I don't believe consumer choice is the only agency we have. Can you imagine any others?
Faced with child-slavery they benefit from: "<shrug> Jeez, I just don't know, guess it's inevitable <shrug>, I'm sure they're better off as slaves... <shrug>"
These people buy, sell and take children by force employing tactics such as threats, violence and (gang) rape. They then traumatize, abuse, kill and use force to secure their profit.
Understand that children and families are not weighing the option as "send my kid to a factory or starve". It is "I just got murdered / will be murdered if these people don't take my kid" or "I simply want to sell my child for cash".
While this child labor could be performed by abducted children, it's also possible that it's performed willingly by children to pay for their school uniforms or supplies, rather than drop out of school. [0].pdf discusses this sort of thing.
[0]: http://www.oeko.de/oekodoc/1294/2011-419-en.pdf (PDF link)
The typical steps: have people mutually educate you (with great respect for their time), team up, act.
A lot of these different topics are ultimately related. So acting on one applies to a web of things.
As I pointed out elsewhere, they can make more money with greater physical safety if we only changed the laws to allow for certain work involving camera phones. I'm pretty sure their clientele would even provide the phones to the children at no cost.
>What's an action you would suggest to improve things?
What about the one I suggested? It isn't perfect, but the children are physically safer and will make more money and get a phone with internet access out of the deal.
What's needed is an innovation to inject a more reliable 3rd party to deal with externalities, like Amnesty International would be one of many possible such contra parties.
Or redistribute 99% of the top 1% wealth, and give it to the bottom x% such that suddenly there's only middle class and better. What that does is poor are no longer so poor that they always have to say yes to getting one more dime, they'd have the option to say no to things like digging in a dangerous mine. That doesn't mean digging in a dangerous mine becomes illegal, it means it becomes expensive, maybe $40 an hour instead of 5 cents a day.
That is in no way how that works.
Like many other social problems, other actors are governments putting regulations (both in the consuming and the producing ones), organizations pushing information (both cultural and products-related), and I guess others.
Ultimately, changes start from the "lower" level, either in the form of consumer choice, or individuals who turn into organizations, who pushes for regulations/informations/etc.
In real-world, of course, there are other facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA8000
or provide tax incentives for such certified companies
Regulation. But large corporations are generally adverse to government meddling in their business (for reasons that make sense from their point of view). Said corporations usually have some form of investment into the pockets of people drafting those laws and/or have ways to pressure governments into not putting them in place (threats of layoffs, threats of indirect economic disadvantages against similar corporations in other areas of the world).
Back to square one for us consumers if we cannot count on elected officials to control the behavior of their biggest manufacturing champions, we either accept that there are children in developing countries working so that we can get fancy toys in conditions that we'd rather not thing about or we stop playing into the game altogether. But then again I am part of that problem and I realize that nothing is that easy and black and white. Those are complicated issues.
If suddenly, a given country would, say, increase minimum wage and mandate safety conditions, it would increase the risk of losing market share. That's just how it works - only a small fraction of the production/consumption chain gives weight to the sources of the goods.
Of course, that doesn't imply that regulation doesn't work; I'm saying that by itself, it's not going to work.
Of course the price of goods will increase, and then the rubber will meet the road. Do we care more about our "things", or people half way around the world being *pulled out of squalor?
There is no reason such laws cannot be implemented where they currently aren't.
We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor, but we don't.
In countries like Congo there are probably quite a few.
> We also have the ability to stop US based companies from selling products produced by foreign child labor
Laws only works when the society can enforce them and it doesn't mean police, social workers and the likes those are supposed to catch outliers not to enact reality. When society can't enforce laws/norms case and point children in low social economic environments laws break down and mean nothing.
Child labor laws might look like they prevent mass scale exploitation of children but in reality they don't, we stopped using child labor for the same reason we stopped using slave labor and it wasn't our morality but rather the simply practical truth that not only we afford to do so but they also in many cases are a liability.
The US industry has no child labor because it has not place for child labor, children can't be professionals most manufacturing is high end the physical labor is mostly automated and cheap "illegal" labor is available for the few tasks that children might still be able to fill (and if you really look into US textile sweatshops and the agriculture industry you'll still find child labor).
If the US had the same industrial landscape as the Congo or any other underdeveloped nation no matter what the so called moral compass of its population would point at, no matter if it would have democracy and all that it would have child labor that's just the reality we live in. We exploit every resource we have in the most efficient way possible, the locomotive and industrial revolutions made slave labor obsolete and the technological revolution made child labor obsolete both of those are fairly closely tied as when you need educated people not only to steer your economy but to drive it on every level they simply aren't compatible.
Better off spending your money on education programs than on pointless processes which will be circumvented.
They get paid $0.25 for a job that an adult would have demanded $1.00 for. Had we banned child labor, the adult would've had the job, the child wouldn't have needed the work as badly (as their parent now has a better job), and we would be paying slightly more over hear.
Let us not pretend that we are doing them some service by exploiting them. (If you really want to say we are helping them by exploiting them, then how about we consider ways these children can make more money with less risk of dismemberment and only needing a weak internet connection and a cheap phone with a camera...)