Human rights group reports poor working conditions for child farmworkers.

Juvenile farmworkers in the United States routinely work under hazardous conditions that expose them to pesticide poisoning, heat-related illnesses, and injuries, according to a recent report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW). The report says that as many as 800,000 juveniles work on farms in the United States and that an estimated 100,000 suffer work-related injuries each year.

According to the report, these children work in fields, orchards, and packing sheds. Their jobs include picking fruit and vegetables, weeding cotton fields, "pitching" watermelons, and bagging produce. Many begin their workdays in the middle of the night. Twelve-hour workdays are common.

In addition to the health hazards they endure, girls are routinely subjected to sexual advances by farm labor contractors and field supervisors, the report says. The long work hours interfere with the education of the child workers, resulting in only 55 percent of farmworker children finishing high school.

Most federal labor and environmental laws specifically exempt agricultural workers. Therefore, many of these child workers are not paid minimum wage and do not receive benefits such as overtime pay, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act allows children as young as 12 to work on farms; children in other lines of work must be at least 14 years old. The law, passed in 1938, allows workers as young as 16 to engage in hazardous labor and does not limit the number of hours that children can work outside of school. In other occupations, hazardous labor is prohibited until age 18, and children ages 14 and 15 can work only three hours on a school day and 40 hours a week when school is out.

HRW officials say the federal laws that exempt farmworkers are remnants of an era when the bulk of the nation's food was grown on family farms and a family's children were needed to work in the fields. Today, however, corporations are increasingly in control of the nation's farms, and the majority of child farmworkers are seasonal migrant workers. Therefore, the group says, it is time to change the laws to protect these children.

Don Keenan, an Atlanta attorney who handles many children's cases, said, "The HRW report shamefully establishes that not much has changed since John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath in the 1930s and Edward R. Murrow's documentary Harvest of Shame in 1960. Can we not do better for children in this new century? These new Americans are the faces of our future. What type of future are we creating?"

Because about 85 percent of the nation's farmworkers are racial minorities, especially Latinos, the report calls the law's bias against farmworker children "de facto race-based discrimination." In addition, the report says, "this discrimination may violate numerous provisions of international law."

Government response

Following the report's release last June, U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman pledged support for stronger legal protections for children who work as hired farm laborers. In a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), she reported the Clinton administration's support for a Harkin bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to raise the minimum age for child farmworkers to 14 and to limit the number of hours that child farmworkers under age 16 are permitted to work. HRW says it welcomes Herman's support.

Keenan, though, said, "It's a sad day when raising the minium age for farmworkers to 14 and limiting the hours of work for little children is considered a substantial reform." He called for "reform from top to bottom" in all aspects of child farmwork.

A copy of the report is available on the Human Rights Watch Web site at http:// www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/farmchild/ index.htm.