LOS ANGELES - A leading human rights group is accusing the United States of violating international standards on child labour by allowing minors - the vast majority Latinos - to work gruelling hours in the fields at the expense of their education, their health and other basic labour standards.
In a report entitled Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers, Human Rights Watch says hundreds of thousands of minors across the country are working days of 14 hours or more, often for well under the legal minimum wage, and are being exposed to highly toxic pesticides and running serious risk of illness and injury from heavy equipment and sharp instruments.
"In the fields, the United States is like a developing country," says the report's author, Lee Tucker. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, agricultural workers are exempt from the age restrictions that apply to almost every other sector of the economy.
Although US politicians have lobbied in support of a far-reaching international treaty to outlaw abuses of child labour, the US itself is not in compliance with the treaty, Human Rights Watch alleges.
"A 12-year-old kid can work unlimited hours on a farm, but isn't allowed to work in a fast-food restaurant," Tucker says.
"There's no good reason to have such a double standard."
The report, based largely on extensive interviews with teenage farm workers in Arizona and research in other western states, showed that the problem is countrywide, even if the greatest numbers of children were concentrated in the main farming states - California, Washington, Arizona and Florida.
Children were routinely exposed to pesticides, sometimes working in fields still wet with poison, and often given no access to fresh water to wash their hands or avert dehydration.
The risk of injury from knives, heavy equipment or falls from ladders was exacerbated by the long hours, sleep deprivation and a relatively high incidence of depression.
Schooling was invariably interrupted, the report said, and only 55 per cent of farmworkers graduated from high school - one of the lowest figures for any sector in the US.
Human Rights Watch also found "persistent wage exploitation and fraud," with one-third of interviewees reporting wages significantly beneath the minimum wage.
The report urged the US Government to close the labour standards loophole and severely restrict the rights of farmers to employ minors.
Tucker acknowledged that it was often low pay and poor conditions endured by parents that pushed them into sending their children out into the fields, and that some farmworkers would therefore oppose a ban on child labour.
The report included graphic testimony from melon and cotton pickers, and from one 15-year-old girl trapped in a cherry packing factory in Washington state during a carbon monoxide leak.
"This girl who was working by us fainted," the girl, Flor Trujillo, is quoted as saying. "A couple of hours later another girl fainted ... After her then a bunch of people were fainting "The manager told us to keep working, wouldn't let us leave ... These kids were jumping on the doors to tear the tape off, open the doors so we could get outside."
- INDEPENDENT
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.