Whether it qualifies as 'an honest day's work' these days - or a cruel and punishing existence - I'll leave for you to decide.
[0] https://youtu.be/41vETgarh_8?si=S0dBolFjv04SSprh&t=497
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/1201524399/child-labor-perdue...
Many of these children are pressured into it by parents who have no other financial options, as described in the video I linked above.
[0] https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/news-from-npr/...
As a 12 year old tech enthusiast I would have been thrilled to work a few hours a week for the Geek Squad. Or I could have worked at a small business entering invoices into Quickbooks, answering the phone, or running the till. I wouldn't even have minded pushing a broom at the pizza place nearby if it'd come with an employee discount!
As it was, all I could do was cut grass -- which is not safer, or more educational, or as profitable for me as some of those other jobs would have been.
"Willfully" is such a toxic word to use here. Did you know that prostitutes also do that willfully? Do you think that's a fair assessment to make?
> New York Times investigative journalist Hannah Dreier has interviewed more than 100 migrant children working in violation of child labor laws across 20 states.
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> "I talked to a 12-year-old girl in Alabama who was working overnight stamping auto parts. I talked to a 12-year-old in Florida who came to this country and the next day was put to work roofing houses," Dreier says.
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> Dreier met one 13-year-old boy in Michigan who worked 12-hour shifts at an egg farm, six days a week. "He told me that really he wanted to go to school, but he hadn't understood how expensive things were in this country," she says.
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> Dreier estimates that some 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and that the majority of them wind up working full-time jobs.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-la...
In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.
Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.
> Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time
I don't think immigration was what killed those jobs for citizen teens. I think it was more like rising prosperity such that they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. I can recall teens regularly canvassing the neighborhood in the 90s asking if we wanted our lawn mowed. But that stopped by around 2000. It's unheard of now. Immigration didn't stop them from doing that, it was more of a cultural shift that caused them not to desire to do that kind of work anymore.
[and sure, immigrants have taken over the lawn maintenance field, but their prices aren't cheap - most of them charge a few $hundred just to start service which is generally in the $200/month range now where I'm at. Teens could undercut these prices easily and still do well, but they don't seem interested]
Teens would be much more likely to mow lawns if the lawn care market had more money in it.
85F / 90% humidity is probably more taxing than 100F / 30% RH.
Yeah, I got my first job working on a family dairy when I turned 14. It was tough work, especially having to wake up at 3:30am on the weekends to go work outside in negative temperatures over the winters. It did help me purchase my first car and other things that my friends either couldn't afford or had to have their parents buy for them.
But the rest of the reaction seems a little out of place. Maybe it's a major culture difference: we're mostly cosmopolitan white collars with luxury time & luxury salaries, and they're our rural countrymen working with their hands and having to make ends meet.
Is it our place to judge them so harshly?
"Health conditions occurring more frequently among farmers in comparison with non-farmers were hypertension and other cardiovascular disorders as well as ear-nose-throat (ENT) and orthopaedic problems."
The OP very strongly disagrees, as do other descriptions I've read.
People here are talking about all farm work as the same thing; I think that betrays complete ignorance.
Farm work ain't great. It's repetitive and rarely if ever ergonomic. There's plenty of reasons anybody who can do something more skilled or better paid does. But it's way less taxing than just about any job where the tool used is a shovel or sledgehammer.
Yeah, if your frame of reference is skilled work or office work it all sucks but there's very much degrees to it.
Which one pays more?
Well, turned out a lot of the young generation didn't like the hours or the pay, and if they dud show up on time they worked at a fraction of the speed of the usual "imported" workers.
Was quite a bit of ruckus in the news about this, as farmers failed to get their crops harvested.
Not that I would have done much better, it's fairly brutal, monotonous work.
We weren't lacking teenagers. We were lacking a dirt cheap seasonal exploitable massive workforce. There are not enough teens even if we conscripted them all. And if you don't, teens don't like doing work. Most teens don't live in the sticks anymore. And (for teens) we care about these stupid things like safety, a minimum wage, and labor laws.
It's not 1950 anymore. The world has changed. The reason we need migrant workers is WalMart. Their demand for ever lower prices creates the need for the lowest priced highest supply scalable labor due to a global supply chain and pricing pressure. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Want cheap shit? Then you hire migrant workers. Or give up on farms and buy from overseas. Or make robots that can pick fruit. There's no free lunch.
Per the OP, the US needed migrant workers in the 1960s and before that - the OP is about a failed experiment in replacing migrant workers.
Through 1864, roughly half of the ag states used slave labour.
California, nominally a free state, had developed (under Spanish and Mexican rule) using what was effectively slave native labour. Following statehood, ag labour was largely imported: from China in the 19th century, from Mexico and Japan in the 20th, with the Bracero programme (established in WWII), and of course Oakies during the dustbowl as immortalised in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, all of whom were at best severely politically marginalised. Conditions in the antebellum former Confederacy long disadvantaged labour as well.
The US National Labour Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) explicitly excluded farm labor from its protections (wages, hours, conditions, unions). California eventually pased the Agricultural Labour Relations Act (ALRA) forty years later, which provided for the right to unionise (Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association features strongly in promoting this), and ... even it is fairly weak sauce despite being the only significant ag labour law in the US.
Farming itself is a marginal business, and farm labour gets the short side of that stick. The underlying economic reasons are complex, and not readily solved. It's not that the present situation is fair to farm workers at all, but a sudden shift would likely be catastrophic across the board. I'd like to see a far fairer system, but it would take significant governance and management to roll out smoothly.