FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

I am pleased to be able to join you this morning. I want to thank all of you for the assistance you are giving us in this important area. Some of you have devoted your professional lives to the cause of human rights and worker rights. You are an inspiration. All of you bring a perspective that we at Treasury want to hear.

There are a few people I want to thank, even though they are not here. One is Senator Tom Harkin, who has taken the lead on this issue in the Congress along with Congressman Bernie Sanders, who was instrumental in obtaining the appropriation that will allow us to deploy more enforcement agents overseas. We look to this Committee for recommendations on how these funds can be used most productively. And I want to acknowledge the great efforts of my good friend Alexis Herman, the Secretary of Labor, whose Department has wide responsibilities throughout the area of child labor, who has been a strong presence in this field.

According to the ILO, an estimated 250 million children, some as young as five years old, are forced to work, some under conditions of great hazard. Through the efforts of many human rights, religious, and labor organizations, and the Clinton-Gore Administration, the issue has made its way onto the moral agenda. Many nations are addressing it, including our own, and often involving the private sector in a constructive way. The MOU covering the garment industry in Bangladesh is an example of such an initiative.

The President, by stressing the problem of child labor in both his 1998 and 1999 State of the Union address, has made this a major Administration priority. Under the fiscal 1998 appropriations, and President Clinton's Child Labor Action Plan, Treasury is assigned the overall task of keeping the products of forced or indentured child labor out of the country. We take this responsibility very seriously at both main Treasury and at the Customs Bureau. We shall rely of course on the expertise and the vast experience the Customs Service has in enforcing trade laws. Commissioner Kelly and Assistant Secretary Bresee are giving this issue a high priority in their enforcement work. The fact that Lis Bresee and Sam Banks are here shows how much we want to reach out to all the affected constituencies for your ideas and your support.

In selecting the members of the Committee, we tried to achieve balance and diversity of background and viewpoint. All opinions are welcome here. But, we also wanted people committed to deal with this issue as an important national priority. You are all agreed on the importance of eliminating the abuses of child labor. If not, you would not be here. That you may have principled differences over means or strategy is no indication of lack of commitment on the issue. It is, indeed, important to your mission. As we have seen in the budget negotiations on Capitol Hill, as we saw this week in China, differences can often be reconciled through man's best friend, the compromise.

I am pleased that you have established a Subcommittee on Business Outreach. This is very important. We have a limited amount of funds for enforcement activities although we feel we have enough to meet current needs. They must be shared among competing priorities such as drug enforcement, enforcement of economic sanctions, and protection of intellectual property rights. We need to be able to leverage our own efforts with those of all concerned citizens, including corporate citizens. If we can make a determined law enforcement showing, companies and individuals will be persuaded to adopt voluntary methods, such as best practices and codes of conduct, in order to avoid statutory violations.

You meet at a time when the Senate, by a large bipartisan majority, has just ratified the

International Labor Organization Convention to abolish the worst forms of child labor. It is not easy to get international agreements through the Senate and this shows the importance child labor has on our national political agendas. The signatories to this Convention are required to take immediate and effective measures to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. These include slavery, and practices that amount to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, bonding of children by their parents and forced labor, and other forms of work which, by the way it must be done, are likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children.

I realize that in some countries, child labor is deeply imbedded in traditional cultural and family patterns. But the nations where it is most prevalent are precisely the nations that can least afford, in the long run, to sustain it. This issue is not about sovereignty. It is about the future of the world's children. It is about whether a country will stay back or will advance into the new economy that is changing the patterns of all nations. Child labor is not just cruel and immoral.

It is also bad economics. It is bad development strategy. In the next century, which we shall enter just seven weeks from now, competitiveness and prosperity will not belong to nations that have small children knotting rugs and breaking bricks. They will come to those that can, with help from private investment and the many multilateral development institutions, develop an educated and skilled work force that can operate at the cutting edge of technology and that have the skill--economic, political, and cultural--to adjust to the global economic environment. The only way developing countries can move into the global economic mainstream is by developing, not exploiting, their human capital-and that means education and training from the youngest years through college and beyond. Child labor deprives a generation of the skills needed to thrive in the technological era in which we live. It consigns such countries to a wider and wider gap with countries like those in Southeast Asia, which invested in the young people.

We are elevating core labor standards, including the exploitation of child labor, in our trade agenda as we seek to create a Working Group on Trade and Labor within the WTO and to create greater ILO/WTO linkages. The European Union has suggested on ILO/WTO Forum, although outside the WTO. Those are the larger stakes involved in what you are helping us to do. I know that many of you have innovative strategies to accomplish this. I hope you will all join actively in the work of this committee, offering your ideas, discussing and debating the issues among yourselves, and coming up with what I know will be good advice.