Our wages and working conditions are among the best in the world and we do a fairly good job of enforcing comprehensive laws against the use of child labor. However, a recent expose' found that in the garment district of New York the child labor continued to exist. Hundreds of millions of children are in the global labor force. For U.S. policy, this is a fact of both moral and economic significance. Today, capital flows freely across international borders.
Technology is almost completely mobile.
Exchanges between branches of multinational corporations account for almost half of all world trade, and several international corporate empires now have incomes at their disposal that are greater than the total gross domestic product of many medium sized nations. It has become a simple thing for companies to shop the world for the least expensive, most exploitable and best trained workers. This means that millions of children are compelled to labor night and day for a pittance, in conditions which are truly Dickensian. Through unregulated trade, the products that they make are imported into the United States, displacing American workers and depressing living standards, here and abroad. The Scope of the Problem While there are few firm statistics on the use of child labor, there is much that can be gleaned from peripheral reports and limited sectoral or regional studies.