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US Law Discriminates Against Child Farmworkers
The current US law governing child farmworkers (the Fair Labor Standards Act) was written in 1938 when many families lived on farms, and children who worked in the fields were usually helping their parents farm land that they would eventually inherit. But today, farming is dramatically different. Where once most children in agriculture were working on their own family farms, today migrant workers working as hired hands for commercial enterprises are primarily affected by the law.
Under existing US law, child farmworkers can work at younger ages, for longer hours, and under more hazardous conditions than children in other jobs. This double standard amounts to discrimination against child farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are Latino.
Picking strawberries, Florida. © Diane Mull. Courtesy of IIECL. |
In agriculture:
- children can work as young as age twelve;
- children can work unlimited hours outside of school, even at 3 or 4 a.m.;
- children can engage in hazardous labor beginning at age sixteen.
In other occupations:
- children cannot work before age fourteen (except for very limited exceptions such as newspaper delivery);
- children ages fourteen and fifteen can only work three hours on a school day, no more than 40 hours a week when school is out of session, and not before 7 a.m.
- performing hazardous labor is prohibited until age eighteen.
Weak Enforcement of Existing Laws
Even limited protections in existing law are not adequately enforced. Although an estimated one million child labor violations occur in US agriculture every year, only a tiny fraction are ever uncovered by the Department of Labor. In addition, penalties are typically too weak to discourage employers from using illegal child labor.
- In 1998, the Department of Labor cited only 104 child labor violations in agriculture—one for every 1,000 estimated to be working illegally in the fields;
- The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division has only 23 investigators devoted to farm labor—less than one for every two states in the country;
- Although agriculture is the country's second most hazardous industry, between 1993 and 1998, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration devoted less than 3% of its inspections to agriculture.
The average penalty for violations of wage and hours laws in 1998 was $971.
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