Victor was only 11 when he went to work
full time. At that age he could not legally work in an office or a store. Instead,
he weeded, picked, and packed collards and kale on a Michigan farm.*
“I was a little kid,” he told me. “I
was used to playing with toys. They took me to their fields and I was like,
‘Where am I?’”
Although the legal age to work on this
size of farm is 12, Victor’s parents were deeply in debt and the farm’s
operator did not check his age.
The following year Victor was given a
knife to cut greens. “Week after week I was cutting myself,” he said.
“My hands have a lot of stories. There
are scars all over.” When I interviewed him last summer, Victor was 17 and had
been promoted to driving a tractor, typically working from seven in the morning
until eight at night.
Victor still turns over his check to
his parents. “I can’t afford to miss any day [of work],” he told me. “Half of
my family depends on the money I earn. My money counts.”
Right now, hundreds of thousands of
children like Victor are working for hire on farms across the United States—weeding,
detasseling, harvesting, and packing our fruits and vegetables, as well as
tobacco, cotton, and other crops.
Most are Hispanic and most are poor.
Because of an exception in the federal child
labor law, they can work for hire in agriculture at far younger ages, for far
longer hours, and in far more hazardous conditions than other working children.
In the last year, I’ve interviewed dozens of children who worked on farms in 14
states across the country. For too many, farmwork means an early end to childhood,
long hours at exploitative wages, and risks to their health and sometimes their
lives.
These children typically
start at age 11 or 12 working ten or more hours a day during summers and
weekends, and sometimes on school days. Many start earlier, though—I
interviewed some as young as seven. Remarkably, federal law provides no minimum age for work on small farms with
parental permission, and children ages 12 and up may work for hire on any sized
farm. Outside of agriculture, children must be at least 14. Even then the jobs
they can perform and their hours are tightly restricted.
The legal loophole for agriculture,
which dates back to a more rural era, is particularly incongruous because farmwork
is the most hazardous occupation open to children. Working with sharp tools and
heavy machinery, being exposed to pesticides, climbing up tall ladders, lugging
heavy buckets, children get hurt and sometimes die.
Under federal law, child farmworkers
can do jobs at 16 that the U.S. Department of Labor deems “particularly hazardous”
for children, such as driving a fork lift or operating a chainsaw, that no one
under 18 can do anywhere else.
Young farmworkers
drop out of school at four times the national rate, and for the 40 percent who
are migrant workers, rates are probably higher. Victor doesn’t get home to Texas
until early November, missing several months of school each year. He was far
behind in credits and didn’t know if he would graduate.
Children who try to combine working and
going to school often find that school pays the price, in part because, unlike
all other jobs, there are no limits on how many hours children can work in agriculture
outside of school hours. Without a diploma, child workers are left with few options besides a
lifetime of farmwork and the poverty that accompanies it.
There is often considerable pressure on
these children to work because their parents are overwhelmingly poor: total annual
farmworker family income averaged less than $17,500 in 2005-2006.
The Labor Department enforces minimum
wage laws poorly, and the law denies farmworkers overtime pay. They are often forced
to spend their own money on tools, gloves, and drinking water that their
employers should provide by law. They
typically receive no paid sick or leave days, no health insurance, and have no
job security. Victor told me that he and his relatives were seriously injured
in a car accident the previous summer while being transported from one field to
the next. The next day they returned to work to avoid missing a paycheck.
In addition to
financial pressure, the fact that the work is legal presents it as a legitimate
choice. But several mothers expressed regret. One said she had stolen her
11-year-old daughter’s childhood.
It’s time to
eliminate the dangerous double standard for farmworker children and ensure that
their work does not jeopardize their health, safety, and education. The
Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (CARE), H.R. 3564, pending in
Congress, would set the same minimum age and maximum hour standards for
children working for hire in agriculture that already apply to every other
industry. Better enforcement of existing rules is also critical.
Even Victor would
agree. His future children, he hopes, are “never going to set foot in the
fields.”
Zama
Coursen-Neff is deputy director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human
Rights Watch and the researcher and author of Fields of Peril: Child Labor in US Agriculture, a new Human Rights Watch report.
*Name has been changed to protect the
individual’s privacy.
Viewpoints in this section solely represent the authors’ opinions and not the opinions of "Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity."