International and local human rights leaders will discuss their concerns for workers in the garment industry -- from cotton seed fields to textile factories and clothing distributors -- during a day-long symposium Saturday at Washington University.
St. Louis-based Monsanto is an underwriter of the event. The company has faced criticism of its own outsourcing practices in seed-production fields.
In 2005, according to metrics provided by the company, ten percent of field workers in India who produced hybrid cotton seeds for Monsanto were under the age of 14.
Monsanto’s director of human rights, Martha Burmaster, said the company realized around that time that contracted growers often hired young children, especially girls, during pollination and harvest seasons.
“The fields have to be hand-pollinated; it’s delicate work,” Burmaster said.
Through a campaign of financial incentives and education, Monsanto reduced the number of children working in their growers' fields to about 0.2 percent. The company declined to say how much the financial incentives are for an average grower. Similar child-labor metrics for other countries where Monsanto operates are not published on their website.
Monstanto regularly checks the work sites and hires an independent third-party auditor to verify their numbers, said Brian Lowry, Monsanto’s Deputy General Counsel.
“Our goal is to get these children in school, get them out of the fields. We know this is labor intensive, and we know that people need to be paid an adult wage for doing that work,” Lowry said.
Eliminating child labor can be complicated by economic instability, poverty and war, Lowry said. Often, large companies outsource production to countries where wages are low and governments fail to regulate or enforce good working conditions.
“There are governments that fail, there are companies that don’t pay attention,” Lowry said. “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying it’s extremely complex. You do not want the private sector, businesses and enterprises, stepping into the role of governments.”
But there are few incentives for large, multinational companies to follow child labor laws in the countries where they outsource, and regulators are often underfunded, said Matt Fischer-Daly of the International Labor Rights Forum. The ILRF published their own review of Monsanto's plan to address child labor in their cotton fields in 2007.
“It’s often difficult to gather information about large companies’ entire supply chains. The responsibility is on the company to be transparent about what’s happening, and be proactive to ensure it’s not violating human rights,” Fischer-Daly said.
Speakers for the day-long symposium at Washington University’s School of Law will include:
· Puvan Selvanathan, United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, U.N. Human Rights Council
· Natalie Grillon, Project Just
· Ima Matul, Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (C.A.S.T.)
· Anthony Curtis, J.C. Penney
· Matt Fischer-Daly, International Labor Rights Forum
· JD Rossouw & Mahesh Chandak, Monsanto
· Sanjar Umarov, Sunshine Uzbekistan
· Chris Budke, Husch Blackwell
· Nancy Donaldson, International Labor Organization (ILO)
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is now closed.