minim-calibre:biodiverseed:cracked:We sat down with Norma Flores, who sweated and toiled in the fiel
minim-calibre:biodiverseed:cracked:We sat down with Norma Flores, who sweated and toiled in the fields while her peers spent their time doing homework and having childhoods. Here’s what she told us about the shockingly modern face of backbreaking child labor…5 Awful Things I Learned as a Child Laborer (in the USA)#5. Your Food is Harvested by Children (and It’s Perfectly Legal)“I started working full time when I was 12, but I’d been working in fields since third grade. There’s no daycare out [there], so parents bring their kids … [The kids] start by bringing buckets, water, picking up apples that had fallen off the tree. Casual, light stuff. And they gradually do more and more. It’s not uncommon to meet kids who have been working since they were able to walk.”Read More#food politicsFrom the linked article: However, farm work is exempt from all these pesky regulations, because it’s traditional, and lawmakers are still imagining a wholesome Normal Rockwell scene in which a farmer and his son get up at dawn to milk the cows together.It’s also REALLY easy, I’ve found, to convince white people who have lived in rural areas and worked on family farms as children that tightening regulations around farm labor is an awful plan, because the opponents to regulation sell it as directly affecting them (when it almost always won’t, because the situations in which they’ve worked are almost always exempted from any of the proposed regulation tightening) and destroying their already tenuous way of life.And I have no idea if there’s any fucking way in the word to fix that, because it’s a fucking hell of a lot easier to come up with pat talking points for saying no to something when trust in the system is non-existent. Which just makes me sad and angry, because kids are fucking dying because of these exemptions and loopholes. -- source link
#child labor#farming#labor