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201 Organizations Endorse Legislation (CARE Act) to Close Child Labor Loopholes that Endanger the Health, Safety and Educational Development of Farmworker Children

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The Child Labor Coalition is reaching out for organizational endorsements of the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety,  which would end exploitative child labor in U.S. agriculture. [The bill was introduced on Cesar Chavez Day, 3/31/2022 in the 117th Congress. We will post a bill number as soon as it is available.]

201 great national, regional, and state-based groups have endorsed this much-needed legislation.

We ask organizations to help us advance this vital legislation which would remove the exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act that allow children to work unlimited hours in agriculture at the age of 12; these exemptions also allow child farmworkers to perform hazardous work at the age of 16. A text of the bill can be found here.

The educational impact of child labor on U.S. farmworker children has been devastating. We estimate that two out of three children who work in the fields drop out of school.

The CLC’s press release explains why there is an urgent need to protect farmworker children and how the bill accomplishes this. Child farmworkers perform back-breaking work for long hours in excessive heat while they are exposed to pesticides and other dangerous agro-chemicals.

Organizations that wish to add their names to the list of endorsers, please email reidm@nclnet.org .

The 201 groups below have endorsed the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety between 2019 and 2022:

Action for Children North Carolina
AFL-CIO
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Alliance for Justice 
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
American Federation of Teachers 
American Medical Women’s Association
Amnesty International USA 
Arkansas Human Development Corporation
Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC
Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance 
Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs 
Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers (AWPPW) 
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, & Grain Millers  International Union 
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, & Grain Millers  International Union, Local 351 (NM)
Bank Information Center
Be Slavery Free
Beyond Borders
Beyond Pesticides
Bon Appétit Management Company 
California Human Development 
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation 
Casa de Esperanza: National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities
CATA – Farmworkers’ Support Committee  (NJ, PA, MD)
Causa (OR)
Center for Childhood & Youth Studies, Salem State University  (MA) 
Center for Human Rights of Children, Loyola University
Center for Progressive Reform
Central Valley Opportunity Center (California)
Centro de los Derechos del Migrante
Child Labor Coalition 
Child Welfare League of America
Children’s Advocacy Institute, Univ.
… Read the rest

Child Labor in U.S. Tobacco: Why Can’t We Make it Stop?

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By Kendra Moesle, Program Communications Coordinator

Children in the Fields Campaign (CIFC) is an active member of the Child Labor Coalition, which strives to combat child labor here in the U.S. and abroad.  Also partners with us on that coalition is the 100 Million Campaign:  a worldwide movement led by kids advocating for kids, whose call to action is “for a world where all young people are free, safe, and educated”.

In the U.S., the local chapter of the 100 Million Campaign has taken on child labor in tobacco, something that has been a problem in the U.S. for a long time due to the inequality of U.S. labor laws.  When the 100 Million Campaign’s youth-led National Planning Committee met and discussed the number of issues before them, Executive Director of the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation US, Anjali Kochar, says they felt this was “the moment in time” when something could finally be done about child labor in tobacco.  In conversations that the campaign hosted in schools across the country, this seemed to be the most galvanizing issue to young people, simply because “it just didn’t add up.”  How is it illegal for minors to buy tobacco products, kids wondered, and yet it can still be perfectly legal for them to manufacture the stuff?

 

Tobacco2
Group picture of Child Labor Coalition members on the steps of AFT, following a February 2019 dialogue with Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi and Sumedha Kailash about the 100 Million Campaign.

 

CIFC believes that no child should be exposed to hazardous work in agriculture, and this is especially true in tobacco, which poses additional risks to children. 

… Read the rest

American 12-Year-Olds Can’t Buy Cigarettes. Why Can They Work in Tobacco Fields?

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[This op-ed appeared in The Guardian on June 28, 2018. You may view it there by clicking here.]

It’s no surprise that working in tobacco fields is dangerous. Smoking tobacco kills 6 to 7 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization. The same nicotine that makes tobacco so dangerous – and addictive – harms workers in tobacco fields. What is a surprise to many is that child workers are among those harmed and the United States allows 12-year-olds to work for wages in toxic tobacco fields where children are exposed to nicotine and toxic pesticides.

In the U.S., many teens who work in tobacco fields wear plastic garbage bags to try to avoid nicotine poisoning. [Photo courtesy Human Rights Watch]

When the seminal legislation the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, it exempted agriculture from its extensive labor protections, including child labor. Most analysts agree that racism played a part in this decision – many agricultural workers were poor black people and the southern congressional leaders who controlled many committees had little interest in protecting them from labor abuses.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), whom we partner with on the US-based Child Labor Coalition, has confirmed that tobacco work is too dangerous for teen workers. Its 2014 report, Tobacco’s Hidden Children: Hazardous Child Labor in United States Tobacco Farming, featured the results of interviews of 140 child tobacco workers and found the majority had suffered symptoms that correlated with frequent bouts of “green tobacco sickness” – essentially nicotine poisoning.

The child laborers described nausea, dizziness, fatigue and other symptoms that left them feeling “like you’re going to die”. It’s clear that children absorb nicotine while they work from residue on tobacco leaves and from particulates in the air, but just how much is uncertain. Estimates differ from the equivalent of smoking six cigarettes a day to smoking over 30. The long-term impact of that absorption is not yet known.

In the US, a 12-year-old cannot legally walk into a store and buy cigarettes, but the law allows that same child to work in a tobacco field. A 16-year-old child tobacco worker told HRW that tobacco was “the hardest of all the crops we’ve worked in. You get tired. It takes the energy out of you. You get sick, but then you have to go right back to the tobacco the next day.”

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We must not leave farmworker women out of the harassment discussion

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By Norma Flores López

Today’s headlines and top hashtags are showing that a powerful movement is building, and its being led by women.

Women–fed up with the constant attack on our bodies, the sexual harassment prevalent throughout our communities and centuries-long inequities in our homes, at the workplace and in the voting booth– are saying, “Enough.” They are displaying courage by organizing, sharing their powerful stories, casting their votes, and creating an effect that can be felt in the halls of Congress, on the movie sets of Hollywood, and through the airwaves. This movement against misogyny and sexual harassment is indeed powerful. It has made influential men step down from their long-held positions of power, it has stopped an accused pedophile from being elected into the Senate, and even made it to the cover of Time magazine.

And we’re just getting started.

We have seen this type of grassroots movement before–a seismic shift in the power paradigm of society, moving us closer and closer towards equity. Yet, we have never achieved the full promise of equality. The work is left halfway done, and we can’t allow this to happen again. We need to make sure that the movement is able to reach the darkest corners of society, in the marginalized communities where the most vulnerable women work and live. 

For me, this is in the fields.

I grew up in a migrant farmworker family, where I was taught at a young age the power men held over me. Sexual harassment wasn’t the only kind we experienced. The boss had the power to protect me, but also the power to destroy me. A lifetime of hard work earned my father a position of leadership in most of the fields we worked in, which he used to protect his wife and five daughters. While most women endured cat calls, inappropriate prepositions and harassment, we were spared. Still, we knew the dangers that lurked out there and took no chances. My sisters and I never walked to the portable bathrooms (when they were available) by ourselves, making sure a few of us were always together. We never went anywhere by ourselves, in the fields or on the migrant camp. Ever. 

Norma speaks frequently about the struggle to protect child farmworkers. Here she help introduce the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment with actress and activist Eva Longoria and others.

While my father did his best to shield us from these dangers, there were seasons that he wasn’t in charge and our family was separated. We were divided into different teams, each completing different tasks in different fields at any given moment. My mother and I mostly stuck together, and for years, we were in a team under the charge of a middle-aged white man who spoke no Spanish and made it known that he didn’t want to be there. As the season wore on, the work days got longer and his temper got shorter. He became a terror to all of the women working with him. It boiled over and from one day to the next, I became the focus of his fury. I was responsible for the team not completing the work at the pace he wanted. I was responsible for the mistakes made by my teammates. I was responsible for everything that went wrong in the fields. For all of this, I deserved his abuse. He began to hurl insults, curse words, and racial slurs on a daily basis, often at the top of his lungs for everyone in the fields to hear. My mother would stare at me in disbelief and fear, desperate to understand what was happening and to understand his English. “¿Qué te dice, Norma? ¿Qué pasa? (What is he saying? What’s happening?)” she would repeatedly ask me. “Nada, mami,” I would reply, trying to hide the hurt and fear in my voice.

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