Slaves for Fashion.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Viewpoint essay

It was enough to make you vomit all over your new denim jacket. Gap has been caught using child labor in an Indian sweatshop, and not just child labor--child slaves. As extensively reported in the news, the children, some as young as ten, were worked sixteen-hour days, fed bowls of mosquito-covered rice, and forced to sleep on a roof and use overflowing latrines. Those who slowed down were beaten with rubber pipes, and the ones who cried had oily cloths stuffed in their mouths.

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But let's try to look at this dispassionately--not as a human rights issue but as a PR disaster, ranking right up there with the 1982 discovery of cyanide in Tylenol capsules.

Think of this as a case study in a corporate crisis communication course: How is Gap handling the problem, and could it do better?

This is not the first time Gap has been caught using child labor, but Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America, went on the air to state that the situation was "completely unacceptable" and that the company would "act swiftly."

Two problems here: One, it would have been nice if she had announced that some of the top-producing child slaves would be reassigned to manage Gap outlets in American malls, and that the underperformers would be adopted by Angelina Jolie.

The other, more serious, problem is that Hansen got defensive about child labor.

This is the mistake Kathie Lee Gifford made in 1996. When accused of using child labor in Honduras to manufacture her Kathie Lee line of clothing, Gifford broke into tears on TV.

Maybe Hansen meant to cover herself by saying that Gap would not "ever, ever condone any child laborer making our garments" rather than saying the company does not condone child labor itself. We already knew, from the rubber pipes and oily cloths, that Gap does not condone much from its child laborers.

Hansen underestimated the potential support for a full-throated defense of child labor. More and more American children are tried and punished as adults today. And the ubiquitous conservative pundit William Kristol will surely be enthusiastic, considering his recent--though possibly facetious--statement that "whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea."

The core of the argument, though, is that anyone who opposes child labor has not witnessed its opposite, which is child unemployment and idleness.

Hansen claims to be a mother herself, so I wonder how often she has...