"It's perfectly legal for children at the age of 12 to work unlimited hours on a farm of any size as long as they don't miss school and they have their parents' permission," says Margaret Wurth, senior researcher in the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. The federal minimum age for work in most industries is 14; in agriculture, it's often 12. But in many cases, children of any age can work. "There's actually no minimum age for children to work on their own family's farm." This variance is allowable because agriculture is largely exempt from the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes national requirements for wages, overtime pay, and youth employment...I will just note in passing that to put this in context, in the 1920s my mother was a pre-teenager driving a pair of horses to cross-cultivate a cornfield when she was so small that "it looked like a big straw hat was sitting on the cultivator." All of her brothers and sisters helped work the farm, and at harvest time the local one-room schoolhouse was closed so that all the children could work.
The U.S. is distinctive when it comes to child labor in agriculture. Wurth has done much of her research in Brazil, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe, and has found significant differences. "What distinguishes the U.S. from all of these countries is just how weak the law is," she says. "None of these other countries allow children legally at the age of 12 to work as hired workers on farms.... It's kind of unbelievable that, in 2019, that's the status of our child labor laws when it comes to farming."
10 July 2019
Legal child labor in the United States
Excerpts from a longread at Pacific Standard:
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It's worth remembering that school summer holidays exist not because the summer is a nice time to not go to school, but all the schools had to be shut then so that kids could help on the farm.
ReplyDeleteMy dad was the youngest in his family. In 1930, at the age of 8, he had to drop out of school because his father became disabled and all the kids had to pitch in to help the family. His older siblings were paid a daily wage for picking crops, but as he was so much smaller, he was paid on "halves", where he could keep half of what he harvested and the landowner would pay him by the bushel for the other half of what he was able to pick in a day's time. At least that's how I understood his explanation. His father eventually recovered, but Dad was too embarrassed to go back to school to a classroom with children 2-3 years younger than he was by that time. He was an avid reader, but was always ashamed of his poor penmanship.
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