We understand that the Free Trade system is broken. We know that sweatshops are bad. We do not want to support child labor. And yet we do so often. Why? Perhaps because they are removed from our immediate awareness. Terms like slave & child labor carry with them horrible images, understandings of atrocities. But frequently these are generalized, the faces of the individuals subjected to them blurred through distance.

World of Good, the developers of the Fair Wage calculator and Fair Trade retailer, has sent Emily to visit various Fair Trade co-ops to demonstrate the calculator and evaluate the co-ops. She even visited one of our own suppliers, Tara Projects, and is blogging her experience.

To gain perspective she also visited some child labor sweatshops. Her account of what she saw made me cry. The descriptions are neither sentimental nor sensationalized. They are simple, as the horrors are simple.

From Emily’s World of Good blog:

6/24/07

I hardly know how to write. Today I visited a hidden slum in New Delhi that is home to a dozen handicraft sweatshops that use child labor. Joshi, the Director of Social Programs for Tara Projects (the fair trade organization I am working with here) took me to see the sweatshops so I could better understand the difference between a fair trade and a non-fairtrade workshop in Delhi. Dressed in traditional Indian clothing and posing as a student, I accompanied Joshi and Shankar, Tara’s intern from France, to the slum. Naseer, our driver, dropped us off on a seedy street teeming with people. At first I thought this was the slum, but Joshi shook his head and motioned us across the street, where we met up with the man who oversees the sweatshops. He is about 20. Joshi has somehow convinced this man that we are not a threat to him, and he had agreed to show us the workshops under the impression that we were interested in the crafts they produce. Joshi and our guide led us through some back streets to a slit in a wall. We passed through this slit and entered into a shaded maze of squalid passages and hovels: the slum.

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