Agreed. A lot of things seem black and white on the surface. A lot of articles seem to imply "think of the children, make cobalt a conflict mineral!" but this would have some insane destabilizing effects.

The story has a lot of parallels to the story of the Harkin Bill. For those that don't know, I've paraphrased the Wikipedia article below:

"Based on the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics Labor Force Survey estimated there were about 5.7 million 10- to 14-year-old children engaged in Child labour in Bangladesh. This number may have been as high as 15 million children."

... "In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act"

... "The act which banned "importation to the United States of products which are manufactured or mined in whole or in part by children" would have resulted in the loss of lucrative American contracts. Its impact on Bangladesh's economy would have been significant as the export-oriented ready-made garment industry represents most of the country's exports."

... "UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution."

I highly recommend everyone read the full Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act

- - - -

For anyone who skipped to the bottom for a TL;DR: Bangladesh had millions of child laborers, US Senator Harkin proposed a bill that would ban importing products made with child labor, and Bangladesh's garment industry (which was most of the country's exports) fired 75% of the children. As a result most children found worse work: crushing stones, scavenging trash, and prostitution.

Ok so should we supinely accept that 1%-ers are benefactors because they're keeping children off the street by making them work?

Sorry but: fuck that.

If a country is competitive because it's essentially engaging in slavery you just increase pressure, up to blockade and sanctions. That is, until they start taxing business enough to pay for proper public schooling, housing and sanitation.

This race to the bottom bullshit has got to stop.

I tend to feel that emotionally charged language shows part of the problem preventing us from resolving these things. Morality is as much a social science as many things, however without taking into account a pretty cold analysis of why we are in this situation to begin with you can't solve it. Certainly naive calls for blockades and sanctions won't solve it. Since the people who would implement those sanctions are probably also the people benefiting from and causing the situation in those countries to begin with.

When child labour was stopped in the mills in the UK, there were similar arguments made about how we shouldn't curb the free market.

Here is Engel's account of working conditions for children in UK mines in the early 19th century:

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/factmine/childmin.htm

Something hard, complicated, and expensive might work: say, a ratcheting minimum age requirement, stipulations that exporters provide documentation on the working conditions at all mines they buy from, extensive investment in the mines, and foreign aid to get early-childhood schools set up with local teachers.

Unfortunately, providing an incomplete or imperfect solution to a problem automatically makes everyone blame you for that problem, even when you provably helped fix it[0]. Anyone who helps fix the problem of child labour by slowly improving working conditions or by brokering a compromise will be blamed for anything and everything remotely connected to it.

[0] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

> until they start taxing business

What businesses? You just killed any business that isn't paying a comfortable living. In a place like the Congo, what makes you think any are left?

It doesn't matter to the Congolese child whether their step down from mining to something worse is morally satisfying to you because it also hurts a 1%er. Banning someone's best option, no matter how shitty, makes them worse off.

Excuse me, but did you read the damn comment that I wrote? When the United States government did what you did, the garment manufacturers responded exactly how you wanted: they fired the children.

What happened was _the children became prostitutes_ because they needed money. Some of the children that did NOT become prostitutes got jobs literally crushing up rocks, which leads to large particle inhalation that damages your lungs beyond belief.

How is that preferable to having them work in a sweatshop?

Bangladesh does not _have_ the money, anywhere, to pay for "proper public schooling, housing, and sanitation". There is no money anywhere _to_ tax. They are one of the poorest countries in the world with an income per capita of less than one thousand dollars.

I've got a fun story for you. The European Union recently introduced a set of regulations that make shipbreaking facilities in the EU face a large number of environmental and labor regulations. Bangladesh said "hey, cheap steel!" and scaled up its shipbreaking operations. The majority of Bangladesh's steel now comes from poorly paid laborers that disassemble large ships with a cutting torch and their hands, with no safety gear or regard for the environment. Net effect of the regulation: more pollution, more workers in unsafe conditions worldwide. There's a word for this: outsourcing. The EU neatly outsourced its problems to Bangladesh. Nice!

Some policy problems aren't some kind of global conspiracy by the 1%, they're actual hard problems to solve. This is a bipartisan issue in that neither side, no matter their particular slant, has an idea of how to solve the problem. If you stop the manufacturers you force children into prostitution. If you let them continue you're complicit in child slavery.

By the way, you can't just blockade or sanction a country like Bangladesh out of nowhere. First of all, a lot countries (small, densely populated countries in Asia) rely on access to Bangladesh's ports, so we'd be inadvertently sanctioning those countries as well. Second of all, you probably don't know how big it is. Bangladesh's population, 160 million, is bigger than Spain, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, Finland, and Norway - combined. You're sanctioning all those people for something that most of them aren't involved in and can't change? And you want them to pay for "proper public schooling, housing and education" for all those people on a total GDP of under 200 billion dollars? For contrast, the Netherlands has a GDP of around 800 billion dollars.

Please reconsider your position.

[0]: Spain (46MM), Canada (36), Australia (24), Belgium (11), Greece (10), Sweden (10), Israel (8), Denmark (5), Finland (5) and Norway (5).

It's not 1%, it's the 10% of global population (the developed world) that benefits. Those cheap clothes you got your kids from Gap, they were probably made by similarly aged kids in Bangladesh.

> UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.

I doubt if anyone economically literate was surprised by this.

Or Maybe if the factory hired and fairly paid adults they could afford to look after their children...

The solution is for the state / government / textile industry to provide education and stipends for those children, not keep them enslaved. What the wiki article leaves out is that happened to some extent after the UNICEF investigation (see https://www.unicef.org/sowc97/download/sow2of2.pdf panel 12).

Then the problem lies with the employers, the government, the system. Not with someone who tried to put pressure on the right side.

   > Then the problem lies with the employers, the 
   > government, the system.

I see it differently. There is insufficient economic activity to employ these people. Since the government is funded by economic activity (and taxing it) they are not in a position to create a welfare system. Because employers are not competitive if they raise prices while others keep their prices low, they aren't in a position to pay additional wages. Because the system relies on actual economic activity in order for capital to flow, and they have disabled a chunk of that economy by fiat (no child workers) they have essentially removed from the economy jobs for those children.

You can do what the Chinese did and essentially print money to pay people for public works jobs which then enables more non-subsidized economic activity, but that boot strapping is difficult and needs you to start with a stable government base.

That's a very peculiar variant of the "think of the children!" argument; that you should buy things you don't want (stuff made with child labour) in order to stop children you don't know from crushing rocks.

> they have essentially removed from the economy jobs for those children.

Jobs for those children, but not jobs from the economy, period. It's not like the demand for garments just dissipated into thin air with that legislation. The work is still there, and Bangladesh has a surfeit of labour.

> That's a very peculiar variant of the "think of the children!" argument; that you should buy things you don't want (stuff made with child labour) in order to stop children you don't know from crushing rocks.

It shouldn't be about the stuff, it should be about the children. The idea that you'd rather have children in worse conditions as long as they're not making stuff for you seems... weird to say the least.

> Jobs for those children, but not jobs from the economy, period. It's not like the demand for garments just dissipated into thin air with that legislation. The work is still there, and Bangladesh has a surfeit of labour.

Presumably other workers demand higher wages (reducing the country's competitiveness) and/or are less good at the jobs. Otherwise they'd already have been hired ahead of the children.

>The idea that you'd rather have children in worse conditions as long as they're not making stuff for you seems... weird to say the least.

It seems quite normal to me. I'd rather not point out the examples I'm thinking of, but I can come up with a number which I'm willing to be people would be against despite being better overall for the children involved, at least in terms of money earned per harm done, actually quantifying harm in a way that one can easily compare is itself a touchy issue. Even then money is more a generic metric itself, because there are many non-monetary things that one can earn, but which usually can be given a monetary value.

I can't believe you're saying that it's our moral duty to buy the cheapest shit possible, in order to prevent child prostitution. That's just fucked-up, wilfully blinkered thinking.

The problem is that people just buy the cheapest shit possible anyway, without any thought whatsoever about the circumstances of its production.

Maybe it would be better to allow products made with child labor, so long as the children are provided with above-average education in return. I guess that would make children too expensive and companies would switch to adults anyway.

The best possible improvement would probably be to provide children with food, shelter and education free of charge, so they don't have to work at all. Unfortunately, very few people are actually willing to pay for that.

> The problem is that people just buy the cheapest shit possible anyway

Yes, they do. And regulations can control that. Regulations around building codes stop people from building shanties everywhere. Regulations around new vehicle safety means people can't put new, unsafe vehicles on the road.

What makes you think that the garment industry is any different? "Oh, I have to pay $7 for this T-shirt instead of $6? In that case, I'm going to import my own from overseas!". Nonsense. It is insane, the level to which people in this thread are defending gruelling child labour as some sort of unavoidable consequence of the supply chain.

I think he was trying to point out that even if you are putting pressure on the right side unfortunate side effects can still be seen. Not that it's anyone's particular fault.

If you apply pressure and bad things happen unilaterally as a result of that pressure, yes it is your fault. Cause and effect, whether you intended for it or not. Denying that is simply not taking responsibility for your actions.

Indeed. Good intentions do not justify means.

You cannot escape responsibility of the bad consequences of your actions, even if you say the consequences are "unwanted", not what you intended. Particularly if you know those consequences were going to happen.

"The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."

- economist Joan Robinson, 1962

That is one way to wash our hands of the problem.

The main reasons your article cites are: 1. Cobalt doesn't come from the part of the RDC considered at war 2. There is no proof that cobalt finances the Congo war 3. We like cheap cobalt

1 and 2 seems good reason to not classify it as "conflict mineral" but there should be other laws that would force US compagnies to look at wether they are financing child labor or not.