Toronto author Jane Springer, who spent a decade working with UNICEF in India, Mozambique, and Nepal, has written a comprehensive, accessible, thoughtful, and direct book that should be in every school and public library in North America. Editor Shelley Tanaka and designer Michael Solomon complete the stellar team who created this attractive book.

Springer begins with the murder of Iqbal Masih, a 12-year-old Pakistani carpet worker shot to death outside his grandmother’s house on Easter Sunday, 1995. Iqbal, sold into a sweatshop at five, had become an activist in the Bonded Labour Liberation Front and was honoured by the International Labor Organization and other international bodies. In his memory, children’s groups in the U.S. and Canada began to organize projects, Internet sites, and campaigns such as Canadian Craig Keilberger’s Free the Children, and Massachusetts’ Broad Meadows School’s A Bullet Can’t Kill a Dream, which built a school in Iqbal’s village. Teachers may want to find the kids’ web sites, which are mentioned but not cited: the Child Labour Coalition (http://www.essential.org/clc/home.html) and the Free the Children Foundation (http://www.freethechildren.org/).

But this is not just a simplistic treatment of the emotional reaction to Iqbal’s murder. The book’s strength lies in its intelligent and comprehensive examination of the complexities of child labour in the global economy and the author’s ability to separate emotion from political analysis. Springer directly examines the reasons for child labour, explaining links between the education of women, shifting market economies, transnational corporations, and political corruption. And she analyzes in depth the various categories of child labourers – from sweatshop workers and fast food servers to sex industry workers and migrant labourers.

All countries have child labour laws that are not enforced, so this book proposes political and practical solutions. Campaigns that label items made under inspected conditions, such as Foul Ball (the soccer ball industry in Pakistan) and Rugmark (the carpet industry), are profiled as positive examples of practical international initiatives.

The involvement of school children in the problem of child labour is inspiring and justifies the subtitle “a book for kids.” It would be interesting to use this in a curriculum unit on the Industrial Revolution. But a book about exploited children should not be left in the ghetto of the children’s trade list. The important step is to take this book from the classroom or library and have grown-ups read it. They’re the ones with the power.