Should The United States Purchase Items Made By Children?

The long-debated argument among government officials and product manufacturers has been whether or not the United States should purchase items made by children. The debate has played an immense role in the eternal uncertainty of cents versus sense. The United States should allow for the purchase of items made via child labor. Through allowing distributors to employ children to assemble their products, the United States is essentially removing many families from a life of poverty. To ensure the working conditions of child laborers are not too inhumane, organizations have developed monitoring programs to oversee the conditions under which the children work. Although some may find themselves in a moral gray-area when endorsing child labor, they
Sialkot, Pakistan, where many Nike soccer balls are produced, has a model economy, especially in such a poor country. The lack of poverty is mainly due to the fact that children are able to work to help support their families financially. David Montero, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, explained that a majority 70 percent of the local marketing system of Sialkot depends upon income from child laborers, which is approximately 20,000 families that would be forced into poverty if the United States banned Nike from importing their products due to the makers being underneath working age. Without the consumers from the United States, families in Sialkot and a myriad of other third world countries would would go into a state of poverty. For the sake of all these children and their families’ well-being, the U.S. should continue to buy products that have been manufactured with the use of child
According to Nadira Faulmuller of Oxford University, “when the U.S. Congress threatened to ban the import of clothing made by children under 14 in Bangladesh, around 50.000 of them went from their jobs in the relatively clean textile factories to collecting garbage, breaking bricks, or even prostitution.” Despite morals against child laboring, the act of children working actually stops kids from taking much more drastic measures to make money. The United States should buy child labor made products to avoid children putting themselves in danger to provide for