child labor

Boy cleaning slaughterhouse in Nebraska. Photo provided by Department of Labor investigators. He was employed by PSSI, a cleaning company owned by Blackstone private equity firm. ⁦@NBCNews
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Boy cleaning slaughterhouse in Nebraska. Photo provided by Department of Labor investigators. He was employed by PSSI, a cleaning company owned by Blackstone private equity firm. ⁦@NBCNews

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Migrant Child Labor in the United States [VIDEO]

 

Posted on July 21, 2010 by WITNESS


This post was written by Chanchala Gunewardena, (Clark University 2011), Summer 2010 intern in WITNESS’ Communications department.

Last Thursday, WITNESS was invited to The Paley Center for Media for a screening of a special segment of NBC’s Dateline, titled America Now: Children of the Harvest. This piece, a follow up to a 1998 Emmy Award winning report on migrant farm workers and their families, attempts to see, what has developed and changed in the lives of a particular group of people twelve years on. More specifically however, it is focused on the issue of child labor, as migrant families who work in the agricultural sector tend to be assisted in their work by their whole family, including children under the legal working age (for this specific sector) of twelve.

 

– Click through for more –

 

Source: blog.witness.org

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Report slams child labor in U.S. tobacco fields

 

(CNN) — Children can’t light up, but there are some who suffer the effects of nicotine exposure as they labor in U.S. tobacco fields.
There is not an exact figure for how many children work in America’s tobacco fields, but Human Rights Watch interviewed nearly 150 for a new report on the dangers these workers face.
“I would barely eat anything because I wouldn’t get hungry,” one child worker, Elena G., 13, told the human rights group. “Sometimes I felt like I needed to throw up. … I felt like I was going to faint. I would stop and just hold myself up with the tobacco plant.”
Nearly 75% of the children interviewed reported similar symptoms — nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, headaches, dizziness, irritation and difficulty breathing. These are symptoms of acute nicotine poisoning, Human Rights Watch said.
And nicotine is not the only danger.
Exposure to pesticides from adjacent fields and accidents with sharp tools are also common, the report said.
“Once they sprayed where we were working. We were cutting the flower and the spray was right next to us in the part of the fields we had just finished working in. I couldn’t breathe,” Jocelyn R., 17, told HRW. “I started sneezing a lot. The chemicals would come over to us.”
See on www.cnn.com

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“It was kind of like slavery”

 

“Backbreaking labor, vicious beatings, unmarked graves, childhoods lost—five men return to the scene of their nightmares.

 

Dozier was unforgiving whatever your skin color. But the white kids were given vocational work while the blacks did grunt labor. (The school profited from both.) “It was brutal work,” Huntly says. “We were out there in the cold cutting cane and planting peas and pulling corn. I was admitted to the third grade when I was there, and I spent two years and about four months there, and the day I left I was still in the third grade. So that’s the kind of education I got.”

 

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

Archaeologists have found 55 burials – 24 more than previously documented.

See on www.motherjones.com

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Choosing not to protect child farmworkers

 

“Children are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of pesticide exposure as their bodies are still developing, and they consume more water and food and breathe more air, pound for pound, than adults. Long-term effects of pesticide exposure include cancer, neurological problems and reproductive health issues.

 

Most children working on farms in North Carolina are poor and Latino. While their parents are frequently undocumented migrants, most of the children are U.S. citizens. Farmworker parents rely on their children’s minimum wage earnings to help supplement meager family incomes, averaging less than $20,000 annually nationwide.

 

Under a double standard in federal labor law, children can work in agriculture at far younger ages, for far longer hours and in far more hazardous conditions than other working children. Federal law has no minimum age for children to work on small farms with their parents’ permission. At age 12, children can work for hire on a farm of any size.

 

…”

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

Racist U.S. laws allow certain groups of children (mostly Latino) to work in these dangerous conditions.

 

@getgln

See on www.newsobserver.com