Muhammad Mohsin is eight years old. He works fulltime making surgical instruments, grinding and polishing German stainless steel castings in a Pakistani workshop filled with poisonous metal dust. He works with no hand or eye protection. The finished instruments say "Made in Germany."

Muhammad brings home 700 rupees per month, the equivalent of about $13.50 per month, which is far below even Pakistan's low minimum wage of 1,650 rupees.

He doesn't go to school so there's no way out for him. He will probably be condemned to struggle in poverty all his life.

American health care institutions are the biggest customers for the scissors, scalpels and other instruments made by Muhammad and 7,700 other children in the city of Sialkot, the center of a surgical instruments industry that supplies a significant share of the world market.

Now the world's trade unions including the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals have launched a campaign to help Muhammad and his young co-workers.

"Child labor is simply wrong. Children belong in schools, not in factories," said Ann Twomey, vice chair of the FNHP program and policy council at a Capitol Hill press conference announcing the drive. "Child labor undermines children's futures and it undermines the continuing struggle to ensure safe working conditions and fair pay for all workers."

Twomey was joined by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, the presidents of SEIU and AFSCME and Hans Engelberts, the general secretary of Public Services International, the confederation of public sector unions that is coordinating the drive.

Engelberts has contacted nine major American suppliers of surgical instruments. Only four responded. Those who did, including Johnson & Johnson and Baxter International, said they don't do business with workshops that use child labor. But Engelberts said it's essential for companies to agree to a monitoring system. "Nobody is using child labor if you believe them," he said.

The campaign's goal is to get the big, multinational companies that sell surgical instruments to work with their Pakistani suppliers to phase out child labor and expand children's access to education and vocational training.

FNHP and the other health care unions plan to ask hospitals and other health care institutions to join the campaign. In Italy, unions and employers are jointly sponsoring a United Nations project to stop child labor in the Pakistani surgical instruments industry.

Children and the global economy

Muhammad Mohsin is one of 15 million child laborers worldwide who produce export goods for the global market. The exploitation of children is a growing problem. As trade barriers tumble, multinational corporations can search the world for the cheapest workers to perform unskilled labor.

Trade unions are pressing governments to require that imported goods be made under conditions that meet minimum standards such as workplace safety, the right of workers to organize, and no child labor.

Last summer, the International Labor Organization unanimously agreed to a new treaty banning the worst forms of child labor--slavery, prostitution, pornography, drug trafficking, forced military service and work that is harmful to health, safety or morals. The Pakistani children would probably be covered under this new treaty because their work is dangerous.

The United States has failed to ratify earlier ILO conventions against child labor that were broader in scope. The unions hope that the narrow focus of the new treaty will help win Senate approval. President Clinton has submitted the treaty to the Senate and has pledged to fight for it.