Group Weaves a Social Conscience Into Rug Making

Interior design makes an unlikely companion for social activism. But the era of globalization has linked the two with tiny hand-tied knots. A rug cannot be beautiful if you know it was made with a child’s forced labor.

Unless, of course, you don’t mind leaving your footprints in an innocent’s sweat and blood.

As First World prosperity collides with Third World poverty, fashion brands such as Nike and the Gap have been blistered by controversies over foreign sweatshops. Now, it’s the turn of the age-old rug-making business.

Demand for beauty on our floors provides desperately needed employment in rural villages in India, Pakistan and Nepal. No one doubts that Afghanistan’s revival will prove challenging.

But who is tending the looms, under what conditions, and how will you know? And if you know, how much will you care?

At the Phillips Collection, art patrons can peer guilt-free at the paintings. That’s because the pale green or gold or apricot rugs underfoot have been certified by their maker to be slave-labor-free.

The Phillips, like the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, chose its carpets from the company founded by Stephanie Odegard. The former Peace Corps worker and World Bank consultant has devoted the past 15 years to socially conscious rug making. Luxurious Himalayan and New Zealand wool and silk are colored with vegetable dyes in a range of 900 hues, then knotted by skilled artisans whom Odegard encountered as a consultant in Nepal.

The finished works are subtle, stunningly beautiful and politically correct. A percentage of sales is directed back to Nepal to rehabilitate children rescued from illegal situations.

Odegard is a member of the nonprofit Rugmark Foundation, created eight years ago by Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi to exert consumer pressure on the rug industry in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

The extent of the problem is hard to quantify, whether trying to document children in bondage or under legal working age.

But suffice to say that some companies have agreed to independent inspection of looms in return for a label that identifies their goods to customers.

I met Satyarthi and Odegard a few days apart. He blitzed through between human rights meetings in Brazil and appearances in New York, but posed a provocative question relevant to interior design: “Why can’t you think about designing the future of a child?”

Odegard spoke at the Washington Design Center, where her company has a showroom. She would be the first to agree that in much of the world, life is not as soft as lamb’s wool. And yet, she makes no apology for the price of rugs that may cost $14,000 apiece.

“I think we’re very privileged to live in a time when we can make some impact by what we buy,” she says.

In other words, put your money where your heart is. Rugmark’s poster shows a Nepalese schoolgirl named Laxmi Shresta, who was found rolling wool for her mother at age 6. She was rescued and now attends a Rugmark-funded school.

Against this emotional backdrop, rational counterarguments pale. Conscientious American importers such as Chris Walter of Yayla Tribal Rugs in Cambridge, Mass., take pains to explain that child labor is a fact of life. Walter has founded his own project, Cultural Survival, to help Tibetan refugees. He says he has never encountered children in bondage but has heard such conditions exist. More often, families work together at the loom. If children weren’t working on rugs, they could fall into worse pursuits.

Carol Bier, a research associate at the Textile Museum, argues persuasively that carpet weaving, which relies on numerical combinations to achieve patterns, has untapped potential to teach geometry and algebra--in other words, propel Third World children into the digital age.

She points out that loom technology led “directly and incontrovertibly” to the development of computers. “The issue, the way it’s being treated by Rugmark people,” she says, “is completely not cognizant of this other end of the spectrum.”

Rugmark deserves credit for generating concern in the first place. In Nepal, 70% of the carpet making industry is said to be enrolled in Rugmark. In India and Pakistan the percentage is far lower, but competing programs and labels have materialized. Mass-market importers such as Ikea and Pottery Barn take the issue seriously. Williams-Sonoma, parent company of Pottery Barn, insists that vendors and suppliers abide by “a prohibition against, among other things, hiring underage workers directly or through middlemen or agents, prison or forced labor, manufacturing conditions that expose workers to immediate risk of injury, or payment of below-minimum wage.”

Underlying any labeling system is the belief that if consumers only knew, they would act. Marsha Dickson, an associate professor of apparel, textiles and interior design at Kansas State University, isn’t so sure. After a Senate debate over clothing sweatshops raised the question, she conducted a survey to find out how much impact a “No Sweat” label would have on the purchase of a shirt. A paltry 16% of respondents said that knowledge of working conditions would outweigh issues of color, fabric or price.

“When you had to decide between something really dear to you, working conditions was not up there,” she says.

Dickson points out, “Children work for a reason. Certainly we have a right to ask, but if we ask, we have a responsibility to understand that whole picture. The root problem is poverty. What do you do about poverty?”

Perhaps the worst thing a caring consumer could do would be to deprive families of income by not buying a handmade rug.

In an imperfect world, there are no easy answers.