*EPF516 04/07/00
Treasury Secretary Summers Denounces Abusive Child Labor
(Says education of girls vital to development) (620)
By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says forced child labor is morally and economically wrong and the U.S. government is intent on suppressing the practice.

"Forced child labor must not be part of what fuels the U.S. economy in the new century," Summers told Treasury's Advisory Committee on International Child Labor Enforcement in Washington April 7.

"Just as we disallowed companies to profit from prison labor, it is a clear principle of U.S. law that overseas enterprises using forced or indentured child labor will derive no profit from the U.S. market," he said.

Summers said the U.S. government is fighting forced child labor on three fronts:

-- enforcing U.S. laws against the import of goods that use forced child labor.

-- cooperating with developing countries through international financial institutions (IFIs) to promote education as an economic alternative to child labor.

-- promoting core labor standards, which include prohibitions of forced child labor, through the International Labor Organization, the World Trade Organization and other international bodies.

During the past year, the U.S. Customs Service has seen its budget for tracking child labor abuses double to $10 million, senior special U.S. Customs agent John Colledge said.

The Customs Service has opened offices Hong Kong, New Delhi, Panama City, Panama, and Montevideo, Uruguay, to scour the surrounding regions for abusive child labor practices, Colledge said.

Colledge urged people with knowledge of child labor abuses to report them to the Customs Service's toll-free telephone number: 1-800-BE-ALERT.

Summers said education for girls is the investment with the highest returns in reducing poverty in the developing world.

Educated women produce smaller, healthier families; they are better caretakers of the environment, and they discourage the spread of AIDS, Summers said.

Parents seeking economic security are better off sending their daughters to school, not carpet factories, he said.

Summers said the U.S. government insists that the IFIs fund educational programs with their loans to developing countries. The U.S. government is expected to reiterate these concerns in the spring meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington April 16-17.

The U.S. government is a major contributor to the IFIs. The Clinton administration has requested $1,400 million in new funding for the multilateral development banks and $262 million for debt relief for the poorest countries in the next fiscal year, which begins October 1.

More than half that money would go to the World Bank's International Development Agency, which Summers said targets education as a primary mission.

Summers said if global economic development efforts succeed, child labor abuses will diminish over the coming decades. If the effort fails, Summers said, the regulatory steps by customs inspectors and other groups will have negligible effect on mitigating child labor.

Ruth Samardick of the U.S. National Economic Council said 250 million children between ages 5 and 14 work, one-half of them full time. She said they engage in back-breaking labor in toxic surroundings, mines and other unhealthy and unsafe circumstances.

Summers said the United States shows "malign neglect of our global interests," which saps its ability to influence the developing world.

He said the world faces new threats in the form of child labor, poverty, virulent nationalism, disease and environmental degradation.

Yet in the face of such threats, Summers said, the U.S. Congress has cut spending on foreign development by 7 percent since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: usinfo.state.gov)
NNNN