CAUSE CELEB

A crusade in search of its 15 minutes of fame sometimes needs a celebrity sacrifice. Zoe Baird gave us immigration reform, Christopher Reeve makes it impossible to ignore spinal-cord research, Magic Johnson lent his charisma to the fight against AIDS. Now the issue of exploited child workers--an ugly story that has become routine--lands in the morning papers and on the evening news because the exploiter suddenly has a perky, famous face. When Kathie Lee Gifford tearfully confessed on her morning talk show last month that yes, her Wal-Mart outfits were made by Honduran girls paid 31[cents] an hour--but she didn't know, she didn't know--it was too good a chance for advocates and activists to miss.

"This gave us an opening to raise the issue in a way we've never had a chance to raise it before," says Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the New York City-based National Labor Committee, a tiny human-rights organization run on a Third World budget. It was Kernaghan's testimony at an April 29 congressional hearing on labor abuses that put Gifford on the griddle. "The fact that major companies are going after these celebrities to be their point persons gives us someone we can wrap our arms around." In fact, that tactic worked so well that last week the lobby Made in the U.S.A. took advantage of the N.B.A. finals to remind consumers that Michael Jordan reportedly earns $20 million a year endorsing Nike sneakers, and to claim that this is more than the total annual payroll for the thousands of Indonesians who help make them. Nike shot back that those shoes are actually made in Taiwan by workers earning an average of $800 a month each. Does Nike exploit workers? "I'm not really aware of that," Jordan told TIME. "My job with Nike is to endorse the product. Their job is to be up on that."

The flaying of celebrities like Gifford and Jordan made it easy to miss the point. For years children have been sold as slaves, blinded or maimed for crying or rebelling or trying to return home, ill-fed, bone-weary, short-lived. They file the scissor blades, mix the gunpowder for the firecrackers, knot the carpets, stitch the soccer balls with needles longer than their fingers. Human-rights groups guess there may be 200 million children around the world, from China to South America, working full time--no play, no school, no chance. All of which raises the question, once the news lands on the front page: How much are we willing to sacrifice the children of other countries to give our children what they want?

The stories were too much for a celebrity who doesn't need the money enough to justify the grief. So Gifford wrote checks and went on Larry King Live and launched a crusade. And the more she succeeds, the clearer it becomes that even the purest consumer can't avoid complicity. The trousers are from Honduras, the orange juice from Brazil, the teddy bear from Thailand. "I like a cheap shirt," admits a Labor Department administrator, "so I'm guilty too."

Americans search for bargains with enduring passion, but it is hard to find them--a handmade rug for only $700--without tiny fingerprints on them somewhere. If child-labor and safety laws were truly enforced, trade experts say, whole industries in many countries would collapse, at great cost to both developing and developed economies.