Now we are learning that fashionable trainers were crafted by children in grim circumstances in Laos or the Philippines.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO), an arm of the United Nations, has just published a report outlining these horrors and urging steps the world should take to suppress child labour. It says that one in six children are at work between their sixth and 17th birthdays. The occurrence of child labour seems a good barometer of local poverty.
The ILO's arguments are more than moral outrage - they also say the children are of less economic value without decent schooling.
I don't contest the good intentions of these arguments. I'm sure I'd be pained if I saw children in workshops in Cambodia or Somalia. Yet for the ILO's economic literacy, I give low marks: suppressing child labour would only deepen misery.
In its foggy way, the ILO argues parents should be paid the equivalent of their child's