Fingers to the Bone: Child Farmworkers in the United States | Human Rights Watch | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Fingers to the Bone: Child Farmworkers in the United States
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We like to think of agriculture as good, clean, outside work.
Something healthy and wholesome and outdoors
and kids working for their families farms and helping out when they can.
Reality is today farm work is something completely different.
I started working when I was 11 years old.
It feels like you don't have no choices.
You don't you don't feel the same as other kids.
There are hundreds of thousands of children working on U.S. farms
and many kids who are working
are working on large commercial farms.
The child labor law in the U.S. is pretty good,
except when it comes to agriculture.
And then it has a big gaping hole.
US law allows children to work in agriculture, at far younger ages
for unlimited hours outside of school
in much more dangerous conditions than any other sector.
So a child can work perfectly legally for any farmer at age 12,
That child couldn't work serving the food
that he can work 10 12 14 hours picking.
Farm work is actually the most dangerous occupation that's open to kids in the U.S.
in terms of fatalities. Kids are working with dangerous and sharp tools
doing work that may require them to be bent down for hours.
I've talked to kids who've worked in 14 states around the U.S.
and kids told me about the toll that this work takes on their bodies.
The airplane flew over the field
and began spraying on the field
and I didn't know what the spray,
what the spray contained or what it was.
The drift was coming towards our field because it was windy.
And I'm thinking oh it's just water it is making the crops grow better.
Now pesticide exposure isn't good for for any farm workers,
but it's especially bad for children
whose bodies are still developing.
Farm worker families are typically very very poor
and kids told me that they worked in order to put food on the table
or to fix the family's truck or to pay the phone bill.
Kids are working because their families really need the money.
When children work so many hours during school and over the summers
it really hurts their education.
Kids who migrate leave school early and go back to school.
They're missing weeks or months at school every year.
These kids are from Texas where school started three days ago.
Now some of these kids will enroll in Michigan schools
when those start up in a couple of weeks.
Others will just wait till they get back down to Texas.
It was hard to catch up in school. It wasn't easy,
it wasn't easy for me because like my —
sometimes I'll be there in class
and my friends know everything I didn't know.
And it was hard and kind of sometimes I feel like embarrassed,
because I never catch up with them.
Kids are also working because it's legal.
US law presents it as a legitimate choice for family
to send their kids after work.
and employers are free to hire them.
Do they pay each person — yeah they pay as much each person.
So even like your twelve-year-old daughters gonna make...
They pay her. Yeah they pay her.
Like she's 12 so he probably won't make the check under her name
because she doesn't have any ID or anything to cash the check
so that he'll just probably put it in my check.
The Fair Labor Standards Act is US federal law
that among other things prohibits child labor.
But when the law was passed,
a big exception was left for Agriculture.
In 1938, a lot of Americans lived on family farms
and far fewer Americans graduated from high school,
or needed a high school diploma.
Today the picture is different but the the loophole remains.
It's not right that these kids — and including me
that I'm...that I lost my childhood
and other children shouldn't lose their childhood as well.
When I turned 14 that's when I drop out from school
and went to the strawberries in Florida.
And then we came back to Ohio
and did the — and started working on the pickles, harvesting.
But it really hasn't been easy.
Right now there's a bill pending in Congress called the Care Act,
it's a bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act
to apply the same rules to kids working in agriculture,
as kids working in any other sector.
A lot of people worked beans or the tasseled corn
or the other kinds of farm work than they were teenagers.
But the Care Bill is about protecting the most vulnerable kids.
Not kids are who doing tours but young kids who are working for such long hours
and compromising their health and their education.
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