Advocacy Organization Report Calls for Protection of Young Agricultural Workers
Human Rights Watch has issued a report titled “Fields of Peril: Child Labor in US Agriculture” that describes the working conditions facing the nation’s youngest field laborers and calls for changes to federal employment and environmental laws to provide them with greater protections. According to the report, child farmworkers as young as age 12 often work for 10 or more hours per day, five to seven days a week. Some begin working part-time at ages 6 or 7.
Many of the labor law protections for other youth workers apparently do not apply to agricultural workers, and Human Rights Watch reportedly found that many children earn far less than minimum wage, particularly when they are paid for production rather than by the hour and when their employers charge them for tools, gloves and drinking water. They also have higher rates of dropping out of school and experience higher numbers of fatalities than children working other jobs.
Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis reportedly commended the report and said that her department has put illegal child labor on its priority list. “We simply cannot—and this administration will not—stand by while youngsters working on farms are robbed of their childhood,” she said. According to Solis, the agency has added more than 250 field investigators to its staff and planned to add more. The Environmental Protection Agency, also criticized in the report, apparently responded by saying “Many of the concerns mentioned in the Human Rights Watch report are sound.” The agency said it expects to propose amendments to federal worker protection standards by 2012 to better protect children.
A bill introduced in Congress in 2009 with 87 co-sponsors would eliminate discrepancies in child labor laws that exempt agricultural workers, except for those working on family farms, and collect better data on the number of child laborers and their work-related injuries. The proposed legislation is reportedly opposed by the American Farm Bureau; a spokesperson was quoted as saying, “We think it’s going too far to resolve a problem that’s very isolated. At what point do you take away the opportunity for rural youth to get gainful work experience?” See The Associated Press, May 6, 2010.
