August 2, 2024

Washington, D.C. - On Friday, August 2, Natalie Snelson and Rachel Aluko interviewed Reid Maki, Director of Child Labor Issues and Coordinator of Child Labor Coalition. The Child Labor Coalition (CLC) is a GCE-US coalition member. Please read this interview to learn more about how to take action against child labor. 

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Rachel: Can you tell us about the Child Labor Coalition’s mission and its intersections with education? 

Reid: Its mission is to reduce and end child labor both internationally and domestically. It’s very obvious, I think the two main factors of child labor are the presence of poverty and access to education. As soon as we heard about GCE-US, I joined it because as more and more children are able to go to school, child labor should start waning. Kids not being able to complete school is one of the causes of child labor. 

Natalie: How is the Child Labor Coalition unique from other organizations that focus on child labor? Are there any specific programming or initiatives that you’d like to highlight? 

Reid: We were extremely unique in that we were the only US coalition working on child labor, until we launched the Campaign [Campaign to End US Child Labor] and that became a second coalition working on child labor. But the CLC is unique from the Campaign in that it does work on both international and domestic issues.

Launched in February 2024, you can join the Campaign to End Child Labor here. 

Natalie: Are there any resources or newsletters that you would recommend to people to learn more about child labor?  

Reid: We have a listserv. It has breaking child labor news. It has news coverage. It has meetings. 

The listserv also covers child labor bills that have been introduced. The listserv recently featured a The Child Safety and Well-Being Act of 2024, a bill led by First Focus, which creates a government-wide children’s commission that would help coordinate resources and activities related to children.

If you would like to be added to this listserv, please email Reid at reidm@nclnet.org. 

Reid: Google “Campaign to End US Child Labor”, they’re trying to put a lot of the breaking news on there. Following that website [and] following the CLC website are good places to start [learning more about child labor]. 

Reid: The Child Labor Coalition also has multiple members that run child labor remediation projects globally. The websites of those organizations are great resources for learning more about child labor. The easiest way to find them would be to go to the CLC website and look at our member list.

Reid: Follow groups like 100 Million, the CLC, and the Campaign to End US Child Labor [to gather] more information.

Rachel: How can people – especially youth – get more involved in learning more about and advocating for child labor? How can an individual get involved? 

Reid: Find groups like the 100 Million Campaign. I think that’s a wonderful way for youth to get involved. 

Reid: [Many] young people ask me about how students can get involved. We [have gotten] so many of those requests that we created an information sheet. Some of the things that we [have] suggested are online petitions. Go to petition sites and google child labor. [You may find] groups like us and the Campaign (Campaign to End US Child Labor). We ran that effort on World Tobacco Day, where 750 people wrote to their members of Congress, and that’s probably still on that site. If people go to these better sites, these child labor focused sites, they can engage in advocacy themselves, and that’s ideal. 

Here is the link to write to your members of Congress regarding child labor in the tobacco industry. The US legal age to harvest tobacco is 12. There are lots of children in the tobacco industry. Contacting your representatives and asking them to sponsor bills that stop child labor in the tobacco industry is a great way to take action. 

Reid: Write a letter to your member of Congress. Just say that you care about child labor and want more funding for child labor. We think blogging is a great thing for young people to do if they have the opportunity to do that. 

Reid: One of the hardest things is people go like, ‘Well how do I know what products to buy?' The problem is we can’t recommend companies because we aren’t sure what their entire supply chain looks like. 

Reid: Trying to buy products that are child labor free is worth the effort, even though it’s hard to tell. It’s time consuming, but go to websites and see what they do say about their supply chain. Do they work with local unions, local farm worker unions? Research is helpful there. 

Reid: There is an app by the Department of Labor called the Sweat and Toil app. It's a helpful app. It doesn’t tell you for sure what company of chocolate is bad, but with that app, you’ll know that 150 plus products are associated with child labor. You’ll know like, 'Oh, I got to be vigilant with chocolate because there’s a ton of child labor here.' So I think that’s a helpful app to educate oneself. 

Reid: I would say, depending on your age, getting on Instagram or X and retweeting groups [is] so helpful. There was some consumer polling done, I think it was more than 10 years, by a local NGO. They asked people how much child labor there is in the world, and 3 out 4 of them said less than a million children in the world are in child labor. At the time, the answer, the nearest estimate we had was a 160 million. So they were off by a factor of 160. 

Retweeting and sharing child labor content regularly helps organizations like the Child Labor Coalition get their message out there. Additionally, there is not a lot of public knowledge of child labor, so resharing child labor content is a great way to take action. There are many ways to take action on a collective and individual scale to combat child labor.

If you would like to get regular child labor updates from the Child Labor Coalition, please contact Reid Maki at reidm@nclnet.org.