Far more of our flowers come from Colombia, where, according to the International Labor Rights Forum, "child labor has been successfully eradicated in Colombian flower plantations." Only a decade ago, an alarming State Department report on Colombia found that "children as young as 11 years of age work full time in almost every aspect of the cut flower industry." Though child labor is still a significant problem in coffee and sugarcane, getting children off of Colombia's flower plantations was a real success. What happened?

Believe it or not, a significant share of the credit goes to George W. Bush. In 2006, his administration started working with Colombia on a free trade deal, but he made it about more than just trade. The deal would require that Colombia meet and enforce certain worker's rights standards, including on child labor. Colombia, which for years had resisted pressure to improve worker's conditions, happily agreed. And why not? A free trade would be so great for Colombia's economy that ending child labor, allowing stronger unions, and improving basic services were well worth the trade-off. Congress finally approved the deal last year, and it is expected to go into effect by the end of 2012.

Still, even if the U.S. can push to end child labor on Ecuadorian flower plantations the way it did in Colombia, that won't make the industry much friendlier to its workers. Two-thirds of flower workers in both countries suffer from work-related health problems: mostly things like nausea or impaired vision, but sometimes asthma, birth defects, or even miscarriages. Labor rights organizations cite the industry's use of dangerous pesticides. The U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project says that 20% of the pesticides are so toxic that they're either restricted or outright banned in the U.S. and Europe.

Women in Ecuador, who make up half of the country's flower work force, often face abusive conditions at plantations. Of the women interviewed by the International Labor Rights Forum in 2005, 55% said they'd been subject to sexual harassment at work and 19% that they'd been forced to have sex with a supervisor or coworker. This means that 5.7% of flowers you see for sale today were cut by women who'd been sexually harassed, and 2.0% cut by women who were forced to sleep with someone at work.

The conditions aren't as bad in Colombia, but women are routinely fired if they become pregnant. One NGO says that, every day, their office receives an average of two women who've lost their flower-cutting jobs after being discovered as pregnant.

A reality of our globalized economy is that rich countries buy lots of things from poor countries, and that poor countries tend to treat their workers a lot worse. That's not because poor countries need to abuse their workers in order to compete -- practices like child labor are actually a net loss for the economy. It's because, among many other reasons, they tend to have weaker court systems and frail labor unions, meaning that workers have a harder time fighting abusive employers, and wages are often so low that hungry parents have little choice but to send their children to get jobs. Employers have little incentive to improve.