Patusan Trading Company, Inc., does not import rugs produced by the forced labor of children, by bonded laborers, or by any organization judged to employ unsafe or oppressive management.  We import rugs that are produced in conditions which are typical of the local milieu and where the weavers are paid no less than the prevailing wage. 

Oriental rug lore suffers greatly from exaggeration, so it is not surprising that rug production is likewise burdened.  Here are some oriental rug production facts which contradict popular myths:  Virtually all oriental rug weaving is done by adults.  Generally the children participating in rug production work with members of their family, and usually that participation involves chores auxiliary to the actual weaving.  Rugs, the production of which can comprise years of manual labor, are too intricate, embody too much costly material, and are too valuable to be entrusted to the care and production of children.  Of all oriental rug myths, the one most urgently needing redress is the idea that children are commonly and oppressively forced to weave rugs.

Poverty, not rug weaving, threatens the welfare of children.  Oriental rugs are generally woven in economically poor regions where most of the people subsist by farming and raising crops for their own consumption or for sale within the local village.  This agrarian economy is not very different from the American economy at the turn of the last century.  Farmers and villagers produce hand crafts and weave rugs to allay the risks of poor harvests and other natural calamities.  The rug producing countries of India, China, Pakistan, and Nepal have laws prohibiting child labor in industrial settings and, as in the United States, farm workers are exempted from those laws.  As in the United States, farm children help with the chores to learn work skills and to help their families make ends meet financially.  The difference is this: to many rug weavers living in poor countries, their craft carries more in the balance than just monetary rewards; it brings food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education--the essentials for future prosperity. 

A few tragic cases of children being forced to weave rugs, like the historic photographs of American children working in coal mines, have generated world wide attention.  These sad incidents remind us that all compassionate people must be vigilant against such abuses.  The fact that these cases are sensational demonstrates their rarity.  They are rare because parents in rug weaving areas are as concerned for the welfare of their children as are American parents.  To assert or imply that abusive employment of children is culturally accepted by rug weaving societies is, at the very least, untrue; and in fact, it is a bigoted presumption. 

Critics of hand craft production, many of whom willfully ignore economic reality, do great harm to the children in rug weaving villages.  Through their protests, these sheltered critics limit rug weaving families' access to the free markets that create prosperity.  It is an economic fact that, subsequent to rug production, peripheral businesses are spawned such as packaging, shipping, banking, tool making, wool processing, hotels, taxis, restaurants, and on and on.  With these businesses come more jobs, more income, and more hope for the future.  One needs only to look at the history of Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan to find evidence of prosperity grown from hand crafts.  Without hand crafts, rugs among them, emerging countries have little hope for the future.  We should not deny them that hope.