16 cents per hour for 12 hours a day?
Children in other countries work that hard to make you the sneakers, clothing, and sports equipment you use everyday. "Young people need to make our voices heard because we are the number one consumers of products made by children."Abby Krasner, sixteen, of Westminster West, Vermont.
Realizing that businesses in the United States using overseas labor have been fueling this economy and that issue also concerns U.S. jobs, Abby and friends wrote to legislators and to US companies using bonded labor overseas. They boycotted their products. Joining with the International Student Activism Alliance (ISAA) they collected over
1 million signatures on a petition against sweatshop labor.

The result:
1. A new law, the first to ban the importation into the United States of products made with bonded child labor,
passed in both the House and the Senate.
2. One of the largest sportswear companies announced significant changes in its negotiations with foreign manufacturers, setting a higher minimum age for workers as one of its requirements.
Check out
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)
Abby's story is in Teen Power Politics: Make Yourself Heard

They said it couldn't be done... but a 15-year-old DOES bring curbside recycling to Houston!
Against rejections by the mayor, refusals to talk "to a kid" by businesses, Laura Beth Moore proves to the city that recycling is viable AND economic. Houston finally complies ... and puts her on their Waste Department Board,
before she can even drive!

Laura's story is in Teen Power Politics: Make Yourself Heard
Check out The Center for Environmental Citizenship

November 30, l999: The United States wakes up to issues of corporate globalization and
the resultant poverty, loss of national control and cultural loss.
High school students joining with their college affiliates, stream into central Seattle from different campuses
to bring direct action protest (banners, marches & street theater) to the mix of educating the American populace
to the issues of free trade.

Check out the use of nonviolent disobedience and activist resources at The Ruckus Society
The Direct Action Network
and in Teen Power Politics: Make Yourself Heard