"Jose, a quiet 14-year-old, was squatting and bending over for hours with other workers in a sprawling strawberry field. The pickers, many of them also minors, snapped berries from plants and placed them in plastic cartons, eight of them in a cardboard box. They moved quickly along the long rows that lined the field. Jose was exhausted but working as fast as he could; he was being paid $2.40 for each box he filled."
"As he ran with a full box, he fell on the uneven ground and twisted his ankle. It hurt for days, he later recalled, but he didn't say anything to his boss for fear of losing his job. "You just gotta suck it up, and you gotta work through it," he said on a recent Sunday, his only day off that week."
"He has labored in the fields every summer and on weekends during the school year since he was 11 years old to help his mother, who also picks berries. His siblings, uncles and cousins - four of them minors - work in local strawberry fields. Jose said that some days he didn't fill many boxes and earned less than minimum wage for the hours he worked, which would be a violation of state child labor laws."
In California's Salinas Valley, children and teenagers work long hours harvesting strawberries and other produce under harsh conditions. Minors as young as 12 legally work in agriculture and often toil without shade, suffer injuries, and face exposure to pesticides. Productivity-based pay can yield earnings below minimum wage for the hours worked. Fear of losing employment discourages reporting injuries or unsafe conditions. Families frequently depend on youth labor, with multiple minors from the same household working the fields. Regulatory protections and enforcement are insufficient to prevent hazardous work, wage violations, and chemical exposure among underage agricultural workers.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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