German consumers, that has had a significant effect on one of the most ancient forms of child labor--the manufacture of handknotted carpets--now a worldwide industry blighting the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. As a result of this German effort it could be said that for the first time ever consumers could choose hand-knotted carpets made without child labor.

These carpets are made under the Rugmark label in India. In addition to freeing the children, the Rugmark effort uses a surcharge of 1 percent of the carpet value for a Unicef-administered program to educate and rehabilitate former child workers. The Rugmark effort avoided the one great drawback of the boycott as a weapon: that it often resulted in the shutting down of factories on which, bad as they were, the poor depended for their livelihood. The U. S. Child Labor Coalition and the National Consumer's League appealed for support for the program, asking that we do whatever we can to induce American retailers to stock Rugmark carpets. Surely consumers who cared would find the surcharge insignificant.

Apparently not. In February an article in The Catholic Spirit, archdiocesan paper of Saint Paul, Minnesota, quoted the Child Labor Coalition as saying that, although more than 50,000 Rugmark rugs have been exported to Germany, no retailer in this country has agreed to market a single Rugmark carpet. To say the least, this is embarrassing. Have we lost our social conscience? Or, as was suggested in the earlier column, have we lost confidence in our ability to effect social change?

If this is true of the majority of us, we can take heart and example from the struggles of a significant few. The same article tells of the work of the Women's Network of Saint Paul on behalf of Rugmark. Caroline Larsen, one of the organizers, tells of passing out information leaflets during a downpour outside Pier 1 Imports last spring and of staffing an information booth at the Minnesota State Fair. As the information became available, religious organizations, women's and children's groups, and retirees joined them. Eventually an estimated 1,000 Minnesotans signed petitions asking for the option of buying Rugmark carpets. A start at least.

In the April Harper's Bazaar, in an article titled "Children of a Lesser God," we read of a Reebok Human Rights Award given to twelve-year-old Igbal Masih who, as a mere child, helped lead a revolt against the abuses of child labor in Pakistan. As the writer put it, Igbal put a human face on the suffering of children worldwide. He was made to work at a loom in a carpet factory when he was only four. He worked twelve hours a day, sometimes more, with a half-hour break for lunch. The conditions under which he worked are described in hair-raising but matter-of-fact detail in an interview with Bazaar writer Trudie Styler.

TRUDIE STYLER: What happened if you were sick?

IGBAL MASIH: Even sick children were not allowed to rest. The owners would bring a sick child forcibly to work, and if he didn't work they would lock him in a room. They also hung children upside down until they became sicker.

TS: Did that happen to you?

IM: It happened so many times I can't count.

TS: What other punishments happened at the factory?

IM: Children were beaten. They were kept hungry. Sometimes they were fined. If a child tried to escape, he was threatened with being thrown in boiling oil.

Igbal, who must have had unusual spirit, tried to escape and to report the abuses only to be returned by the police to the factory owner, beaten, and chained to his loom. Nevertheless, at the age of ten, he attended a meeting of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF) and learned that his bondage was illegal. He obtained a "certificate of freedom," attended a BLLF school, and began the fight to free other children.

Igbal was very brave. When he was in the United States to receive the award he would often say when interviewed, "I used to be afraid of the carpet masters. Now they are afraid of me." Tragically Igbal met his death just a few months after his visit to this country. He was shot while riding a bicycle with two other boys in a village near his home. The murder investigation is suspect. Fifty governments and human rights organizations, as reported in Bazaar, criticized it as tainted, inept, and corrupt. It is feared that "the carpet masters" got Igbal in the end.

He has, however, left a legacy. The very fact that Harper's Bazaar whose audience is made up of patrons of designers in the garment trade--among the first employers of child labor abroad--would publish such an indictment as "Children of a Lesser God" is stunning evidence of that. The mobilization against child labor is growing, if slowly. "It is the American consumers with one-quarter of the world's purchasing power, who hold the ultimate leverage."

The most hopeful sign is that young people are rallying to the cause. This winter I heard Anne Nicholson, a student at the College of Saint Catherine in Saint Paul, tell about the discovery she and a few of her friends made about the involvement of one of their favorite stores, the Gap, with the abuse of teen-age women workers in El Salvador. The clothing they liked was being put together in a "sweat-shop" there--called a maquiladora. It was managed by Taiwanese but financed by Gap contracts. Girls there were working twelve hours a day, sometimes overnight, with few if any breaks, for fifty-six cents an hour. Anne and her friends, shocked, formed a group called the Closet Activists. They set up an information table at the college, showed videos, and staged a mock fashion show demonstrating the Gap's relationship to the maquiladoras. The response was a passionate letter campaign from fellow students and students in other schools.

Unfortunately the law of unintended consequences set in. The Gap announced that it would sever its ties to the plant in El Salvador. The plant shut down, leaving the people without any employment at all in conditions of desperate poverty. The protesting students and their allies launched another campaign. The Gap responded that it would reopen its relationship with the plant and agreed to allow independent monitoring of labor conditions there. The National Labor Committee hopes that this is the opening that will lead to monitoring of all third-world suppliers to American designers and retailers.

Little by little the effort to end child labor and its abuse grows, not as fast as we might hope, but the movement is there, needing our attention and our help.