From Human Rights Watch: US: End Child Labor in the Fields:
The Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act) would update US law to ensure that all working children are protected equally. Please contact your Congressional Representative to ask them to support this important bill.
Working Away Their Childhoods: Young Farmworkers Robbed of Rights:
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.
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.
h/t Omaha Steve at DU
