Labeling Rugs Buyers Seek Assurances That Imports Made Without Child Labor

Buyers of handmade imported rugs are accustomed to petting the plush, appraising the pattern and checking the dimensions.

But not until now have so many buyers been inspecting a rug’s flip side, searching out a little tag that says the rug was made without child labor.

With the new ban on imports of goods made by children in bondage, signed by President Clinton a week ago, it has become the latest must-have label.

“Our customers are really aware,” said Kimberley Aylward, the spokeswoman for Garnet Hill, a mail-order catalog that sells $1 million in imported rugs each year. “They want assurances even before they place an order that no kids were involved.”

Accurate numbers do not exist for the number of children working in servitude in the making of rugs in South Asia, said Darlene Atkins, public policy coordinator at the Child Labor Coalition in Washington, D.C. Estimates range from 300,000 to 1 million, the latter figure provided by the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude.

Most of the children working in the rug industry are in India and Pakistan, Atkins said.

Although Congress passed the new law, it did not appropriate any additional money for the Custom Service to monitor imports or track violators. Retailers and manufacturers in the imported carpet business, estimated at $1.3 billion a year, are aware of the risk to their image in selling items made by children and are looking for ways to market their awareness to concerned customers.

These range from self-monitoring - Ikea and Pottery Barn are among the stores that hire agents to inspect looms periodically - to labeling programs, of debatable efficacy, that monitor production and use the fees they collect to set up schools.

Frank Hagemann, a policy analyst at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, said the number of rug manufacturers signed up for programs worldwide is too small to measure. But “awareness is increasing rapidly,” he said.

Five years ago, he pointed out, there were no programs at all.

Right now, the most visible marketing tool is labeling. The international labor group says six labeling programs currently operate in India, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and the United States. The two largest programs are Rugmark and Kaleen.

Rugmark, an international nonprofit organization that has enlisted 145 manufacturers from India and Nepal, monitors production and uses fees paid to it to finance three schools in Nepal and India.

Kaleen, which is promoted by the government of India in collaboration with the carpet industry, requires that every exporter contribute 0.25 percent of the export price of each rug to the program and register every loom in return for the Kaleen label. The money raised is used for schools.

Only the winsome, smiley-face Rugmark label certifies that products are made without child labor.

“We guarantee to the public that we have done a thorough inspection,” said Terrence Collingsworth, general counsel for the International Labor Rights Fund in Washington and a member of the Rugmark board. “If you want to sell rugs in the United States, you’re going to need some kind of certificate.”

But effective monitoring remains the biggest snag. Critics say any retailer offering a blanket guarantee is being naive - at best - given the workload of inspectors.

Rugmark, despite its $1 million budget, has only 18 inspectors who are supposed to make surprise visits to 18,636 looms. Kaleen turns the work of monitoring looms at 2,400 carpet export houses over to an independent Indian research organization with 18 inspectors.

“Labeling programs are futile,” said Chris Walter, project director at Cultural Survival, a nonprofit human-rights organization in Boston. “Labels can and will be bought.”

Elliott Schrage, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s business school who has helped coordinate an effort by the sports equipment industry to stop using children to stitch soccer balls in Pakistan, says that passing laws and affixing labels may not be the best way to help exploited children.

“Without a video camera on every loom in every home where rugs are made,” he said, “there’s no way you can know if children were involved.”

James Tufenkian, an American rug manufacturer who employs some 6,000 weavers in Nepal and who is a board member at Rugmark, says that while Rugmark’s heart is “100 percent in the right place, it’s difficult to know what’s really going on when production is so spread out in the weavers’ homes.”

Ikea does not place any tags on its rugs because “we would have to have people out there all the time watching, and without that, we cannot make a real guarantee,” said Marianne Barner, a manager at Ikea headquarters in Almhult, Sweden. She added that the Ikea chain pays another company to make random visits to looms.

At Pottery Barn, “Our position is that child labor is an issue that we cannot afford to be associated with,” said Patrick Connolly, a vice president. Some Kaleen rugs are evident in its stores, but he said, “Our goal is not to get a label on every rug but to make sure there has been no illegal use of children.”

The new law specifically bans imports made by children in bondage, estimated at $100 million worth of goods each year, for the most part rugs and carpets.

Many observers are sensitive to the issues of Western values applied to foreign cultures.

“I see it as an issue of cultural domination,” said Carol Bier, curator of Eastern Hemisphere collections at the Textile Museum in Washington. “In many cultures the economies are very different from our own. Many are family based, and the setups are very different from documentable child abuse.

“Rug weaving is one of the most perfect examples of a sustainable economy in developing countries. In Turkey virtually every living room will have a loom in it.

“There is pride and delight felt by the whole family with their rugs,” she added, noting that a child well-versed in the art of weaving often has a highly sophisticated grasp of complicated mathematics. “To ban all that could have a devastating effect.”