Students’ View on Child Labor

* Re “Teens’ Efforts Give Soccer Balls the Boot,” Dec. 23.

Your article on the motion of Monroe High School students for LAUSD to stop buying soccer balls made in Pakistan touches the heart, but the reasoning mind cautions one against such myopic approaches to real world problems.

Apparently, the students believe stopping the LAUSD from buying Pakistan-made soccer balls is a step forward in the fight against child labor in Pakistan. One wonders what is necessarily and universally evil about child labor. Not all countries and societies are like the United States. Did their research conclude that those Pakistani children, sans child labor, would have better options available to them; or do their families need the extra income, however meager, that the children bring home? Is it a question of putting children to work or is it about the conditions under which children labor?

Granted that child labor is intrinsically evil, did the Monroe High School students consider that those soccer balls could still find their way to LAUSD through third parties that can hide all traces of Pakistani manufacture? The soccer balls would then cost more to LAUSD and the children would get paid less as middlemen cut into the profit margin at both ends.

The world is full of well-meaning people. We don’t want to lose them or their drive to do good, but we need to have them go beyond mere intentions and feel-good values. We do good by doing it, not by meaning to.

MARIO ENRIQUEZ

Palmdale