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“OUR DOMESTIC CHILD LABOR LAWS SHOULD BE REFORMED SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE REPORTS ON PROBLEMS OF CHILD LABOR IN AGRICULTURE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E2303-E2305 on Nov. 8, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
OUR DOMESTIC CHILD LABOR LAWS SHOULD BE REFORMED SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE
REPORTS ON PROBLEMS OF CHILD LABOR IN AGRICULTURE
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HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Monday, November 8, 1999
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share with my colleagues in the House an article written by Gayle Forman which appeared in the October 1999 edition of Seventeen Magazine. The article, entitled ``We Are Invisible,'' is about one of this country's ugly secrets--children laboring in our country's fields, harvesting the produce that all of us eat, and working under deplorable and backbreaking conditions which take a toll of their health and education. In her excellent article, Ms. Forman writes about the challenges facing children and families who work in the fields in trying to scrape by on meager wages and appalling working conditions. Since most of my colleagues are not avid readers of Seventeen, I want to call their attention to this article and the very serious issue it raises.
Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States, but children are still allowed to work legally at very young ages for unlimited hours before and after school in extremely dangerous and unhealthy conditions. As many as 800,000 children work in agriculture in this country, picking the fruits and vegetables that end up in our grocery stores, either as fresh or processed fruits and vegetables.
Children who work in our Nation's fields are killed and suffer life-
changing injuries. Recently, a 9-year-old was accidently run over by a tractor and killed while working in a blueberry field in Michigan. A 13-year-old was knocked off a ladder while he was picking cherries in Washington State and was run over by a trailer being pulled by a tractor. A 17-year-old was sprayed twice by pesticides in 1 week in Utah while picking peaches and pruning apple trees and died of a massive brain hemorrhage.
Children who work in agriculture often do so at the expense of their education--and education is critical to help these children break out of the cycle of poverty. Mr. Speaker, we have a responsibility for the future of these children, which means their education, and we have a responsibility to protect them from job exploitation.
Under current Federal law, children working in agriculture receive less protection than children working in other industries because of many outdated and outmoded exceptions included in our laws. For example, children age 12 and 13 can work unlimited hours outside of school in nonhazardous agricultural occupations but are prohibited from working in nonagricultural occupations. It is illegal for a 13-year-old to be paid to do clerical work in an air-conditioned office, but the same child can legally be paid to pick strawberries under the blazing summer sun. In some instances, children as young as 10 years old are working in the fields harvesting our Nation's produce.
Mr. Speaker, our laws are inconsistent and out of date with regard to the long-term changes in agriculture that have taken place. Children working in agriculture no longer merit such separate and unequal protection. The agricultural industry is no longer dominated by family farmers who look out for their own children's health and well-being as they work in agriculture. Today, major agricultural conglomerates control much of the production and the work force in agriculture, and children who work in the fields are hired laborers. Given these and other changes in our Nation's agricultural economy, I ask why children in agriculture should be treated differently than children working in other industries.
Mr. Speaker, earlier this year, I introduced H.R. 2119, the ``Young American Workers' Bill of Rights Act'' which would provide equal standards of protection for children who work in agriculture and children who work in other sectors of our Nation's economy. The ``Young American Workers Bill of Rights'' would take children under the age of 14 out of the fields. It would create an exception only for family farms, where children would still be able to assist their parents on farms owned or operated by their family.
Mr. Speaker, last year, our colleagues, Congressman Henry Waxman and Bernard Sanders and I released an important GAO report entitled
``Children Working in Agriculture'' which found that current legal protections, the enforcement of those protections, and educational opportunities for children working in our fields is grossly inadequate. The GAO reports that hundreds of thousands of children working in agriculture suffer severe consequences for their health, physical well-
being and academic achievement. There are also weaknesses in enforcement and data collection procedures, with the result that child labor violations are not being detected.
Mr. Speaker, as a result of this article which appeared in Seventeen Magazine, young people around our Nation have written to me during passage of legislation to deal with these problems. I ask that the article be placed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to read the article and support meaningful comprehensive domestic child labor reforms, specifically including adoption of H.R. 2119, the ``Young American Workers Bill of Rights.''
(By Gayle Forman)
We are Invisible
Imagine that it's summer and instead of sleeping in and then hanging at the pool, you wake up at 5 a.m. You get dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and head out to a dusty field. There you spend the day bent over at the waist, plucking cucumbers that grow on prickly, low-lying vines in the ground. You do this alongside your family, throughout the day, taking a half-hour break for lunch. Imagine how it feels by afternoon, when the sun's glaring down on you, making you sweat so much in your heavy clothes that your body is dripping and your shoes are as wet as if you'd stepped in a puddle. Your hands swelter in gloves, but if you took them off you'd be exposed to pesticides or cut by thorns. Imagine that you work like this, sometimes for more than 12 hours, before heading back to the trailer or tent that is your temporary home. You shower, eat and go to sleep. The next morning you do it all over again.
One more thing: Imagine that you're nine years old.
Janie doesn't have to imagine this life. The 18-year-old from Weslaco, Texas, began working in the fields when she was nine. Along with her parents, two brothers and a sister, Janie is a farmer--but not the kind most of us think of. They don't live in a farmhouse or till their own fields. Rather, they're migrant farmworkers who crisscross the country from spring to fall, traveling from crop to crop, picking the fruits and vegetables that wind up on our tables.
In spite of all the technological advances in this country, a majority of crops--including the oranges in your juice and the pickles on your burger--must be harvested by hand. And many of those hands belong to kids. The United Farm Workers union estimates that as many as 800,000 children work in agriculture in this country--and most of these kids are U.S. residents or citizens.
Dangerous--and legal
Here's the thing. Such work is not against the law. Under our child labor rules, a 13-year-old cannot work in a clothing store after school, but she or he can labor in a field. In fact, it's legal for children as young as 10 to hand-harvest crops for five hours a day if their parents and the farmers for whom they're working get permission from the U.S. Department of Labor. These laws may seem strange, but in the 1930s, when child labor statutes were set up to protect children, exemptions were made so kids could work on their families' farms. Today, however, most child agricultural laborers are migrant or seasonal workers who toil on someone's else's land.
Some families--whether ignorant of or just ignoring the laws--will let really young kids work legally. ``I've seen children as young as six picking with their families,'' says Diane Mull, executive director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs (AFOP), an organization that provides support for migrant farmworkers. It's not that fieldworker parents don't love their kids. ``Parents are faced with tough choices. Either they're going to take their kids to the field, to help make as much money as possible, or they won't be able to put food on the table,'' says Mull.
She's not exaggerating. Migrant farmworkers are among the poorest people in the country--the average family earns less than $10,000 a year. Janie understands that bleak economic reality all too well. ``When I first had to work, I was upset. I didn't want to do it,'' says the bright-eyed brunette, who loves salsa music and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. ``My parents told me it was necessary if we wanted to meet our expenses. When I looked at it that way, I wanted to help.''
If parents were more aware of the dangers, they might be less willing to have their kids work on farms. Kids who labor in fields account for about 11 percent of working children in the United States--and 40 percent of all on-the-job deaths of kids happen to that small group. And then there are the pesticides: No one's sure what effect the chemicals have on kids because studies only look at how pesticides affect full-grown male adults. But a chemical that doesn't hurt a 150-pound man may be toxic to an 80-pound girl. And long-term exposure to pesticides has been linked to a bunch of health problems, from skin rashes to leukemia.
Uprooted
The threat of danger and disease is just one of the hardships of being a picker. As a migrant family follows the ripening crops, it's not unusual for them to live in several different places in one year. Rosa, 18, has been ``moving around since I was a baby.'' She and her family do the West Coast route--picking in California from January to May, then traveling up to Washington to harvest berries and apples until November. Conditions in the camps where Rosa lives aren't as comfortable as the trailers Janie stayed in. When Rosa travels, she, her parents, and four siblings usually live in a van or in tents near the fields. Meals are cooked over a campfire. When the season's over, the family heads to Mexico for November and December.
This nomadic existence can totally mess up your academic life. When Rosa leaves California in May, she also has to leave school early. Come September, she's usually in Washington, meaning she has to start classes there. She misses six weeks of school when she's in Mexico, too. Every time she switches schools, she tries to catch up, but she still gets shoved in remedial classes. Plus her constant state of flux means that she's forever the new girl. ``It's hard. I'm always crying on the first day of school,'' Rosa says. ``I just sit in a corner, and after two weeks in one place, we move again.'' It can be a lonely life, and lots of migrant kids say they'd rather stick to themselves than build relationships only to sever them. ``I would like to have friends,'' says Rosa. ``But it's hard to make them. And I can't do the kinds of things you do with friends because I don't have money.''
Rosa hopes to graduate high school and become a nurse, but those gaps in her education mean she has missed out on more than a full social life. The director of her school's migrant program thinks Rosa will have a tough time making it to nursing school. Even so, it's not impossible for migrant teens to succeed. In spite of her stop-and-go schooling, Janie has managed to kick serious academic butt, acing her honors classes. After an essay that she'd written about being a migrant caught the eye of people at AFOP, Janie was selected to attend an International Labor Organization conference in Switzerland in June. Last spring she graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA. She was set to go to Ohio State University--and then her scholarship fell through. Anxious to get on with her education, Janie enlisted in the army rather than wait to reapply for scholarships.
Money doesn't grow on trees
If Janey is a success story among migrant teens, she's also an exception. A near majority of migrants--45 to 55 percent, says Mull--don't graduate from high school. ``There are all these incentives for the kids not to stay in school,'' says Mull. ``They have the disruption in the flow of education. Some parents want older kids to work full-time. [In Mexico, where many migrant families are from, it's not uncommon for kids to leave school at 15.] Once they [these kids] start earning money, the motivation is to make more money.''
Cash was definitely on Rosalino's mind when he dropped out of school. Up until eighth grade, Rosalino, 18, lived and went to school in Mexico. After he and his family moved to Florida when he was 13, Rosalino quit school so he could help his family earn money. ``During the winter I work in strawberry fields in Florida,'' he explains, sitting under a weeping willow tree at a migrant camp in Michigan. ``In June my father and brothers and sisters drive two days to Michigan, where we pick until October.'' At the height of the season, Rosalino clears $200 a week--most of which goes to his family. That money must tide them over during the slow winter months, when jobs are sparse. The average migrant farmer works only 26 weeks a year, and many can't collect unemployment during the off-season.
When Rosalino ponders his future, he hopes he'll be able to shake the mud off his boots and leave the fields. ``I don't want to work on farms all my life,'' he says. In his pursuit of a better career, however, he's hindered by a host of handicaps. He doesn't speak English, though he's lived in the United States for six years, and he doesn't have too many skills under his belt other than fieldwork.
It's kids like Rosalino who worry children's advocates like California Representative Tom Lantos. The migrant life is usually a prison of poverty, Lantos says, and education is the key to unlocking that jail. ``These children won't have any future 10, 20, 30 years from now if they are deprived of their education, if their total work experience is farm labor,'' says Lantos. ``We must provide them with an education and an opportunity to develop their potential.''
labor against labor
Unlike a lot of countries that turn a blind eye to child labor, the United States has been cracking down on farmers who employ underage kids. But, say advocates like Lantos, to really keep children out of the fields, we must change the laws so that it's no longer legal for them to be there. Lantos recently proposed a Young American Workers' Bill of Rights, which aims to close the loopholes in child labor laws that make it legal for kids and young teens to work long hours in agriculture. Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman says she's also trying ``to see how [current child labor laws] can be strengthened.''
But banning child labor and actually stopping it from happening are two very different things. ``We find children working in the fields in this country for many reasons besides a disregard for the law,'' says Secretary Herman.
``We have to address the root causes--chronic poverty, lack of child care, underemployment.'' And the government is trying. The federal government funds Migrant Head Start and other education programs that give kids a place to go during the day while their parents pick, and provide them with a school away from school, so they can continue their studies when their families are on the road. President Clinton has allocated more cash for education programs as well as job training projects that give kids (and adults) alternatives to the fields. There have also been efforts to make parents aware of the dangers of farmwork and the importance of keeping kids in school.
Ultimately, though, migrant teens and their families will find it a rough road to hoe, says Mull. Major improvement in conditions would mean, among other things, paying adult pickers more so there would be less pressure to make kids work. But increasing wages could raise produce prices--and few consumers relish the idea of shelling out more money for a head of lettuce. Maybe if people understood the plight of migrant teens, they'd be willing to pay a few extra bucks a year to help, but, as Janie says, migrants are pretty much invisible to many Americans. ``I've met people who are running the country who don't know about the migrant life,'' says Janie. ``Most people don't even know we exist.''
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