(machinery clanging)
(machinery whirring)
(indistinct conversations)
(indistinct chatter)
(indistinct remarks)
(speaking foreign language)
This is Kailash Satyarthi.
His organization Bachpan Bachao Andolan,
Save Childhood Movement,
conducts secrets raids with or without local police.
They have saved over 80,000 children
from child trafficking and slave labor.
(indistinct conversations)
They were not just child labor.
Let me underscore here
that they were traffic children,
they were bondage child laborers.
So it's a virtual slavery.
Rescuing these children is a violent undertaking.
Kailash has been severely beaten,
and members of his organization murdered
during these rescues.
(indistinct chatter)
(horns honking)
(speaking foreign language)
(indistinct remarks)
No, no, no, stop!
(speaking foreign language)
Let him come here, let him come here, let him come here,
let him come here, let him come here!
In many places in the world,
the children are working
day in and day out as slaves.
At least animals can roam around freely,
but these children can't.
They have no dream.
In many ways, globalization has been a force of good
in developing countries,
bringing opportunities, education, and infrastructure
to some of the world's poorest regions.
But it's not always a pretty picture.
For decades, deep-pocketed multi-national corporations
have been exploiting workers in developing countries.
Violating international labor laws,
and paying workers the bare minimum.
Keeping costs low, profits high,
and consumers coming back for more.
And while consumers expect an abundance of cheap goods,
it's often children who pay the highest price.
(indistinct conversations)
Child labor refers to work that deprives children
of an education or compromises their physical,
mental, and social development.
There are child laborers
in almost every country in the world.
Countries shaded in dark red
have higher concentrations of children
between the ages of 5 to 14
in their workforce.
There's somewhere around 200 million
child laborers in the world today.
Virtually no country is immune to child labor,
and virtually no industry is immune to child labor.
Setting aside all the definitions,
and all of the laws and policies and economics of it,
child labor really means this.
It means the innocence
and purity of childhood
is transformed into grinding, menial labor,
which is in turn transformed into the delightful things
we consume every day.
That's really what child labor is.
It's their suffering turned into our clothes
and our food and our jewelry and our chocolate.
Companies look for low-wage,
under-regulated labor markets in order to maximize return
on shareholder value, et cetera.
So, in the era of global capitalism
where you can ship things from one corner of the world
to another for a very inexpensive cost,
you can also look for labor in any corner of the world,
and low wages are often afforded by the use of children,
because they are, by definition, more vulnerable.
Palm oil is a vegetable oil that is present
in a majority of consumer products.
Its primary purpose is to extend shelf life.
Indonesia is the largest source of palm oil.
Its valuable rainforests are being destroyed
by this multibillion-dollar industry.
In Indonesia, you see a lot of focus
in the palm oil conversation
on the environmental degradation.
The industry has been literally burning
one of the oldest growth rainforests in the world.
What is frequently overlooked
is that those that are actually doing the burning,
preparing the plantations,
spraying the herbicides, which are in many cases,
banned in other parts of the world,
and doing so without protection--
these workers, too often,
are children.
(engine rumbling)
This plantation, like most in the region,
pays its workers below the minimum wage
and forces them to hit a daily quota.
If the quota is not met,
they will be fined or fired.
(speaking foreign language)
This plantation is one of many
that supplies Wilmar,
the world's largest palm oil producer.
The children cannot form the trade unions.
They cannot go to the court of law.
They cannot go on strikes, they cannot bargain their wages
or their living working conditions.
So, they're always preferred
than the parents of these children.
(laughing)
Throughout Indonesia's palm oil plantations,
children suffer injuries from the rugged terrain,
heavy lifting, and the use of dangerous tools.
(engine whirring)
If companies were to provide safety gear to children
it would be an admission that they use child labor.
Just by working on the plantation
children are exposed to toxic chemicals
such as the herbicide paraquat,
which is known to cause Parkinson's disease.
Children with these pesticide backpacks,
no protection on their backs,
no respirators, no mask,
they get chemical burns.
The ultimate effects on their health
won't be known for a couple of years,
but these are genotoxins.
It's not gonna be good.
After the palm fruit is picked,
it is loaded onto trucks
and delivered to a mill within 24 hours.
The mill sterilizes and presses the fruit,
creating crude palm oil.
From there, it is refined, separated,
and sold to corporate giants.
Unilever, Proctor and Gamble,
Nestle, Kellogg's,
and Colgate-Palmolive
all buy palm oil from Wilmar.
Palm oil gets everywhere.
It's in the stuff that we use every day.
New Colgate Enamel Health toothpaste.
Kraft Mac and Cheese.
Real cheese matters.
Coffee-Mate, stir things up.
(indistinct chatter)
So, we look into these instances immediately.
So, if you have concrete examples,
please give them to me.
In a 2016 report titled "The Great Palm Oil Scandal,"
Amnesty International cites
child labor and forced labor abuses
on Wilmar's palm oil plantations.
According to the report,
Nestle, along with Kellogg's,
acknowledged that they received palm oil
from these Wilmar plantations.
So, yes, we have been in conversation with Amnesty,
and we take this situation very seriously.
Wilmar is a big supplier, indeed.
In palm oil, the challenge
is that you have to have traceability
to the plantation in order to be able
to completely remediate the situation.
You will often hear,
"Well, we just don't know about those conditions.
How can we know, right?
We're buying from a supplier.
The supplier's sourcing
from a big farm.
The farm subcontracts out
to smaller producers,
and it's impossible for us to find out."
And that's not true.
That's willful ignorance.
These companies, if they want to,
can find out.
Many of the companies,
they have good social responsibility documents,
and they publish them on their websites,
and that is there because of the consumer's consciousness.
But when it comes to realization,
then they pass on the responsibility
to the second level or third level
of their contractors or subcontractors.
In 2016, Amnesty International
exposed that children as young as four
are working in cobalt mines
across the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The cobalt from these mines is used in lithium-ion batteries
found in products from Samsung, Microsoft,
Apple, and Sony.
Fourteen months after this report was released,
Apple was the only company to suspend use
of cobalt from these mines.
Globally, 168 million children
are in full-time jobs.
Ironically, 200 million adults are jobless.
Many of these jobless adults
are none but the very parents of these children.
If children are freed from child labor,
then huge employment opportunities
would be created.
Most companies haven't gone about setting up a system
of transparency and auditing
to ensure that there aren't child laborers
in their supply chains.
Companies often aren't interested
in finding out what is actually happening.
They don't own the farm or factory itself,
and so they feel less reputational risk,
but even if their name isn't on that farm
or isn't on that factory or isn't on that ship,
they are buying those products and turning a blind eye
to what is going on below them.
Companies 50 years ago,
the first way that they thought about their success
when they talked about how successful their company was--
by how many people they employed,
how many people did they give
a living wage, a good wage.
Today, it's about stock price, it's about profits.
We reported total revenue of more than $482 billion.
(cheering)
Across the developing world,
global companies pressure suppliers
to slash production costs.
In order to meet these demands,
suppliers subcontract the work,
which shields the companies from accountability.
Even if companies are concerned
about child labor in their supply chains,
they will seek for some assurance
from that first factory,
but that first factory might be subcontracting
down two, three, and four levels,
all the way out to rural areas
where no one's looking.
Old Navy and its parent company Gap
use a multi-layered supply chain
and reap the benefits of cheap underage labor.
This factory in Istanbul employs children
making clothes for fast fashion outlets
such as ASOS and Marks and Spencer.
ASOS says it has zero tolerance for children labor.
The company accepts its clothes were made here,
but says it's not an authorized factory.
In order for companies to clean up their supply chain,
it takes a realistic assessment
of what their supply chain is,
and that starts with mapping.
When we go in and talk
to many of these big brands and retailers,
they, in many cases, have not only not heard
of the suppliers that we're talking about,
but they haven't heard of the geographic area
where we've been focusing our investigation.
(indistinct conversations)
Indonesia is the world's fifth-largest tobacco producer.
There are more than half a million tobacco farms.
Tobacco in any form contains nicotine,
and when workers are out in the fields handling tobacco,
they can actually absorb that nicotine through their skin.
Nicotine is both water and lipid soluble.
So, when you go into a field of tobacco
and rub against it on your skin,
you absorb nicotine.
If you go into a wet field of tobacco,
all the water on those tobacco plants
is filled with nicotine.
The immediate effect is acute nicotine poisoning.
Nausea, vomiting,
headache, insomnia.
Nicotine has long-term
neurological developmental effects.
Now you put a child into that situation.
The child is smaller,
has not quite developed
physically or neurologically.
Children shouldn't be there.
(indistinct chatter)
The tobacco that children are helping to produce
is bought by the biggest tobacco companies in the world.
The law in Indonesia is actually pretty strong.
Indonesia has good child labor laws
that are aligned with international standards.
They've ratified international labor organization
conventions on child labor.
The problem is really enforcement.
Haji Masarun is the head of the Labor Department
of Central Lombok.
(speaking foreign language)
He is in charge of making sure
that all the companies in the region
are following Indonesia's labor laws.
Except, he doesn't seem to know the labor laws.
The minimum working age in Indonesia
is 15, not 17.
And the workers on this plantation
are as young as six.
(indistinct chatter)
(speaking foreign language)
In the United States today,
it is legal for children as young as 12
to work on any farm of any size.
For small farms or family farms,
there is no minimum age requirement.
Hundreds of thousands of American kids
pick blueberries, strawberries, sweet potatoes,
and other crops sold nationwide.
Because many of these children don't finish school,
they often remain trapped in a cycle of poverty.
The history of agricultural labor is one
that comes right out of slavery into the Jim Crow South,
and now relies largely on immigrant labor
that's often underpaid and overworked.
In 1938 as part of the New Deal,
the U.S. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act,
which attempted to keep children under the age of 16
out of the workforce.
The agricultural sector, however,
was excluded.
Franklin Roosevelt pushed those laws through,
but the Democratic Party was this strange alliance
of Northern urban citizens
and labor unions,
and Southern white supremacists
whose economy rested on low-wage labor
and who also didn't want
African American workers
to be able to organize for any purpose,
because organizing for labor unions
might be a stepping stone toward organizing
for civil rights.
I started working in tobacco because my parents,
sometimes they couldn't like-- sometimes the money
was kinda short for them to pay the bills.
So, I couldn't get, like, supplies for school,
and, yeah, that's mainly the main reason why
I work in the fields.
I had to work, because my mom
didn't have enough money for us, so.
A single parent making $7.25 or even $8.25
doing seasonal agricultural work
can't afford to feed their family.
It's just not a possibility,
and so, families have to come together.
They have to have as many people as possible working,
and that's really, you know, the main root cause
of why so many young people are doing work
that's often dangerous.
I've been working in the fields since I was eight,
and I'm 17 now, and I'm still working in tobacco fields.
Yes, ma'am.
We would start around five or six,
and get out until seven or eight in the night.
- That's a long day. - Yeah, it is.
What was it like working in the fields?
It was bad, it was bad.
Like throwing up, and stuff like that.
It's like harsh conditions,
and especially since the sun is beating down on you.
You need a lot of water,
and like, you can't get a lot of breaks.
If I were caught getting a break,
I would probably get fired.
Yes, ma'am.
Um, well, what I do
is, like, I find woods,
and if there's no woods I have to find a place
where there's no workers at.
They didn't have paper or nothing like that,
and so, I had to use leaves.
In 2015, a group of scientists
uncovered that nicotine levels
from working in tobacco fields
greatly exceeded nicotine levels
from smoking cigarettes.
We did a study where we looked at cotinine in urine
of farm workers compared to non-farm workers.
The urinary cotinine levels
of non-smoking farm workers
was 541 nanograms per milliliter,
whereas the urinary cotinine levels
of smoking non-farm workers
was 199 nanograms per milliliter.
So, the farm workers had two and a half times
as much cotinine, even though they did not smoke.
When I threw up, the owner told me,
he said, "You can keep on working.
I mean, everybody goes through that.
Not only you."
Protections are not reaching children in the fields.
Companies like Philip Morris International,
British American Tobacco,
Altria Group, Reynolds American.
They've set up a system
where they don't have the responsibility
for what happens on the farm.
I would get rashes.
Then my body start hurting and the leaves are kinda--
they got something like--
something they put in the leaves.
The tobacco fields that supply companies
like Philip Morris and Reynolds
are sprayed with an enormous amount
of pesticides and herbicides,
many of which are banned in other countries.
The chemicals can get on you
and they can make you really, really sick and hurt you.
I was in the hospital for a week because of it.
The chemicals, it was going through my bloodstream.
Plus, I was coughing up blood because of the chemicals.
It is unclear which chemical caused illness
among the children interviewed,
but a commonly used pesticide is chlorpyrifos.
It is made by Dow Chemical
and is banned on three continents.
The Obama administration attempted to ban this chemical
in favor of less toxic alternatives.
The EPA scientists under the Obama administration
found that the chemical could interfere
with children's brain development.
Reduced IQ, lower working memory scores,
increased ADHD.
Regulating these poisons
that endanger American children
is now unlikely.
Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.
Every regulation should have to pass a simple test.
Does it make life better or safer
for American workers or consumers?
In February 2017, President Donald Trump
ordered the Environmental Protection Agency
to remove restrictions on several harmful pesticides,
including Dow Chemical's chlorpyrifos.
Dow Chemical had just donated $1 million
to President Trump's inauguration.
President-elect Trump, I can't tell you--
I tingle with pride listening to you.
Dow Chemical's CEO, Andrew Liveris,
was at the president's side when this order was signed.
Behind me, and Andrew, I'd like to thank you
for initially getting the group together.
Three months after Trump's executive order,
a farm in California was forced to close
after dozens of workers were poisoned by chlorpyrifos.
Top story here at five.
More than 50 farm workers exposed to a pesticide drift
this morning southwest of Bakersfield.
The active ingredient in the insecticide is chlorpyrifos.
It is reported to cause severe neurotoxic symptoms in humans.
Chlorpyrifos is manufactured by the AgroSciences division
of Dow Chemical Company.
Chlorpyrifos will continue to be used in tobacco farming.
(indistinct conversations)
He kept telling us he was sick, he was feeling sick.
And he passed out and he laid--
we just laid him up under the leaves
until we could get the ambulance to get there.
And it's like--that was like the scariest day of my life
that I thought I was gonna lose my best friend because of it.
- How old was he? - He was 12.
We were--I was 13, I'd just turned 13, he was 12.
- I'm sorry. - It's okay.
Work in tobacco farming is treated just like work
in any other agricultural crop, which means, you know,
12-year-olds can be out in the field
working 50 or 60 hours a week,
and that's perfectly legal.
A few years back, the Obama administration
proposed regulations to label tobacco as hazardous.
Powerful agricultural lobbying groups
came out strongly opposed to these regulations,
and in the end, the Obama administration caved
to these groups and really abandoned child farm workers.
We need to see more political will from our policymakers
in Washington to protect kids who are at risk
working on farms in our country.
So many of our kids in our country and Europe,
around the world, enjoy eating chocolate.
I mean, who doesn't enjoy eating chocolate?
We all love chocolate,
or hot chocolate, or chocolates of any form.
And to think that so many of our kids who--
people who enjoy chocolate,
we don't know that it's being produced
by forced child labor in many cases.
Kids that are deprived of their childhood,
kids that are basically child slaves.
There are nearly two million child laborers
ages 5 to 14 working in Ghana.
Some work in the gold mines,
but a majority of them work in the cocoa fields
that supply companies like Hershey, Cadbury,
Mars, and Nestle.
Anas Aremeyaw Anas
is the Ghanaian investigative journalist
who has spent the last two decades
exposing corruption and crime across Africa.
A master of disguise,
he works undercover and never reveals his face.
My name is Comfort Aklugu.
How old are you?
I am 11 years old.
Three years.
Three years?
Yes.
Do all of the children go to school or...?
Yeah, some of them don't go to school.
They just work on the cocoa farm for me.
They like money,
so they will come and work for me
so that they get money.
Yes.
The Cocoa Board and PBC
are the Ghanaian government organizations
responsible for cocoa production and sales.
They claim that they have dozens of inspectors
auditing the cocoa farms regularly.
In the 10 years you have been working on this farm...
- Yes... - How many times
has the Cocoa Board come and audited?
It's only last year that they came.
- Last year. - Yeah.
- 2015. - Yes.
And what did they do here?
They just came to see what we are using,
the insecticide and the pesticide.
That's all they came and looked for.
They didn't look at the workers?
No, no.
They didn't ask you how many workers are here?
- No. - How old they are,
- what they do. - They didn't ask.
- Nothing. - Yes.
I met a group of children
working in cocoa beans production.
And I said, "How do you like chocolates?"
The children smiled, "What is chocolate?"
During the course of our filming,
we realized that some of the child laborers
on this plantation had been trafficked
from other countries.
Are all the children who work here from Ghana
or are some of them from other countries?
Yeah, some of them are from other countries,
like Nigeria and Côte d'lvoire,
Burkina too, yeah.
Yeah.
And they come to Ghana for-- just for working?
Yes, yes.
For how long?
Some two years, five years.
Some also don't go back again.
What if they want to go home after one month?
Can they go home or, no, they have to stay?
If they decide to go one month,
then I have to collect my money back,
the money that I gave to their owner, yes.
And so...
...the owners of these kids don't let them go.
Yes.
If they have to give you your money back.
Yeah.
The options in poor countries tend to be pretty bad.
You can sell fruit in the vegetable market,
you can sell cigarettes one by one,
you can work in a factory making cheap sandals.
So, a labor broker will go to a village
and offer jobs to village kids
and promise wages that sound really good.
And then those kids show up
and it turns out that they're not getting paid
or not getting paid very much,
their identity cards are taken from them,
if they have them at all.
They may not speak the language
in the place they're working.
They become pawns in this international economic process,
and completely deprived of rights
in ways that truly are analogous to 19th century slaves.
The United Nations estimates
that approximately 200,000 slaves
are working in various trades in West Africa,
and the State Department has estimated
that about 15,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12
have been sold into forced labor.
The Harkin-Engel Protocol,
created by Senator Tom Harkin
and Representative Eliot Engel,
is an international agreement between governments
and global cocoa companies
aimed at ending the worst forms of child labor
in the production of cocoa in West Africa.
These are essentially American industries,
American companies, and, you know,
we should be very concerned about child slave labor.
And I said, you know, I'm a congressman,
I should try to do something about this,
this is outrageous.
Despite the best efforts on the part of government,
the Cocoa industry repeatedly failed
to meet the deadlines set out by the protocol.
And we laid out a series of date-specific actions,
including the development of industry-wide standards
of public certification,
which was supposed to be done by July 1st, 2005.
Though I was disappointed that the July 1st deadline
was not fully met by the industry,
they have given us a commitment,
a commitment to achieving a certification system
which can be expanded across
the coca-growing areas of West Africa.
The certification system will be in place
by July 1st of 2008.
In 2013, 12 years after the protocol was initiated,
a U.S. government funded study by Tulane University
found that children engaged
in inappropriate forms of child labor
had risen 21% in Ghana and Côte d'lvoire.
The study noted that over a million children
were trapped in exploitative labor
in the cocoa sector of just those two countries.
Since the failure of the Harkin-Engel Protocol,
the chocolate companies are taking cover
under other certifications, such as UTZ,
which routinely failed to protect child laborers.
So, it's 100% UTZ Certified,
the cocoa comes from the cocoa plant,
which means that it's completely traceable,
so we know where it comes from
and we know how it has been produced.
But just because something is UTZ Certified
does not mean that it is free of forced labor
or trafficking or child labor.
It means the product is traceable
and it has been responsibly sourced,
to the extent possible.
Are you aware that there is child trafficking
on cocoa farms across Ghana and Côte d'lvoire?
Again, these are very rare cases.
When we detect such cases through our system,
we immediately alert the authorities.
When I was in Ghana in December,
on all the farms I visited
I found incidences of trafficked children.
Didn't seem very rare to me.
Is it common for a lot of cocoa farmers
to order kids from other countries?
Yes.
- It is? - Yes.
Does everyone do it?
Yes.
Do you know the word trafficking?
No, please.
- Hm? - No.
Do you know the meaning?
No, I don't know the meaning.
Have you ever heard that word, "trafficking"?
- Yes, miss. - You have heard it?
- Yes. - Do you know the meaning?
I don't know the meaning.
(commotion)
We are not talking about a figment
of anybody's imagination.
These are human beings
whose rights are being trampled upon,
some of them being taken against their wish.
(commotion)
Between 1990 and 2010,
China grew from being the seventh largest
manufacturing country in the world
to the first.
In the early years of this rapid growth,
sweatshops accounted for a high percentage
of manufacturing,
and child labor violations were rampant.
Much of the East Asian economic model
was built around taking rural labor, especially girls,
and...and having them work in sweatshops
to make toys or garments.
But in the late 1990s,
a transformation occurred.
China implemented universal primary education,
making school compulsory for tens of millions of children.
School attendance soared,
significantly reducing child labor.
Today, China has pulled most of its population out of poverty,
but despites China's success in reducing child labor,
global corporations have found a loophole
to maximize production.
These are high school students, many of them freshmen.
They're at this factory during their summer vacation,
and are part of what the Chinese government calls
a student internship program.
But it's nothing of the sort.
For 30 million of these Chinese students,
their summer internships consist of forced labor
at manufacturing facilities for global multinationals.
A lot of vocational schools in China
are not really designed to provide students
with training in a particular trade.
They are there simply to provide factories
with cheap labor at short notice.
If a particular factory is short of workers,
they go to a vocational school and say,
"We need 1,000 workers for 2 months."
And the students really have no say in the matter.
When the students go to the factory,
they realize that what they are doing
is just like manual labor, repetitive labor,
which is irrelevant to their studies.
But if they do not finish the internship,
they cannot graduate.
These students are spending their summer working for Gree,
the world's largest air conditioning company.
Their products are sold at Best Buy, Home Depot,
Target, Walmart, Sears, and Staples.
They will live at the factory,
be forced to do compulsory overtime,
and will be paid very little.
Some of the students, they are only 15 years old,
and then some are like-- their average age is around 16.
The students are essentially held captive.
There are an estimated 30 million child laborers
under the age of 14 working in India.
The children are often bonded laborers
working in embroidery, jewelry making,
carpet making, agriculture, and mining.
U.S. companies import a wide variety
of embroidered goods and carpets from India.
These products retail in American stores
for up to $3 billion annually.
The average wage for Indian workers
in the carpet industry is 20 cents an hour.
The children often make nothing.
People think of slavery as this ancient thing
that exists in these old sepia photographs,
and, in fact, you know,
modern day slavery is all around the world.
And American supply chains,
European supply chains
do include elements of this kind of child labor.
Mica is a sparkly mineral
widely used in makeup and car paint.
And most of the world's mica is produced in India.
Crippling poverty forces young children
to work in these mines.
The mica powder is exported globally
and used in products from companies
such as Revlon, L'Oréal, Estée Lauder,
Rimmel, and Maybelline.
And automobiles from Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and GM.
Many of these companies have pledged to eliminate child labor
in their mica supply chains,
but only the BMW Group has stopped purchasing Indian mica
until their suppliers guarantee
that their product is child labor free.
Our fight is not against the big brands and companies.
The fight is against the evil of child labor,
the crime of child labor.
So we have to see that how we can engage consumers,
on one hand,
and the power of consumers could be converted
into some pressure on the big companies
that they are not using child labor.
In 1994, Kailash Satyarthi founded GoodWeave,
a program that allows rug manufacturers
that pass rigorous inspections to attach a logo to their rugs
that certify they are child labor free.
I thought that why can't there be a labeling system,
after thorough monitoring and certification,
on carpets that they are free of child labor.
With very little investment of money,
but strong resolve,
the companies can find the solutions.
The total cost to the consumer
of ensuring a rug is child labor free
is less than 1% of the retail price.
Consumers can make a difference
by supporting labeling systems,
such as Child Labor Free, Fairtrade, and GoodWeave,
and pressuring companies to join these certifications.
In any market-driven economy,
consumers are the supreme power.
Five years ago,
out of the largest 175 economic entities in the world,
50% were corporations, 50% were countries.
Today, 65% are corporations,
and that trend line isn't going down.
Corporations, increasingly, in the world,
are the most important actors.
And, critically,
and this should give us all some hope,
corporations can do in 48 hours
what it takes governments 10 years to think about doing,
to debate doing, and then never enforce
at the district and the local levels.
I was part of an investigation team
for an organization called the Worker Rights Consortium,
which inspects factories around the world
that make collegiate merchandise.
There was a Nike factory in Mexico
where the workers were being hit
with hammers by supervisors.
There was, effectively, an organized crime group
that had control of the factory
that was calling itself a union.
We put pressure on Nike,
and Nike went to the state government and said,
"No, you gotta get your organized crime group
out of the factory and stop siphoning off money."
And like that, everything changed down there.
It's easy enough to write on a piece of paper,
"No child labor."
But the headquarters of the multinationals
have to send people out,
have to do aggressive, ongoing investigations,
and have to be willing to say to the local factory or farm,
"You will be cut off."
Do you know who helped make your iPhone's battery?
Amnesty International says children may have had a hand.
Forced overtime, underaged labor
after explosions and chemicals
killed and harmed workers over there.
Apple's been taking increasing heat
for the way they run their factories.
(applause)
After facing years of criticism and harsh media exposure,
Apple, the world's largest tech company,
now conducts hundreds of audits across its global supply chain,
and severely punishes suppliers for child labor violations.
If underaged children are found in Apple's supply chain,
Apple forces the supplier
to immediately return the underaged worker home,
ensure they attend school,
and pay their wages until they reach legal working age.
It is also setting new standards for transparency.
Publishing a list of its suppliers
and publicly reporting all grievances and labor violations,
including instances of child labor.
Focusing energy on getting corporations
to understand their responsibility
is energy well spent.
Consumers have the power to determine
whether these supply chains get cleaned up.
Consumers can vote with their wallet,
and companies will hear them.
If somebody was to buy the cheapest goods,
from Bangladesh or made in India or in Cambodia,
then there are chances that the children are involved.
As individual consumers,
one can simply ask the shopkeeper
how they are going to guarantee
that these things are not made by children or slaves.
If hundreds of consumers ask the same question every day,
that shopkeeper will call back to the supplier or the brand
that many consumers are asking the question
and they are not going to buy the things
if it is made by children.
Little sacrifice will make this world a better place.
There's no magic wand
that is gonna make this problem go away.
It's intimately linked to poverty as a whole.
But together we can chip away at it and mitigate it
so that modern slavery goes the way
that 19th century slavery did.
Kailash Satyarthi's organization
established rehabilitation centers,
such as Bal Ashram and Mukti Ashram,
giving rescued child laborers
a second chance at a childhood.
(children singing)
Child labor fuels poverty.
If you employ children today,
you're ensuring poverty in the rest of their life.
That link has to be broken.
(children singing)