Kinder, gentler sweatshops: a martyr makes a difference.

Readers may remember the valiant twelve-year-old Iqbal Masih of Pakistan whose courageous crusade for the human rights of the child laborers of his country aroused those of us in the first world to the dire situation of millions of children in the third ("By the Sweat of Kids' Brows," June 1, 1996). He awakened us, too, to our unwitting complicity in that situation via America's global industries. He reminded us that our clothes and our shoes are imported far too often from American-owned sweat shops abroad in which children (and adults too) work in shocking conditions.

Iqbal was made to work in a carpet factory when he was only four. He worked twelve hours a day, sometimes more, with a half-hour break for lunch. If he was ill or lagged behind, he was beaten or hung upside down. At the age of ten, with unusual spirit, he attended a meeting of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front and learned that his bondage was illegal. He obtained a "certificate of freedom" and began school and his fight to free other children. Iqbal was a martyr for his cause, shot while riding his bicycle - murdered, many think, because he had angered the wealthy and powerful "carpet masters."

In April, as the anniversary of Iqbal's death approached, Kamran Aslam Khan, minister of trade at the Embassy of Pakistan, in Washington, D.C., issued a letter marking the occasion "with profound grief and sorrow." Iqbal's contribution, Mr. Khan wrote, "in raising the general consciousness of human-rights issues and more specifically issues pertaining to the exploitation of children," has resulted in remedial initiatives the world over and, of course, in Pakistan.

Somewhat defensively, the minister reports on two surveys done in collaboration with the International Labor Organization that "have confirmed our conviction that the incidence of child labor in Pakistan is not of alarming proportions" and that "the figures quoted in the international media were absolutely incorrect." True, there are 3.5 million children employed in the country, but only 11 percent are in the manufacturing and transport sectors (the object of Iqbal's concern). The great majority - 70 percent - are employed in "the informal sector...including family business, domestic service, home-based industries, shops, and small establishments." Another 19 percent are working in crafts and their sales.

But "whatever its magnitude," the minister concludes, "the government...is cognizant of the child-labor problem and is committed to combat it through programs designated to implement laws, coupled with measures to rehabilitate the...children after withdrawal from their place of work." (Skeptics should remember that Iqbal won his freedom through the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, which had its source in the Bonded Labor System [Abolition] Act passed in 1992, and that he attended a BLLF school.) The other initiatives in Pakistan, listed by the minister, are impressive.

Whether by coincidence or design, Mr. Khan's report was issued at about the same time as a White House report on an agreement of several U.S. companies - including Nike and Liz Claiborne - to promulgate a set of minimum standards for their overseas plants and subcontractors. The agreement had its roots in a meeting last August when President Bill Clinton and then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called together representatives of the apparel and shoe industries, trade unions, a consumer federation, and religious and human-rights organizations. They were asked to prepare a plan to promote humane working conditions here and overseas. It was also an acknowledgment of the fact that sweatshops overseas are beyond the reach of U.S. law but not beyond the influence of U.S. companies with factories abroad.

In addition to the agreement of companies to issue standards, the participants agreed that the commission as a whole was to become a nonprofit foundation monitoring compliance. And the commission was to enlist companies not part of the first gathering, as well as other companies beyond the manufacturers of apparel and shoes. The pledged standards, though termed minimum, were significant: to end child labor and forced labor; to provide a safe and healthy working environment; to guarantee the rights to organize and to collective bargaining.

Almost at once, some human-rights groups were up in arms. They said, among other things, that the commission had only succeeded in getting "a kinder, gentler sweat shop." Why accept, for example, the legal minimum wage of various countries - which fall far short of meeting workers' needs (seventy cents, for example) - instead of imposing a living minimum wage? Was it not outrageous to tolerate sixty-hour work-weeks with only one day off? And why not demand complete independence for those who monitor working conditions?

Unfortunately, the "kinder, gentler" workplace is an achievable first step and many workers will be glad for it. It is a constructive beginning. Only continued public pressure on this issue will make the commission succeed. It behooves all people of conscience to contribute to that pressure. Some companies have complied not so much out of good will but because of bad publicity. Even at the time of the report, Indonesian police were battling Nike workers who were demonstrating because they purportedly were not being paid the legal $2.50 minimum wage. And in Vietnam it was reported that young women making Nike sneakers were earning less per day than the cost of an adequate diet.

Pressure against sweat shops and the concomitant abuse of human rights is, alas, needed in this country too. Here the pressure must focus on the uncovering of sweat shops and the enforcement of the existing laws. How soon we have forgotten the discovery of the factory on the West Coast and the enslavement of Thai women immigrants there.

Representative George Miller (D-Calif.) has recently introduced legislation to impose federal minimum-wage and immigration laws on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory. The government there, he said, has allowed sweat-shop conditions, forced prostitution, and the exploitation of foreign workers. Noting the recently announced agreement of the U.S. manufacturers and the administration in regard to sweat shops overseas, he said, "Those efforts must also focus on our own soil, on the CNMI, where conditions that could not be tolerated anywhere else in America flourish with the blessings of the local government."