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Child Labor
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Children in the Fields v
AFOP's Children in the
Fields campaign strives to improve the quality of life of migrant and
seasonal farmworker children by advocating for enhanced educational
opportunities and the elimination of discriminatory federal child labor laws
in agriculture.
 Since 1997, AFOP has
advocated for stronger federal child labor laws through its Children in the Fields
campaign. It has partnered with the
Child Labor Coalition, the National Consumers League, and other concerned
parties to publicize the
plight of this hidden population. It has used its extensive network of
member agencies to
inform the public and advocate for federal legislation that would
strengthen the child labor safeguards in agriculture so that they are just
as protective as
those in all other industries. AFOP has conducted field investigations that
have uncovered children as young as nine working
in the fields. Most Americans still envision farms as safe, nurturing
places. The Children in the Fields campaign has shown that the myth of the
agrarian idyll does not extend to the children of America's migrant and
seasonal farmworkers.
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Hundreds
of thousands of children work in the fields in the United States.
No one knows how many children work in agriculture in the United States.
In 1998, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that
300,000 youths aged 15-17 worked in agriculture. The National
Agriculture Statistics Service released a report indicating that 431,730
youths aged 12-17 were hired for agricultural work in 1998. No studies
have been done on the number of child farmworkers under age 12.
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Most of
the children working in agriculture are Latino.
An estimated 85 percent of
migrant and seasonal farm workers are racial minorities. In some
communities, 99 percent of the farmworkers are Latino. An increasing
number of immigrant youths between the ages of 14 and 17 are migrating
to the United States from Mexico and Central America to perform farm
labor. In 1997, a Department of Labor report estimated that there were
55,000 of these child laborers traveling without the protection of their
immediate families.
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 These
children are dropping out of school at an alarming rate.
Half the youths who regularly perform farm work never graduate from high
school. Report authors found that children in agriculture work, on
average, 30 hours a week, often during times of the year when school is
in session. Long hours in the field make it difficult to succeed in
school.
Elda Hernandez, now 19, the seventh
child of a farmworker family, fell so far behind in her school work,
she dropped out of school at 16. When she was six, her family worked
in an area of California that was so remote, she and her siblings
ended up missing an entire school year. “There wasn’t anything there.
My parents couldn’t take us to school,” she recalled. Elda started
helping her family in the fields when she was in the fifth grade,
missing two months of school to pick cherries and raspberries. By the
time she was 12, her wrists hurt too much to work. She resumed work a
year later, continuing to miss the last two weeks of each school year.
Poor grades her freshman year, partly caused by missing school to do
farm work, may have contributed to her decision to drop out as a
sophomore. Later, she returned to school and, like many farmworker
children, valiantly struggled to catch up with her course work.
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 Children
working in agriculture face serious health threats.
Children account for about 20 percent of all farm fatalities. Between
1992 and 2000, 42 percent of all work-related deaths of minors occurred
in agriculture. According to the Government Accountability Office, in
1998, more than 100,000 children and teens are injured on farms each
year. Farmworkers regularly work in fields treated with pesticides—some
of which are known carcinogens. Child farmworkers are exposed to the
same pesticide levels as adults, yet likely face a far greater health
risk. In March 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated
that children under two may be 10 times more vulnerable to cancer from
chemicals and pesticides that cause gene mutations. Children ages three
to 15 may experience at least three times the cancer threat the same
chemicals pose to adults, said the EPA. Yet, the Agency has not
established additional protections for working children under the Worker
Protection Standard, the body of regulations that limits farmworkers’
exposure to recently sprayed fields.
In June 1998, a 17-year-old migrant
farmworker named José Antonio
Casillas died suddenly of brain hemorrhage. The youth had mistakenly
been sprayed with organophosphate pesticides twice in the previous
week.
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 Farmworker
children are not being afforded the same protection as other working
children.
Federal laws permit a child aged 13 to work in 100-degree heat in a
strawberry field, but do not permit that child to work in an
air-conditioned office. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) the
legal age to perform most farm work is only 12 if a parent accompanies
the working child. Children who are 14 or older can work unlimited hours
in the fields before or after school hours. The same law requires a
minimum age of 14 years for non-agricultural work and limits such work
to 3 hours per day while school is in session.
Furthermore, federal laws allow children
to perform hazardous work in agriculture at age 16, while the minimum
age for hazardous work in all other industries is 18.
Farmworker children should not receive less protection from labor laws
because they must work in agriculture—an industry that no longer
deserves sweeping exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act,
legislation that was enacted almost 70 years ago when our national
economy was vastly different.
In July 2002, the Association of
Farmworker Opportunity Programs interviewed a group of 15 farmworkers
in Texas. Most of the workers were between the ages of 10 and 16.
Ten-year-old Robert Aguilar worked five hours a day to help support
his family. Another youth, Gilberto, said he was 13 and had been
working cotton for five years. Four of the group had started farm work
at 10 or younger. Sixty percent had missed some school because of farm
work.
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We must
provide support services to farmworker families and children.
Many children work with their families or play in the fields because
their families cannot find or afford childcare. There are federal
programs for migrant youths—Migrant Head Start and Migrant
Education—that need to be fully funded so that all migrant and seasonal
farmworker families have access to safe and affordable child care. A
study in 2001 found that only 19 percent of the eligible migrant
children and 2 percent of the eligible seasonal children in our country
were being served. This compares to a 60 percent national rate of
participation.
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We must
ensure that farmworker families make a living wage.
Many migrant children work to supplement family income. In 2002,
researchers found that 57 percent of farmworkers earned less than
$12,500. The average farmworker family made between $15,000 and $17,500,
well below the federal poverty level for families of four or more
people.
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We must
act now to protect child farmworkers.
It’s time to address the unequal treatment of child farmworkers under
the law. The 109th Congress considered legislation to remedy the problem
but did not act.
Please urge members of the 110th Congress to revise the Fair Labor
Standards Act to remove exemptions that allow children working in
agriculture to work longer hours at younger ages and to perform
hazardous work at younger ages than children working in other
industries. |
Please contact Heather Anderson at
anderson@afop.org
for more information. |
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