New Congressional Bill to Protect Child Farmworkers
Written by Alexandra Rosenblatt Wednesday, 24 February 2010 12:56
Maria Mandujano began working as child farmworker in Idaho at the age of 11. Now 19, she is a college student and activist with Student Action with Farmworkers. While many children went to summer camp, the beach or on family vacations, Mandujano worked 13 hours shifts in temperatures hovering around 100 degrees. She was never trained in the hazards of pesticides. She stated they never even mentioned the use of pesticides; they simply told them they would be "watering." Despite the heat, she wore baggy long sleeve shirts and pants to avoid sexual harassment from supervisors and other workers. She said it was no secret she was working alongside children as young as 8 years old.
Norma Flores grew up in a migrant farmworking family in Texas and began working in the fields at age 12. She is now the Children in the Fields Project Director for the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs . She told of leaving town before school got out in June so her family could migrate to Iowa, Indiana, or Michigan to work in the fields and did not return until well after the first day of school in September. When she finally returned to school, she found she could not write because of blisters on her hands from working without gloves and using tools that were too big for her child-sized hands.
Maria and Norma told thier stories in a briefing on a bill introduced by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) called the Children's Act for Responsible Employment, HR 3564.
Despite our nation's alleged commitment to ending child labor in this country and abroad, we have almost all together ignored the hundreds of thousands of children who are laboring in the fields across this country to pick the fruits and vegetables we eat every day. This is because most child labor laws exempt agricultural work. Panelist Zama Coursen-Neff, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Children Rights Division, explained that unlike the protections guaranteed to most workers under the Fair Labor Standard Acts, there are no limits on the number of hours children can work in agricultural jobs outside of school hours. Because of the failure to regulate the work of child farmworkers, many children are working for wages well below the minimum requirements. Coursen-Neff stated that children are four times as likely to die from pesticide exposure and nearly one half of all child farmworkers do not graduate high school.
Panlist U Roberto Romano, an award winning filmmaker who presented the trailer to his new film, "The Harvest," stated that most child farmworkers are "American citizens, who because of our failure, were not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act" and that as a result we have created a situation in which we have some of the "worst forms of child labor than anywhere in the world."
Children's Act for Responsible Employment, HR 3564 would address the inequities and harsh conditions faced by child farmworkers. Find out if your representative supports this important piece of legislation by visiting the action alert page on the Human Rights Watch website [note: this page does not display in the Firefox browser, only Internet Explorer].
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