While I agree that it is sometimes not pleasant to realise that some of the garments on sale in our high street stores were manufactured by children, I was perhaps even more disturbed by the statements put out by GAP in response to the report. The statement was worded roughly along the following lines: GAP do not intentionally stock any garments manufactured by firms that employ children in the manufacturing process, and the stock featured in the report will be destroyed.
Well then.
Firstly, what on earth is productive about the ‘solution’ of destroying the garments in question? This course of action will not undo the harm that has been done to any of the children who have been exploited. It smacks of the insidiously increasing attitude towards our own common sense adopted by the business community whereby they think that this pointless act will somehow be viewed by us as redressing, in part, the balance of wrong versus right. And unfortunately, the majority of our society will swallow it, feeling that some kind of blow has been struck for the equality of the oppressed minors. Would it not have been better to simply distribute these garments to the needy, either in Britain or in the country where they were manufactured? Perhaps GAP feel that the act of destroying the garments would lend more of a dramatic edge, which will no doubt be eagerly lapped up by the ever growing numbers of headline-hungry media junkies among us.
Secondly, GAP is more than able to do something far more positive and in the far longer term. INVEST in the process. “My God!” I hear you all cry. Invest in the cruel exploitation of innocent children in the third world? Let’s clarify a few points.
In many families within these countries, children play a vital role in supporting the family. In a lot of cases, children are actually the only wage earners within the family unit. Businesses in prosperous western countries are not going to stop buying stock from deprived countries – it doesn’t make good business sense for them, and that is their overriding concern, no matter how outraged the tone of their press releases in response to such media reports. So, why not invest in the business infrastructures of the most deprived communities so that the children there can continue to make these vital contributions, whilst protected by some minimum health and safety guarantees and minimum wage guidelines, to their families without being exploited to the point of exhaustion, ill health or worse. To believe that this would not be common sense is to believe that we can assuage our nagging feelings of guilt by imposing our own version of who should (or should not) be working for a living upon cultures that are, quite literally, a world apart from our own.
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