Clinton Calls for Campaign Against Child Labor

President Clinton called Saturday for an international campaign against child labor, setting out the goal of creating “a global economy with a human face,” and renewed his plea for a reduction of barriers to expanded world commerce.

Clinton also urged Congress to expand his authority to negotiate trade agreements, while saying such trade-opening pacts need not restrict labor rights or protection of the environment. And he said the leading industrial economies were near agreement on a plan to more than triple international contributions to ease the debt of the world’s poorest nations.

Addressing about 6,000 people attending the University of Chicago commencement in a sunny quadrangle of the gothic campus, the president put forth the central argument of his effort to open new markets through the elimination of trade restrictions. With 4.5% of the world’s population and 22% of its income, the U.S. “cannot sustain our standard of living unless we sell some things to other people.”

The president’s attention to the barriers to greater international commerce, the uncertainty that still faces the global economy and the debt burdens of the developing world reflect a shift in his public focus away from the Kosovo conflict and toward the international economic arena that has undergirded his presidency.

It also foreshadowed a speech he will give to the International Labor Organization in Geneva on Wednesday on child labor, and meetings at the end of the week in Cologne, Germany, with leaders of other major industrial nations, including Russia.

Clinton presented an administration plan to combat abuse of child labor overseas and in the United States by moving to restrict government purchases of goods made by young workers in harsh conditions, and developing a list of goods that may have been mined or produced by forced or indentured child labor.

“In many, many communities around the world, tens of millions of children work in conditions that shock the conscience--and send the products to us and to other wealthy nations,” Clinton said.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said in a statement issued Saturday that as recently as 1997, “our government purchased $57 million of products made by industries known to rely heavily on forced and indentured child labor.”

The ILO is in the throes of what the Clinton administration hopes will be the final stages of an effort to complete an international agreement intended to restrict the worst forms of labor abuses against workers younger than 18.

The organization estimates that at least 250 million children between 5 and 14 are at work in developing countries. Half are employed full-time, and tens of millions are exploited and employed in harmful conditions, which include exposure to hazardous pesticides and carcinogenic manufacturing substances.

In his speech at a university founded by John D. Rockefeller and known for its support for free-market economics, the president also renewed his proposals for greater openness in international financial procedures and institutions, to limit the potential of financial crises to disrupt the global economy.

The president acknowledged the long-standing controversy surrounding international trade and its impact on American jobs when he told about 820 graduates--nearly all of whose hands he shook as they received their diplomas--that he had indeed spotted the stickers a number of them wore on their graduation robes reading “Fair Trade, Not Free Trade.”

The challenge facing the world, he said, is “how to build a system that is both free and fair.”

“The global community cannot survive as a tale of two cities--one modern and integrated, a cell phone in every hand, a McDonald’s on every street corner; the other mired in poverty and increasingly resentful, covered with public health and environmental problems no one can manage,” he said.

Clinton has long advocated relaxing barriers to international trade, arguing that further growth of the U.S. economy depends on American businesses gaining access to foreign markets. That approach was at the center of two crucial and ultimately successful economic battles of his first term--to reach a free-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and to complete more than seven years of international trade negotiations that reduced tariffs around the globe and created the World Trade Organization.

But his advocacy of free trade has put him at odds with the more traditional direction of the Democratic Party and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House Democratic leader.

Critics at both ends of the political spectrum have angrily raised fears that eased access to the American market by foreign manufacturers operating at lower cost than U.S. companies would threaten American jobs.

Critics have also warned that such trade pacts can make it difficult to ban imports.

Unable to muster sufficient Democratic support, Clinton was forced last year to retreat from his plea for renewed, expanded trade negotiating authority. That lapsed authority, known as “fast track,” would allow the administration to negotiate trade agreements that Congress could only approve or reject, with no opportunity to modify them.

The head of the president’s National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, said Clinton was modifying his proposal to give greater weight to environmental and labor concerns in such negotiations.