empowering farmworkers to improve their living and working conditions since 1981

Child Labor

Immigration Labor - Child Labor

Children and teens are part of the migrant and seasonal agricultural workforce. Young workers are highly susceptible to injury, illnesses, and even death, because of their inexperience, the hazardous conditions in which they work and their physical and developmental immaturity. These workers are also particularly vulnerable to exploitation because many are unaccompanied by an adult family member.

Please support the CARE Act Children’s Act for Responsible Employment (HR 3564).  More information on the Human Rights Watch website.

Summary of the bill  .

See this New York Times slideshow about child labor on blueberry farms in North Carolina.

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupations

Agriculture is one of the top three most hazardous industries in the nation. Young workers, like their adult counterparts, often work with or around toxic pesticides, in stooped or awkward positions, carrying heavy loads, using knives or machetes, with unguarded farm machinery, and without drinking water or toilets.

Despite these hardships, children working in agriculture have fewer protections under federal law than children working in all other industries. For example:

Minimum age for hazardous work (e.g. applying pesticides) is only 16.

In jobs that are particularly hazardous (e.g., applying highly toxic pesticides), children employed in agriculture must be at least 16 years old. By contrast, in every other industry the minimum age for performing hazardous work is 18 years old.

Minimum age for non-hazardous work is only 14.

For most agricultural jobs (i.e., those that have not been designated by the Secretary of Labor as "hazardous"), young workers generally must be 14 years old (and must work outside of school hours). In other industry the normal minimum age is 16 years old. In agriculture, however, there are many exceptions to the age requirement which result in children, as young as 10 years old, being permitted to work. Outside of agriculture there are few exceptions to the minimum age requirement. A notable one is that children of 14 and 15 can work in certain limited jobs in retail, food service and gasoline service establishments.

Few restrictions on hours of work for child farmworkers.

In agriculture, the only restriction on work hours is that children under age 16 cannot work during school hours. Apart from this restriction, there is no limit on how early or late children can work or on the total number of hours they can work in a day or a week. As a result, children as young as 14 (and, because of various exceptions, some who are as young as 10) can be forced to work long hours in agriculture. In other industries, there are far greater hours-of-work protections: Children of 14 or 15 cannot work during school hours, before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. when school is in session (or after 9 p.m. in summer), and they cannot work more than 3 hours on a school day or more than 18 in a school week. On non-school days, they can work up to 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week.

What we're doing to improve protections for children working in agriculture

Farmworker Justice has taken many actions to try to improve the protections for children working in agriculture.

To eliminate these inequities, Farmworker Justice has long advocated for passage of legislation that would increase protections for young agricultural workers. In addition, we published a report, The Ones the Law Forgot: Children Working in Agriculture which describes injuries suffered by youth working in agriculture, the extent of existing state and federal protections, and our recommendations for increased legal protections.

We have also met with U.S. Department of Labor officials to urge them to adopt enhanced administrative protections. This would include the recommendations of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to update and strengthen restrictions on hazardous work (Read the NIOSH report and recommendations .)

Farmworker Justice is also an active participant in the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), along with unions, church organizations, and youth advocacy groups. The CLC's report on child labor, "Protecting Working Children in the United States," which we co-authored, was presented to the UN's International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. It calls into question whether the United States is in violation of a US-ratified international child labor treaty.