Danger! Children at work.

They can't say they weren't warned. Four years ago, I told a group of leading employers in Bangladesh that they'd be in trouble if the children working in their garment factories were shown on television in the United States, the principal market for Bangladesh's garment exports.

At first they flatly. denied that they employed girls and boys as young as ten or eleven. Any worker who looked that young, they said, was simply a malnourished adult. They backed down, however, when they realized I knew better. In Western eyes, it's true, Asians often look younger than they are. But I already knew from Bangladeshi sources, including a factory manager in Dhaka, that many garment workers are younger than fourteen, the minimum age for factory work under Bangladeshi law. And in visits to factories I had myself seen unmistakably underage children at work; I even had pictures of them.

Hoping to prod the employers into initiating reforms, I pointed out that, with miniaturized video technology, it would be a snap to document how girls and boys work far into the night making clothes for American and other foreign consumers. I recalled that CBS's "60 Minutes," using a hidden camera, had captured scenes of prisoners in China producing goods for export to the U.S.

A year later, my warning came true. A "Dateline NBC" camera crew visiting Dhaka didn't even need a hidden camera. Posing as American buyers shopping for a new source, they toured two garment factories and readily got permission to use a home video camera. As a result, a U.S. network audience in nearly 14 million households saw vivid examples of how Bangladesh's booming garment industry employs underage children, mostly girls, by the tens of thousands. The children, who were busy helping make shirts for U.S. stores, said that they earned $12 to $20 a month, or 5 to 8 cents an hour, and were locked into the plants until the day's production quota was met, sometimes well past midnight. One nine-year-old girl, who had been working for six months, pleaded with the crew's interpreter: "I don't want to stay here any more. Will you take me out with you?"

Revelations of such exploitation have long been a staple in the print media. But in an era when problems need television validation to be considered important, the "Dateline" expose and other TV productions like it provided the most powerful evidence of an alarming trend: millions of girls and boys in developing countries are making clothes, shoes, carpets, dolls, soccer balls, cutlery, fireworks, and many other products for consumers in the United States and other developed countries. They are at work even in jobs that would seem far too demanding for them. In Pakistan, for example, pre-teen children held in bondage grind and sand some of the $33 million worth of surgical equipment exported to the United States every year.

According to a United Nations agency, the International Labor Organization [ILO], the number of children at jobs instead of in school is increasing throughout the world, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the world's children. Most toil in agriculture, where youngsters have traditionally helped their parents and relatives. Now, however, this ancient agricultural custom has spilled over into the modern sectors of some developing countries, particularly in industries now prospering through mass production for export. Competitive pressures lead individual countries to ignore their own laws on the minimum working age even in hazardous industries, such as those manufacturing fireworks and glassware. In short, the global economy is clearly promoting child labor.

Sometimes (more likely: often), working conditions are brutal. In some Asian developing countries, there are no laws prohibiting physical punishment of children, so that such abuses are rarely documented. One exception was a 1985 survey conducted by the Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Bishops of Bangladesh. Of 1,000 female garment workers interviewed--children and young women--101 said that they had suffered corporal punishment at work.

Children remain the most frequent victims of on-the-job physical abuse. Male supervisors discipline them for making "mistakes," such as miscounts in packing, by striking them on the head or forcing them to kneel on the floor or stand on their head for ten to thirty minutes, as well as threatening them with bums from hot irons or scalding from hot water. In Indonesia and some other Asian countries, such violence is common enough to spark periodic protests against Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong managers of factories in export industries.

Slowly, the realization is dawning that something is out of whack in the global economic modernization process, and that consumers in the developed countries bear some responsibility for bringing about reform. After hearing a radio broadcast on child labor in Asia while he was on a road trip, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) put his staff to work researching the subject. In August 1992 he introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act to prohibit importing into the United States any manufactured or mined product made in whole or in part by children under fifteen. A similar bill offered in 1989 by then Congressman Donald J. Pease of Ohio had been sidetracked when the Bush administration successfully argued that any such U.S. initiative should be negotiated in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]. Under congressional mandate, U.S. delegates at that time did propose a GATT "social clause," which would include a ban on child labor. But GATT officials--an in-group of trade-oriented specialists, for whom any linkage between international trade and human fights is an abomination--summarily blocked even a discussion of the issue.

This year, parallel to the Harkin bill, the Clinton administration revived the social clause as an agenda item for the new World Trade Organization [WTO], where the prevailing sentiment still is "Thanks, but no thanks--let the International Labor Organization handle it." At an ILO conference in Geneva in June, its director general, Michel Hansenne, wisely refrained from accepting sole jurisdiction on the issue, and even urged the WTO to break new ground by applying trade sanctions against countries with serious worker-rights violations.

Meanwhile, for the first time in its seventy-five-year history, the ILO is waging a major campaign against child labor, the International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor [IPEC]. Launched in 1992 with a $30-million grant from Germany, IPEC concentrates on educational and technical-assistance projects in eight countries: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Turkey. The projects in each country depend on a national steering committee, with members from the government, employer groups, and trade unions, but usually not including nongovernmental figures who are the most active in combating child labor. The governments have a way of channeling IPEC funds into "safe" projects and away from any that might actually affect the status quo.

Because the Harkin bill seems to have a better chance of becoming law than the Pease bill did, it has stirred controversy abroad, especially in South Asian countries with bad child labor records. In Bangladesh, where garment factories make up the country's largest private industry, employers and government officials have relentlessly pilloried the bill and its author: Harkin is more of a household name in Dhaka than in Washington, D.C. But the controversy has done some good. The mere existence of the bill has driven a few better-known Dhaka garment factories--those most likely to be visited by foreigners--to comply with their country's law.

Of course, the Harkin bill is also controversial in Washington. The reason is simple: The bill will have teeth. (The exact penalties to be imposed for violations are still in negotiation, as is the minimum wage.) The business leaders and economists who oppose the bill have a name for any effort to enact enforceable rules governing trade: It's "protectionism," and they're against it.

Well, not really. Or not always. It depends. Take the "piracy" of intellectual property rights. Illegally copying audio tapes, video tapes, compact disks, computer programs, motion pictures, books, and other intellectual property on a mass production basis is a booming industry in some developing countries. Only when the U.S. government finally threatened sanctions under the 1988 U.S. Trade Act did Thailand, Indonesia, and China start to take some action against the widespread piracy in their lands. Still, U.S. copyright owners lost an estimated $8 billion in 1993, which contributed to the "miraculous" growth of some Asian economies. With the support of the same economists who generally worship at the altar of "free trade," the victimized business leaders--Bill Gates, the billionaire head of Microsoft, among them--demanded that the U.S. government become more aggressive in protecting business interests. To round up international support for this purpose, the U.S. government took the lead in inserting sets of rules with teeth protecting intellectual property rights into both the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] and the new agreement establishing the World Trade Organization.

Wildlife too has the benefit of government protection. Both bilaterally and multilaterally, the United States is taking steps to protect dolphins, sea turtles, whales, elephants, tigers, and other forms of endangered species. In April, President Bill Clinton banned $22 million of exports in wildlife products from Taiwan to the United States because of Taiwan's continued trade in tiger and rhino products, a violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Hmmm. Without abandoning Bill Gates or rhinos and tigers, couldn't it be time for the United States to take the lead in rescuing the world's children from global sweatshops? Supporters of the Harkin bill point out that the United States had erred in assuming that the individual states would cope with the growth of child labor in American industry. Congress, they recall, enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in part to ensure that U.S. interstate commerce would become "undefiled by the products of children." Here's the case for extending the same standard to international as well as interstate commerce:

* The United States is the world's largest importer of child-labor products, so that we are individually, collectively, and massively involved. Moreover, if the United States takes firm action in behalf of these children, other developed countries will tend to follow, so that our leadership may be decisive. (The European Parliament has already urged the European Union to adopt policies similar to those proposed in the Harkin bill.

* In the absence of strong U.S. leadership, the recruitment of children into the international labor market is bound to expand. On almost every continent, there are large pools of children who can be trained and disciplined to do many jobs now done by adults. Experience in Asian factories shows that physical punishment and the threat of such punishment do wonders to cure the playfulness and short attention spans of the young.

* Opposition to child labor is mounting in many developing countries where home-grown nongovernmental organizations are challenging the status quo. In India, for example, a Brahmin named Kailash Satyarthi heads the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude, a network of sixty nongovernmental groups dedicated to freeing South Asian children from conditions he calls servitude. Such indigenous activism has created an indispensable third-world force for change. This happy development discredits the frequent charge that reform involves imposing "Western values" on native cultures. However, given the powerful influence of the global economy, leaders like Satyarthi realize that they need solidarity support from abroad, and warmly welcome it, even to the point of favoring selective international consumer boycotts and trade sanctions.

* Child labor undermines the U.S. commitment to help poor countries get off the treadmill of underdevelopment. Satyarthi turns around the popular notion that poverty is solely to blame for child labor, and argues that "poverty is there because of child servitude." He cites these figures: When India became independent, it had about 10 million child laborers, and about the same number of unemployed adults. Today India has "a whopping figure of 50 million children in servitude on the one hand and an equal number of unemployed adults, i.e., 55 million, on the other hand." Failure to eradicate child servitude today, he argues, will mean "perpetuating poverty, illiteracy, and abject misery of 55 million future adults in India and 80 million future adults in the [whole South Asian] region."

* U.S.-based multinationals, whose operations now span the globe, constitute a strong network for shaping labor policies abroad. Although they almost never hire children on their own payrolls, the multinationals handle much of their production through factories owned by foreign contractors and subcontractors, where the worst abuses occur. Sensitive to the need for monitoring indirect hiring to prevent abuses by their overseas business partners, a few U.S. companies--Levi Strauss & Co. and Reebok International being the most prominent--have adopted codes of conduct requiring that, among other things, contractors hire no one under fourteen. So far, however, such corporate initiatives are rare, and desperately in need of encouragement from the White House and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In short, expanded global trade can greatly benefit humankind, but it will require concerted leadership to guarantee that children are not left behind. If "modernization" is not to mean continued exploitation of children, more than new federal legislation and codes of business conduct will be needed. Testifying at Department of Labor hearings in April, Kenneth P. Hutchison, executive director of the AFL-CIO's Asian-American Free Labor Institute, urged that the United States adopt firm and clear stands against the commercial commodification of children in its dealings with such powerful international agencies as the World Bank and others that are heavily dependent on American taxpayers, and in the newly created World Trade Organization. Along with the stick of regulation, he proposed a carrot: A much larger part of international financial aid for education in the developing world should be allocated to primary schools for the poor, and a smaller share to universities for the elite.

The opportunities for change are many. So are obstacles created by well-placed opponents in governmental agencies and business circles, U.S. and international, who use their influential roles in trade policymaking to resist any enforceable international rules except those that protect their own special interests.

Meantime, more and more girls and boys are being drafted to work for us in the global economy, without any of the protections accorded to dolphins and sea turtles or to the likes of Bill Gates. Apart from consumer goods, this unholy system produces stunted minds and bodies, children robbed of childhood, hope, and growth, as well as whole economies condemned to unbalanced and unjust development. Attention must be paid.