In 1996, the International Labor Rights Fund launched a campaign to end the exploitation of child labor in the soccer ball industry. This campaign secured the endorsement of important soccer leagues, city government, youth and children's associations. The campaign also helped encourage the establishment of an international program to move children from soccer ball stitching to schools in Sialkot, Pakistan, where 70% of the world's soccer balls were made.

The World Bank's World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World (WDR) afforded an opportunity for the World Bank to provide leadership on a central issue that faces both its borrowing and non-borrowing member countries: how the increasing competition of countries for the same pool of investment capital, particularly for the purpose of producing manufactured goods, can be reconciled with the interests of workers in industrialized countries and countries at lesser stages of development.