Working Away Their Childhoods: Young Farmworkers Robbed of Rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5947/working_away_their_childhoods_young_farm_workers_robbed_of_rights/

Friday May 7 9:50 am

By Michelle Chen

As kids around the country look forward to the start of summer break, it's easy to forget that their mid-year vacation is actually curious relic of an earlier time, when children took time off to help out on the farm. Still, even in the post-industrial age, today's farm sector continues to put kids to work, perpetuating one of the country's last bastions of child labor.


(Photo courtesy Human Rights Watch)

It makes sense to employers: Kids make obedient field hands, their little fingers nimble enough to cull all those tiny berries with maximum efficiency. Moreover, the vast migrant labor force—largely Latino, impoverished and disenfranchised—is ripe for exploitation. But there's a cost of doing this business, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW): disrupted schooling, safety hazards, and the threat of sexual assault, all factor into the opportunity cost of a lost childhood. (See video below.)

The extensive investigation reveals that child labor isn't limited to Dickensian sweatshops in the “third world.” The federal labor laws that govern child farmworkers, moreover, don't recognize that the agricultural sector has moved away from bucolic fields and toward modern-day plantation slavery.

Current U.S. regulations allow children as young as 12 to work on farms, and small farms have no minimum age if the child has parental permission. Toiling alongside their parents under brutal conditions, children are underpaid and exposed to injury and pesticide contamination. Young girls are “exceptionally vulnerable to sexual abuse.” For many, education and play time are impossible luxuries.

How many children work in U.S. fields each year? Due to the migratory and transient nature of the work, it's a difficult question to answer, and data isn't fresh; the HRW report notes that farmers in 2006 reported directly hiring 211,588 children under 18, and that nearly half a million children worked on their family's farm that year. The total number toiling is likely much higher—the government estimates that 9 percent of all farmworkers hired in 2006 were under 18.

Child farm labor clusters in California, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Oregon, and Washington State, though HRW stresses, “Virtually no state is without child labor in agriculture, and certainly no state fails to benefit from children’s farmwork, as the produce that is harvested and packed by youngsters' hands may travel thousands of miles to grocery store shelves.” Even when subsidized by children's wages, annual family incomes still hovered in the poverty range, “between $15,000 and $17,499" on average, according to 2005-2006 data.

FULL story and video at link.