Review of the literature

Review of the Literature;Emotional, Physical and Psychological Consequences of Using Children in the Rural American Labour Force

Of nearly 250 million children engaged in child labor around the world, the vast majority- 70 percent, or some 170 million-are working in agriculture. Child agricultural workers frequently work for long hours in scorching heat, haul heavy loads of produce, are exposed to toxic pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from sharp knives and other dangerous tools. Their work is gruelling and harsh, and violates their rights to health, education, and protection from work that is hazardous or exploitative. (Human Rights Watch)

Child Labour and Child Work

First of all, there is a distinction to be made in order to really understand the problem of child labour, and it is to classify what is child labour and what it is not. “At one end, certain work activities can be beneficial to children, or, toward the center, at least not harmful”, which is qualified as child work, and “at the other end […] harmful work” and “work that keeps children from attending to school”(Hindman; continuetolearn.com), which is considered as child labour. However, what has been recognised to be harmful work according to the law?

Historically; Towards Regulations

Child labour was present in every industry, mines, mills, and factories at the beginning of the 1900’s, says Hindman. Even though there were some king of an attempt to regulate child labour before 1903, in his historical overview of child labour, Todd Postol mentions that the first person who really brought up the child labour issue in the United States is a woman called Mary “Mother” Jones. Her main goal was to get “national attention to the health risks faced by working children,” and has one of her achievements, “on May 29, 1903, [she had] 100 000 textile workers, including 16 thousand children below 16, [walk] off their jobs at mills in and around Philadelphia” (2). This strike was one of the first steps taken towards child labour regulation in the United States. Then, as mentioned by Todd Postol and in continuetolearn.com, in 1904, the National Child Labor Committee was founded, and for forty years, fought child labour industry by industry. Afterwards, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act was adopted by the congress in 1916 and voted unconstitutional in 1918. Consequently, Julie Novkov demonstrates in her research that the reason why “the legislation did not succeed through out the country is because of the fear the government had and that the manufacturers knew how to play with it” (3). In result of that pressure on the government, she divides the outcomes of the fight against child labour in two categories, the fact that the successes were on the state level and the failures on the federal level (Novkov, 2), and as a result, the government was not able to put in place one law that regulated child labour all over the country. However, in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which for the first time regulated child labour on the federal level. Finally, the Convention 182 was adopted on June 17th, 1999 by the International Labour Organisation as the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, which “condemns certain forms of child labor including slavery, sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and other forms of forced labor, child prostitution and pornography, and use of children in illicit activities such as drug trafficking” (Hindman; ILO). However, not all forms of child labour had disappeared from the United States. As expressed by Jongsoog Kim, Lydia Zepeda, and Paula Kantor in their research, still today there is a major lack in child labour regulation concerning the United States’ rural area, more precisely in agricultural labour force(2).

Rural Child Labour

Unfortunately, children working on farms work in poor conditions, such as being exposed to dangerous pesticides, that encounter suffering from headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, many of them are forced to work without access to sanitary facilities, they are not feed properly, they work under temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and are somewhat kept from going to school because of the long hours of work they have to attend (Human Rights Watch). Moreover, in a research on children working on family farms, it was found that the parents are more likely to let their children do hazardous work, like driving tractors at a really young age, because they do not really feel the danger of it, but see the benefits working on the farm and having responsibilities will bring to the children (Kim, Zepeda, Kantor, 3). However on family farms, children most of the time, still go to school and work after school with their parents. On the contrary, when it come to immigrant or seasonal farm workers, children do not attempt school and work alongside with their parents as young as 4-5 years old (Fingers to the Bone, 10). Most children who work on farms do so, because of poverty in their families and because, the only place of employment available for them is on rural farms (Fingers to the Bone, 10-11). Compared to family farms, where children work because their parents think that by living and working on the family farm, their children learn responsibilities, work ethics, skills, and how to solve problems (Kim, Zepeda, Kantor, 6). In the same manner, psychologists suggest that children are more likely to develop moral and financial responsibility through family interaction rather than through work experiences outside the home because the family is still the primary place for child development (Kim, Zepeda, Kantor, 7), therefore working on the family farm is beneficial psychologically for children. Meanwhile, children working on farms in general encounter many psychological problems, because their work is not supervised by their loving parents, but exploitative bosses and their conditions are far from being adequate, working long hours, not attending to school, brain damages from heat illness, depression caused by jobs uncertainty and frequent moves, social stigmatisation, isolation, among others (continuetolearn.com; Human Rights Watch; Finger to the Bones; Kim, Zepeta, and Kantor; International Labour Organization). In result to high pressure, a studied had shown that farm workers are vulnerable to substances abuse, which can take away pain and temporary make them think their life is better (Fingers to the Bone, 25). They also get down to taking drugs for performances, especially those who work at peace rate, where the pace of work determines the earnings (Fingers to the Bone, 26). Nonetheless, there are special risks faced by girls working on farms, such as, sexual harassments, and the rate of teen pregnancy on the United States farms is 54.4 per 1,000. Moreover, most of them do not know that sexual harassment is a crime and endure it (Fingers to the Bones, 35). The worst of it is if they say no, they lose their employment.

All those extremely inadequate consequences on children are caused because the laws concerning agricultural labour are not strict enough regarding children on the federal level in the United States. Therefore, this is the reason why my research will examine and analyse what has to be improved in the regulations regarding the rural child labour force of the United States, in order to protect children against any form of exploitations or harmful labour, which may have emotional, physical or mental consequences on their health.