Today, a large ad caught my eye in the morn­ing paper: A Store with a Story is Open — CLF Store in Amstelveen. It turns out to be the first ‘Child Labour Free Zone’ ini­tia­tive in the Netherlands.

The idea is as sim­ple as it is strong: make sure that your com­pany, store, school, niegh­bour­hood — how­ever you define your ‘zone’- does not sell or use prod­ucts that have come about through exploita­tion of child labour.

Of course child labour is some­thing that noone openly — or per­haps even con­sciously — would like to defend. Or pro­mote. But the sta­tis­tics speak for them­selves: there are a stag­ger­ing 218 mil­lion child labor­ers in the world, right now, in 2009: mean­ing that as many as 1 in 7 chil­dren aged 5 — 17 world­wide work instead of going to school! Let’s not be naive: we prob­a­bly all of us have more cloth­ing, shoes and other things in our house that  some of these kids made. Stuff we have smil­ingly picked up for a euro at a mega-sale, think­ing that we have made a bargain.

Turns out this is part of a major inter­na­tional project spon­sored by the ILO, EU, Alliance 2015 and  inter­na­tional NGOs such as Hives, Oxfam, Amnesty and Unicef, as well as NGOs in Inida. This ini­tia­tive is already around for years, to push for action, to make sure that com­pa­nies and con­sumers act in accor­dance with all these inter­na­tional con­ven­tions that world lead­ers have signed in the last decades, pro­claim­ing the inten­tion to ban child labour. And allow kids to spend their youth where they belon: in school.

Six EU Mem­ber states are listed on the site as hav­ing active projects. He! Six? This is where I start get­ting con­fused. Why not 27?? Why not some non-EU coun­tries also? I’m for instance com­pletely aston­ished to see that Swe­den is not on there. Or the UK. Why?? Can some­body enlighten me, please?

In the mean­time, I want to make a state­ment and a com­mit­ment here and now: the Mum­my­Mug will only ever be man­u­fac­tured by adults, who get a fair pay for their work. And we’ll do our utmost to con­trol any­one who deliv­ers input in our man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion chain that they also have a clean record. 

If this is enough to offi­cially qual­ify as a CLF com­pany, I still have to find out. But I do hope that it means that also we may proudly carry this state­ment logo, and hope­fully also inspire other com­pa­nies up there to also rise to the challenge.

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