Our Food
© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Dodd Center for Human Rights, University of Connecticut
The Care Act for Responsible Employment Congressional Hearing on September 7, 2022
The Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety of 2022, or the CARE Act, is a bill proposed by the House that seeks to ‘revise labor provisions for protecting child workers, including those employed in agriculture, and increases the civil penalties for violations of such provisions and imposes new criminal penalties for violations resulting in the death or serious injury or illness of a child worker.’ The bill really seeks to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that has left child farmworkers behind by ‘revising the definition of “oppressive child labor”’ to raise the minimum age of employment to 14 years of age and promote the age to 18 years for those working in hazardous farming occupations. This bill was originally introduced by Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard in 2001, then re-introduced in 2017, but after opposition and slow going, the bill was once again introduced by the House Education and Labor Committee this past March 2022. The bill, named ‘overdue legislation’, has failed to pass in the past because of fierce opposition from those who claim that the bill is attacking family farms and US farmers. From my own experience attending the congressional hearing proposing this bill, as well as reading over the provisions of the bill, I believe Congresswoman Roybal-Allard said it best in a statement: “The CARE Act is NOT about disrupting the way of life on family farms as it maintains current exemptions for family farms and agricultural education programs…[it is time to] give all of our children the fundamental protections they rightfully deserve.”
© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Dodd Center for Human Rights, University of Connecticut
No matter the past, I am elated that there is a possibility that the CARE Act may finally be passed. Around 97% of the US is rural, 40% of these rural areas are farms that are 2 million in number, and rural communities comprise 14% of our population. Small to large farms employ child farmworkers, most of these child farmworkers being migrants. Migrant children in farming are the only group of children not protected by any existing child labor laws. Children can work full time starting at ten years old and there are no minimum ages for working on small farms, while the minimum age is 12 years old on larger farms and 16 years old is the minimum age for working with hazardous agricultural equipment. Child farmworkers make up about 5% of the US child labor force but 50% of child hospitalizations in the US, the highest number of fatalities under the age of 16 occur in agriculture. Several published reports from Human Rights Watch detail the status of child farmworkers in America, with 33 children injured every day while working on US farms. Many child farmworkers work 12-14 hours a day in the heat with exposure to pesticides and dangerous equipment for which most have received no safety training or protective equipment, and these workers risk injury and death from tractors, machinery, livestock, not to mention respiratory exposures and heat stroke, making agricultural farm work even more hazardous than construction. The pesticides these children are exposed to are poisons that affect our food supply, health and farmland. Farm worker youth drop out of high school at a rate 4 times higher than other youth, and migrant child farmworkers and their families suffer from generational poverty. A racist legacy is apparent in the disproportional harm done to Latinx children in the agricultural profession.
In last month’s fully remote congressional hearing, ‘Children at Risk: Examining Workplace Protections for Child Farmworkers’, I was given the opportunity to hear about the bill’s premise and justification from its committee as well as the opposing side. The committee, composed of witnesses from Human Rights Watch, the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agriculture Health and Safety, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute and the Child Labor Coalition, backed by government representatives, are a testament to the strength of their evidence and fervent nature. I was new to this topic and found the data supporting the current state of affairs for child farmworkers to be startling. With all of the strong points the committee raised, as well as some members’ soulful personal testimony, I was taken aback by the amount of derailing attempts and irrelevant conjectures supplied by the opposing party to this bill. Why were they talking about family farms and the ‘dewy-eyed wife of the farmer’? Why wasn’t the focus on ensuring rights for children? Why were they shifting the conversation to talks about the border with Mexico and the issue of fentanyl, when children and their families are being exploited? It’s all politics, to protect agribusiness and maintain the capitalistic exploitation of those without a voice, through claims of over-regulation.
Now, what is the difference between being a part of a family farm and being a migrant farmworker? Choice. Some migrant families simply do not have the opportunities to find other work. Norma Flores Lopez, member of the Child Labor Coalition, spoke in the congressional hearing about her own family’s experience working in the fields as migrants. The exemptions in the child labor laws show themselves in the abuse and obstacles to education she experienced as a child farmworker. Three generations of Norma’s family have had cancers and health issues that are likely connected to pesticide exposure from working in the fields. With these facts - and that’s what they are, facts - and real-life personal testimony, how could one oppose any sort of legislation that would provide the basic protections that these child farmworkers deserve? But oppose they did, with the side against the proposed legislation stating that this proposal was a way to villainize farmers, discourage those from entering the agricultural profession, take away children's ability to help on family farms (when the legislation specifically said it wouldn’t touch family farm regulations), and that ‘we’ should instead be focusing on the ‘drug and border crisis’ on hand.
© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Dodd Center for Human Rights
As a person from a background of science, logic and reason, it astounds me how facts and personal statements can be twisted and discarded so easily in a hearing of this status. Children’s rights should equal basic human rights…right? That’s why anyone should even care about this bill. A Republican opponent, a rural voter; they should all care about the health of children, the wellbeing of those under 18, and people who have come to live in the land of the free who deserve basic fairness and equity, or the idea of freedom means nothing.
© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Dodd Center for Human Rights
Mara-Clarisa Boiangiu
is a graduate of Arizona State University with degrees in Neuroscience (B.S.) and Global Health (B.A.). She is currently working on a Masters of Science in Global Health concentrated in Health Policy and Management at Georgetown University.