Today Is...World Day Against Child Labour

In my local Tesco store, they sell jeans for £4. Not particularly nice jeans but they seem popular in these financially challenging times. I'm not privy to how much Tesco pay for these jeans or where they come from, but they obviously pay the distributor less than £4 per pair in order to make a profit, and the distributor pays the factory and the factory pays the jeans makers who by the time the money gets to them, and everyone else has taken a slice of the £4, must be paid a pittance to make the jeans in the first place.
As with clothes, we also enjoy food and without it we'd all die horribly but short of it growing in the ground, we don't worry too much about where it comes from or the farm working kids out in the fields, learning the virtues of menial labor instead of wasting their time playing with their friends or going to school and that's not in some third world country, in America farm workers can be under 12 and can legally be paid less than the minimum wage.
Happy with that iphone in your pocket? The Chinese mining company Huayou was reprimanded by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) after it has discovered children as young as four mining for cobalt.
Cobalt is a vital component in the batteries for mobile phones and the main recipient is Apple who have now told Huayou to suspend all mining until they can be checked to be free of child labour.
Last summer Apple celebrated selling their 1 billionth iphone so there is a very good chance that as they have only just stopped using this supplier, the iphone currently sat on your table was a product of a small child being paid pennies to toil in a cobalt mine.
Worth thinking about next time you moan about your phone's short battery life.