Child farmworkers: Double standards and no field of dreams

Published: 2005-09-02

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- At an age when Norma Flores was too young to legally work in an air-conditioned office, she was fleeing an airplane spraying pesticides on the field where she was tending crops as a migrant farmworker. "We had to run out of the field," recalled Flores, who was 14 when the spraying took place. "They sent us to the wrong field," she said. "This doesn't happen at Wal-Mart." Flores, now 20, was personalizing what critics of U.S. child labor law call the double standard embedded in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. The law, still in force, does not provide the same protection to children working on farms as it does to youngsters working at other occupations. Many fruits and vegetables eaten daily at U.S. tables were sown, cultivated and harvested by kids as young as 10, without limits on the number of hours they could work daily under a summer sun. Flores' story does not surprise Sister of Notre Dame Charlotte Hobelman. As coordinator of migrant ministries for the U.S. bishops' Migration and Refugee Services, Sister Hobelman knows that farm work for minors is no field of dreams. She sees firsthand the harmful effects on children's health, education and psychological well-being under current migrant child labor law. "We have an outdated labor law," she said.

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