The Forgotton 14 Million
Children in the Fields
By John Biewen, American RadioWorks
May, 1999
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  Emma Mata unloads a bag of apples near Mattawa, Washington.
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After eight years of uninterrupted economic growth, the United States is the richest society in history. But that growing wealth has been matched by growing inequality. One in five American children is growing up poor; that's twice the rate twenty-five years ago and the highest rate of any rich country. While the economy has left some children and their families behind, critics say the nation's laws also fail to protect some poor children. For example: laws that permit children to work in the nation's fields and orchards.

SANTIAGO AND EMMA MATA work side-by-side inside a natural tunnel formed by overlapping branches of Granny Smith apple trees. They wear gloves and surgical masks to guard against dust and pesticide residue. It's a crisp, perfect October day near Mattawa, in south-central Washington State. The Matas are not migrants. Like thousands of farm workers in this part of Washington, they live here year-round.

"I work all the time," Santiago says through an interpreter. "Picking cherries, picking apples, trimming and pruning the trees…."

The Matas pluck the green apples with smooth, rapid motions, quickly filling the canvas bags strapped over their shoulders. Every few minutes, each of them climbs down to lay a bagful into a squat, wooden bin the size of a big freezer chest;  very gently, to avoid bruising.

Together, the husband-and-wife team can fill a 900-pound bin in half an hour. This orchard pays $12 a bin, so it's a good day; the Matas are each making about $12 an hour.

"But it depends," says Emma, as she empties her sturdy canvas bag. "Sometimes, when there's a good, long row with lots of fruit on the trees, we make good money. But if there are other workers near us and not much fruit, we don't make much."

Economists who study the industry say on average, hired farm workers make $6 or $7 per hour, with no health coverage, workers' compensation coverage, or overtime pay. Between seasons, farm workers live through long stretches of unemployment. So the average farm worker in the U.S. earns about $7,000 a year.

"I strive to pay a fair wage, and I believe that we do, I believe that we do," says Larry Knudson, 59, who owns a mid-sized orchard outside of Yakima.

Knudson is blunt but amiable; he wears a wide-rimmed leather hat and scuffed canvas jacket. "Our base wage on this operation is $6.75 an hour," he says proudly. His speech grows halting, though, when he's asked how his workers get by. "All my year-round people, they're all raising families and … are living … fine."


 
Luis and Jose Hernandez pick crops to help support their family of eight.
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Helping Pay the Bills

"I sleep [on] the floor, because I feel better on the floor," explains 13-year-old Luis Hernandez, giving a tour of the small house where he lives with his parents and five siblings in Toppenish, WA. "My big older brother, he sleeps right there, in the bed."

The bed is the only one in the house. The four younger children sleep on thin mattresses on the living room floor, Luis says matter-of-factly. "And my dad and my mom, too."

Luis's parents, Juan and Antonia, are Mexican immigrants. Their children were all born in the U.S. The Hernandez' don't work for Larry Knudson, but, like his year-round employees, they make more than the average farm worker family – $18,000 last year, they say. That's still $10,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of their size.

To ease the burden slightly, Luis and his 14-year-old brother, Jose, work sometimes, too. Jose picked cherries last summer, then kept working after school started, harvesting apples on weekends through mid-October.

"Not all day, but in the morning [until] 3 p.m.," he says in an adolescent's shy monotone. "To help my parents get money to pay the bills and all that."

Antonia and Juan Hernandez seem sensitive to questions about their sons doing farm work. They say they don't require the boys to work.

"No, they wanted to come and help us," Antonia says in forceful Spanish. "It was their idea."

The eldest boy, Jose, goes to the orchards, Juan explains, "so [Luis] wanted to go too. Because he wanted to make some money. We let them keep some. Only a little, but some."

 
"It's OK for a kid under 14 to work in the fields using knives and machetes and other sharp cutting instruments, but they can't work under 14 in an air-conditioned office collating paper."

- Diane Mull

Media reports often focus on illegal child labor in agriculture. But it's entirely legal for 14-year-old Jose to work in the orchards. 13-year-old Luis could work legally in cucumber, berry and spinach fields, but he appears to have broken state law by picking cherries last summer; cherry orchards are off-limits in Washington until age 14. (Why the distinction? A state agriculture official said he didn't know.)

Agriculture's child labor laws vary from state-to-state and crop-to-crop, but as a rule they're more lenient than in any other industry. That's true in most states, and it's strikingly true at the federal level. That despite the fact that farming ranks with mining and construction as one of the most dangerous industries.

"It's OK for a kid under 14 to work in the fields using knives and machetes and other sharp cutting instruments, but they can't work under 14 in an air-conditioned office collating paper," says Diane Mull of the Washington D.C.-based Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs.

Mull estimates 800,000 children work legally and illegally in agriculture. Hard numbers aren't available. One census bureau estimate says 155,000 minors work on farms, but that survey didn't count kids under 15. A recent survey in Wisconsin found 92% of farm workers' children over the age of 12 worked in the fields.

Farm leaders insist their industry has the most relaxed labor laws for good reason.

"The average agricultural producer is a very, very small business," says Bryan Little, chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. "And family farms by and large cannot succeed without relying on the efforts of family and friends and extended family and anybody else you can find to try to come and drive the truck, drive the combine, and do stuff like that when you're trying to get the harvest in before it rains."

But that communal picture of child labor is largely outdated, statistics show. The Census Bureau says only a quarter of kids working on farms are the children or neighbors of farm owners. Three-fourths are hired laborers.

A report last fall by the National Research Council's Institute of Medicine called on the government to tighten restrictions on child labor – especially on farms. Working on farms can be healthy for children if the work is safe and doesn't go on too long, says commission member Barbara Lee, a rural Wisconsin physician. "But if you put them into a situation where they're actually taking the place of an adult laborer, you have to ask the question: Would it be acceptable in any other industry? And if it is not, then we have to say we've got a problem here," Lee says.

Children At Risk

Luis Hernandez worked on the cherry harvest for just a few days last summer. That's because in the first week, just before his 13th birthday, he took a break to play, and got seriously hurt.

"I was standing on a ladder," he recalls. "When I got off, I was playing with the guy, a friend, that was on a tractor. I was playing with him, throwing cherries. Then I tripped, and when I tripped, the tire, it ranned over me and stopped right here on the middle of my stomach."

Luis's mother, Antonia, was working on a ladder nearby. She screamed when she saw the tractor's flat-bed trailer, loaded with bins of apples, knock Luis down and roll onto his chest.

"[The driver] heard me and he stopped and looked down," Antonia says. "The wheel had come up just short of Luis's head. The driver then backed off him."

Luis was flown to a hospital in Seattle with a bruised heart and blood in his lungs. He's O.K. now. But a 17-year-old boy picking peaches in Utah last summer was not as lucky; he died of a brain hemorrhage after being sprayed accidentally with pesticides twice in one week.

Teenage farm workers make up just 4% of all employed teens, but a much higher 25% of those killed on the job.

Farm groups say those figures overstate the danger to young hand laborers. Most of the kids killed on farms are those who live there, says Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League; they are far more likely to handle dangerous machinery and pesticides.

"But for somebody who is involved in a field work position, who's not working around concentrated forms of pesticides, who is handling a piece of fruit that is going to be sold and marketed the next day, the threat is not there at all," Gempler says. "The hard evidence doesn't stack up."

But critics counter that there's no hard evidence either way. Federal officials acknowledge that the long-term effects of pesticide exposure on field workers have never been studied. Farm worker advocate Diane Mull points out federal standards for when workers can enter a field after pesticides have been sprayed are based on the estimated risk to an adult male,  not a child.

"We're using these kids, we're using farm workers, as guinea pigs, to really look at what intensive pesticide exposures are," she says. "If you look at that population and you know that they're largely minority, that's an even more egregious form of discrimination."


Forget About Education

Even if farm labor doesn't hurt kids physically, it may damage their futures in another crucial way, according to some farm worker advocates. Studies have found that teens who work a lot of hours during the school year are more likely to drop out. Children of farm workers tend to start younger, and work more, than other children. And it's estimated that one-third to one-half of them drop out before finishing high school.

One of the apple-pickers at Larry Knudson's orchard, near Yakima, is 21-year-old Pedro Ramos. He went to school in Yakima – "To the middle school and one year to high school only," he says.

Then he dropped out.

But apple grower Knudson says orchard labor is not to blame if farm workers' children are quitting school. On the contrary, he cites his own childhood on an Oregon cattle ranch as evidence that farm labor endows a child with a strong work ethic.

"I started working on the farm for my parents when I was about 6 years old, driving derrick to stack the hay." Knudson smiles fondly at the memory. "I didn't work 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day. But I learned basic work skills and I learned that when the job happened, you got on it, you got it done."

Farm worker advocates say farm labor may teach wholesome lessons to middle class children who are confident they'll go to college or inherit the farm. But for the children of desperately poor farm workers, the chance to do paid farm work can be an invitation to drop out, they say.

19-year-old Noel Cornelio says he came close to dropping out during his junior year at Wenatchee High School, when his mother, a farm laborer, got injured and couldn't work. As it turned out, Noel found an evening job and stayed in school, graduating last spring. He now attends a local community college.

Most high school students in Wenatchee – "The Apple Capital of the World" – are the children of farm workers. Wenatchee school officials say they've made gains in keeping Hispanic students in school, but their dropout rate is still 17%, three times the rate for non-Hispanics.

"They make it to freshman and sophomore year, maybe," says Cornelio, "but most of them drop out those years. Those are the hardest."

"They have to work to keep their family living," says Cornelio's friend, Jose Cuevas. "That's what they care most about is helping their family go up and they forget about education."

Farm worker advocates say the best way to curb child labor in agriculture is to reduce the need for children to work, by raising the wages paid to adult farm workers. Farm employers reply that they couldn't compete in global markets if they had to pay much more.

The Forgotton 14 Million