[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 20]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 29065-29067]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



  OUR DOMESTIC CHILD LABOR LAWS SHOULD BE REFORMED SEVENTEEN MAGAZINE 
           REPORTS ON PROBLEMS OF CHILD LABOR IN AGRICULTURE

                                 ______
                                 

                            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

[[Page 29066]]

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.''

                [From Seventeen Magazine, October 1999]

                           (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

[[Page 29067]]

     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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