January 12, 2012

Contact: Reid Maki, (202) 207-2820, reidm@nclnet.org

Washington, DC—Advocates from the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), a group representing more than two dozen organizations concerned with protecting working youth, has released a list of the top ten child labor stories from 2011. The list represents international and American issues in child labor that received considerable attention in 2011 and what advocates hope is an increase in attention to exploitation faced by vulnerable child workers that has previously gone unnoticed by mainstream media.

“The year brought some much needed attention to serious child labor problems in the supply chains of some of the world’s largest companies,” said Reid Maki, Coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition and the Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards for the National Consumers League (NCL). “However, we also saw a disturbing move in a few states to roll back long-standing child labor protections and a much-publicized attack on child labor laws by a presidential candidate.

The year’s 10 biggest stories, according to the CLC, included (in no particular order):

1. Apple admits products manufactured by Chinese child laborers

1. Victoria’s Secret’s dirty secret about child-labor harvested cotton

1. DOL proposes rules to protect child farmworkers for first time in 40 years

1. NBC News spotlights dangerous child labor in gold mining

1. Newt Gingrich calls child labor laws “stupid”

1. Advocates oust Uzbek designer from NYC Fashion Week

1. Nestle hires independent monitoring group to examine supply chains

1. Media reports highlight backbreaking child labor in American agriculture

1. States try to turn back the clock on child labor protections

1. Obama approves miliary aid to countries employing child soldiers

1) Apple hit with allegations that its iPhones and other electronic gadgets are manufactured in Chinese factories by child laborers. In February, Apple announced that it had found 91 children worked at its suppliers in 2010—a nine-fold increase from the previous year. The company also acknowledged that 137 workers had been poisoned by the chemical, n-hexane, at a supplier’s manufacturing facility and that less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with Apple’s code on working hours. In the year prior to December 2010, Apple had sales of over $65 billion.

2)  Victoria’s hidden “secret”: children help harvest the cotton that goes into garments. Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed in December that some of the cotton retail giant Victoria’s Secret uses is harvested by young children in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. The piece profiled 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who works on a cotton farm, where she said she is routinely beaten by the owner. By hand, Clarisse performs work that many farmers use a plow and oxen to perform and often works in 100-plus degree heat and eats just one meal a day. Some days she gets no food. Many of the children like Clarisse are considered “foster children” and receive no wages— most do not attend school. Limited Brand, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, has annual sales in excess of $5 billion.

3)  U.S. DOL issues proposed child labor rules to protect children on farms from dangerous work. For the first time in four decades, the Department of Labor has issued proposed rules to prohibit work on farms that is dangerous for teen employees. The regulations would ban kids from driving tractors and other machinery, work from heights greater than six feet, work in grain facilities, and other dangerous activities. Despite a far-reaching “parental exemption” that would exempt the sons and daughters of farmers from the proposed protections, many members of the farm community and many farm-related groups attacked the proposed regulations as an assault on the family farm that would make it hard to train the next generation of farmers. DOL received more than 18,000 comments about the regulations. CLC members remain strong supporters of the proposed protections, which we believe will save 50-100 teen workers over the next 10 years.

4)  Human Rights Watch and NBC News draw much needed attention to child labor in gold mining. Artisanal mining for gold is a common but brutal and dangerous form of child labor for West African children. In early December, the NBC News show Rock Center featured a chilling report about child gold miners in Mali, Africa. As many as 20,000 kids are estimated to work in artisanal mines, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which found that kids as young as six years old “dig mining shafts, work underground, pull up heavy weights of ore, and carry, crush and pan ore.” As if this backbreaking labor wasn’t bad enough, many children also work with toxic mercury to separate the gold from the ore. Many child miners are not paid wages for their labor, receiving bags of dirt which may or may not have any gold dust in them. Many children work instead of going to school.

5)  Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich calls child labor laws “stupid” and urges U.S. to save money by hiring school children to clean school bathrooms. Republican Newt Gingrich made headlines this November when he suggested that poor kids in struggling schools be given jobs as janitors. Gingrich suggested that poor children typically lack the example of a working parent and that cleaning school bathrooms would help develop a strong work ethic. Gingrich has previously made headlines for having spent $750,000 on jewelry at Tiffany’s, raising questions about his ability to empathize with the struggling poor.

6) Advocates draw attention to the forced labor in Uzbekistan to harvest cotton by getting a dictator’s daughter ousted from Fashion Week. It’s not always easy to get the attention of one of the world’s most brutal dictators, but that’s what the advocacy community did during New York City’s Fashion Week in September 2011, when several CLC members and the Cotton Advocacy Network successfully got Uzbekistan’s Gulnara Karimov ousted from the prestigious fashion show. A designer and a Uzbek diplomat, Gulnara is the daughter of Uzbekistan’s brutal leader Islam Karimov. Each fall, Uzbek school children and their teachers are forced to leave their classrooms and perform arduous hand-harvesting of cotton for up to two months. The children, whose numbers are estimated to range from several hundred thousand to almost two million, receive little or no pay. Recently, the European Union voted not to ease import rules for Uzbek cotton, hoping to force the regime to allow independent investigators to survey child labor in the country.

7)  Nestlé agrees to hire a third-party monitor to examine child labor in its supply chain. For a decade now, the world has known that cocoa in West Africa is often harvested by children under difficult and dangerous conditions. That cocoa is purchased by the world’s leading chocolate companies and eventually becomes the chocolate treats that we all love to eat. For years, the advocacy community has pushed the chocolate industry to do more to combat this intractable problem. This year, Nestlé agreed to hire the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit monitoring group, to look for child labor and other problems in the Côte d’Ivoire.

8)  60 Minutes and “The Harvest” film bring much needed attention to the problem of child labor in American agriculture. Children as young as 12—and sometimes even younger—toil in the fields beside their migrant farmworker parents, harvesting fruits and vegetables. The work—legal under U.S. child labor law—is often back-breaking and sometimes dangerous. “The Harvest,” a brilliant and poignant film by director Roman Romano and producers Shine Global, followed the lives of three migrant children as they struggled to overcome exhausting work, missed educational opportunities, and social disruption.

9)  State attempts to roll back child labor laws. Conservative legislators in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Maine worked to reduce child labor protections in 2011. The Maine legislature increased the number of hours teens can work during the school week from 20 to 24 and allowed them to work till 11 p.m. at night. In Wisconsin, legislators pushed through changes—without a public hearing or debate—that removed restrictions on the total hours that 16- and 17-year-olds can work. A bill to weaken protections in Missouri went down to defeat but legislators essentially got their way by defunding the state labor investigation team.

10) President Obama issues waivers for countries that use child soldiers. For the second year in a row, the President decided to waive congressionally mandated restrictions on giving military assistance to Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Yemen because they continue to use children in their armed forces. Issued in the name of “national security,” the waivers will result in thousands of children—some of them very young—being forced into armed conflict, including many young girls forced into sexual slavery.

“This list serves as a painful reminder that much work needs to be done in 2012,” said Sally Greenberg, a co-chair of the CLC and NCL’s executive director. “Corporations need to tighten their supply chain monitoring. Consumers need to make informed purchases and let companies know that child labor is an issue that they care about. It’s also imperative that we let the Department of Labor and congressional members know that the safety of children working in U.S. agriculture requires the immediate implementation of the proposed child safety rules, which are 40 years overdue.”

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About the Child Labor Coalition

The Child Labor Coalition is comprised of 28 organizations, representing consumers, labor unions, educators, human rights and labor rights groups, child advocacy groups, and religious and women’s groups. It was established in 1989, and is co-chaired by the National Consumers League and the American Federation of Teachers. Its mission is to protect working youth and to promote legislation, programs, and initiatives to end child labor exploitation in the United States and abroad. For more information, please call CLC Coordinator Reid Maki at (202) 207-2820[reidm@nclnet.org].

January 5, 2012

Contact: NCL Communications, (202) 835-3323, media@nclnet.org

Washington, DC—The National Consumers League (NCL) issued this statement: The National Consumers League (NCL) applauds President Obama for appointing Sharon Block, Terence F. Flynn and Richard Griffin to fill the vacancies at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

“These three appointments to the NLRB, a five seat board which as of January 3rd had only two members, helps to ensure that the Board is able to continue in its vital role,” said Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director.

All three appointees are exceptionally qualified sit on the NLRB.  Block was the Senior Labor & Employment Counsel to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee under Senator Edward M. Kennedy and most recently served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional Affairs at the Department of Labor. Flynn served as Chief Counsel to NLRB Board Member Brian Hayes and has previously served as Chief Counsel to former NLRB Board Member Peter Schaumber. Griffin was the General Counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers and serves on the Board of Directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.

“We applaud these appointments, ” said Greenberg. “We applaud President Obama for ensuring that an independent NLRB is able to continue in its mission of safeguarding employees’ rights to organize and promoting civil and efficient union-management relations and collective bargaining.”

“There is a common misperception that the NLRB is merely ‘pro-labor’,” said Michell McIntyre, Project Director for NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft. “The reality is that the NLRB is an impartial independent agency designed to foster open, productive dialogue between employers and employees on fair labor practices, including collective bargaining, elections, and union representation—common sense goals intended to benefit both labor and management.”

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About the National Consumers League

The National Consumers League, founded in 1899, is America’s pioneer consumer organization. Our mission is to protect and promote social and economic justice for consumers and workers in the United States and abroad. For more information, visit www.nclnet.org.

January 4, 2012

Contact: NCL Communications, (202) 835-3323, media@nclnet.org

Washington, DC–The National Consumers League today applauded President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The following statement is attributable to Sally Greenberg, Executive Director of the National Consumers League:

“Over more than two decades of public service, Richard Cordray has built a sterling record as a advocate for the nation’s consumers. We can think of few better candidates to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In reaction to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Congress created the CFPB to protect American consumers from the financial tricks and traps that contributed to the near-destruction of our economy in 2008 and 2009. Through sensible regulation, the CFPB will ensure that consumers are treated fairly in the marketplace and financial firms compete on a level playing field.

The urgent need for a strong CFPB should not fall victim to political bickering. Unfortunately, Congressional opposition — backed in large measure by the very financial industry whose irresponsibility cost consumers trillions of dollars — has delayed the implementation of the CFPB’s legal mandate. Congressional delay has forced the President’s hand and we believe he rightly chose to exercise his recess appointment authority in this case.

We look forward to working with Director Cordray to protect the nation’s consumers and put an end to predatory lending practices that have hurt consumers for far too long.”

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About the National Consumers League

The National Consumers League, founded in 1899, is America’s pioneer consumer organization. Our mission is to protect and promote social and economic justice for consumers and workers in the United States and abroad. For more information, visit www.nclnet.org.

December 16, 2011

Contact: NCL Communications, (202) 835-3323, media@nclnet.org

Washington, DC—The National Consumers League (NCL) applauds the nomination by President Obama of Sharon Block and Richard Griffin to fill the vacancies at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Block is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional Affairs at the Department of Labor and has recently served as the Senior Labor & Employment Counsel to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee under Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Griffin is the General Counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers and serves on the Board of Directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.

“NCL urges the Senate to confirm these qualified nominees,” said Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director. “We look forward to a full quorum at the NLRB, allowing it to continue in its historic mission of safeguarding employees’ rights to organize and promoting civil and efficient union-management relations and collective bargaining.”

“There is a common misperception that the NLRB is ‘pro-labor.’ The reality is that the NLRB is an impartial independent agency designed to foster open, productive dialogue between employers and employees on fair labor practices, including collective bargaining, elections, and union representation—common sense intended to benefit both labor and management.”

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About the National Consumers League

The National Consumers League, founded in 1899, is America’s pioneer consumer organization. Our mission is to protect and promote social and economic justice for consumers and workers in the United States and abroad. For more information, visit www.nclnet.org.

December 15, 2011

Contact: NCL Communications, (202) 835-3323,  media@nclnet.org

Washington, DC—In comments filed with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), the nation’s oldest consumer organization is strongly urging the government to revoke sodium’s long-standing status as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS), a strong action geared toward reducing expected to reduce Americans’ sodium consumption.

“The fact is, most Americans are taking in far too much sodium, at a detriment to their health. The average American consumes 3,400 mg of salt per day, far above the recommended levels,” said Sally Greenberg, Executive Director of the National Consumers League, which filed comments with the federal agencies this week. “While the reformulation of ready-to-eat foods to reduce sodium content is also a crucial step for industry to take, it is time for the federal government to step in and send the message that Americans need to take their sodium consumption seriously.”

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a daily intake of 2,300 mg of sodium. For nearly 50 percent of Americans, especially including those over the age of 50, African Americans, and those with certain chronic health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, the recommended daily amount is even lower at 1,500 mg per day. Heightened levels of sodium consumption can have serious health consequences. A diet high in sodium has been linked to increased blood pressure, which in turn can lead to a higher risk for heart attacks and strokes.

“Consuming too much sodium has real health consequences. Luckily, simply lowering the amount of sodium in your diet can help combat these effects,” said Greenberg.

Unfortunately, with 77 percent of the sodium Americans consume coming from processed and restaurant foods, reducing sodium consumption can be challenging for many consumers. “With so much salt already added into ready-to-eat foods, simply going a little lighter on the salt shaker will not solve the problem,” Greenberg added. “We have to reduce the amount of salt found in processed and restaurant foods in order to decrease overall sodium consumption.” Reformulation of products, so that they include less sodium to begin with, is a critical step in this process.

While reformulation is a step that will be undertaken by food companies, unfortunately the industry has not voluntarily reduced sodium levels in restaurant or prepared foods, thus we turn tot he FDA to help make progress in reducing sodium levels. Wwe do not believe that an issue this important to public health should be left up the industry,” said Greenberg.  “That is why we are suggesting that FDA take action and revoke sodium’s GRAS status.

With the GRAS status of sodium rescinded, FDA would have the authority to determine maximum allowable amounts of salt in processed and restaurant foods. This would serve as a catalyst for industry reformulation efforts.  FDA has stated that it would be willing to revoke the GRAS status of salt if the food industry did not make a “substantial reduction in the sodium content of processed foods.” Since industry efforts have not yet been enough to curb sodium consumption, NCL strongly supports the revocation of sodium’s GRAS status.

“This is a nationwide problem with significant health consequences. Reducing the amount of sodium in our diets will help reduce the incidence of certain chronic, costly diseases. It is essential that the government take action to facilitate this process,” said Greenberg.

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About the National Consumers League

The National Consumers League, founded in 1899, is America’s pioneer consumer organization. Our mission is to protect and promote social and economic justice for consumers and workers in the United States and abroad. For more information, visit www.nclnet.org.