By Jill Dellamalva
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 30, 1998

Labor pains: America's child laborers

Arizona Daily Wildcat Jill Dellamalva

A 14-year-old girl sweating over a sewing machine in a rat-inhabited factory. A four-year-old boy harvesting chili peppers in the scorching sun. No, these aren't examples of poor children working in underdeveloped countries. This kind of stuff is probably happening right in your own hometown, right here in America.

Sixty years ago, Congress outlawed child labor with the Fair Labor Standards Act. That meant an end to "oppressive child labor" in the United States, didn't it?

Not quite.

For the past few months, the Associated Press has been searching for children working illegally in our country - not just children who work too many hours at after-school jobs, but children who work in sweatshops (or "factories" as some people prefer to call them). In just a short amount of time, the AP was able to track down 165 children illegally employed in 16 states. Some were found in the chili fields of New Mexico, while others were located in the "factories" of New York City. Does this surprise you?

It shouldn't. One-hundred-sixty-five children is an awfully small number compared to the 59,600 American children under the age of 14 who worked in "factories" last year. Rutgers University economist Douglas L. Kruse reported this in a study that also estimates that 290,200 U.S. children were employed illegally last year.

All these numbers, all these statistics. I suppose they don't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things. That's just life. Tell that to Bruce Lawrence, an eight-year-old who has been working in the bean fields of Florida since he was five. What were you doing when you were five?

I was playing with Barbie.

According to the AP's study, every five days in the U.S. a child is killed on the job. Meanwhile, the government fusses over things such as increasing the legal driving age in some states because some weeping mother got on "Oprah" and told the story of her son blaring music and joking around with friends while driving. He was killed in an accident. Where was this concern when a nine-year-old driving a tractor on a farm in Iowa killed his six-year-old passenger? Blamed on a faulty door latch, it's obvious that the accident wasn't a result of laughter and a booming radio.

A total of 200, 000 children are injured on the job annually. Sorry, I don't mean to sound like Sally Struthers.

But seriously, what has the government done about this? U.S. Labor Department officials were given a list of recommendations for new child safety rules by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in 1994. Among these recommendations was to ban 16 and 17-year-olds from construction sites, as well as to ban them from using powered conveyors or extracting petroleum and natural gas.

Nothing was ever done about the proposals.

Three years later, 14-year-old Alexis Jaimes was killed on a construction site. Other kids have been injured while using power-saws and machetes used to cut trees. The AP found that Iliana Sifuentes, 16, cut off two fingers while trimming branches at a Christmas tree farm. Merry Christmas, Iliana.

In a country where adults will take extreme measures to slap ratings on TV shows to protect children from viewing violence, this is ironic. In a country where adults scramble to censor pornography from children's eyes on the Internet, this is ironic. In a country where adults are quick to attack a president who is accused of giving little thought to morals, this is ironic.

Darlene Adkins of the National Consumers League put it best when she said "If there were a toy that was harming 200,000 kids a year, it would be off the market."

But then again, what does brutal child labor really have to do with violence, loss of innocence, morals or harm? In our country's eyes, the answer seems to be absolutely nothing. Go on and cry for us, Kathie Lee.

Jill Dellamalva is a junior majoring in journalism and creative writing.