Posted on 08/11/2011 3:42:35 PM PDT by flowerplough
(Or just some other kinda ordinary farm kids? My brothers and I dairied well over 40 hours a summer week when we were still in elementary school.)
Nearly two years after ABC News cameras uncovered young children toiling away in Michigan's blueberry fields, federal investigators have found yet another disturbing example of illegal use of child labor in the berry industry.
Three southwest Washington strawberry growers were fined $73,000 last week after the U.S. Department of Labor found children between the ages of six and 11 working in their strawberries fields in June.
While an exemption in the federal child labor law allows 12- and 13-year-olds to work for unlimited hours on large agricultural operations, children under the age of 12 are strictly prohibited from working under similar conditions.
Andrea Schmitt, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services in Olympia, said that the low wages made by workers in the Northwest berry industry are a key factor driving young kids into the fields. She said that berry pickers, who are usually paid a piece rate instead of an hourly wage, often struggle to make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
No one I think is in my tree.
If school is out, why not? Or is this a nannyism?
One again, ABC goes for the low hanging fruit.
I wish, as a child, I was picking strawberries instead of my many other chores.
And no, there was NO allowance given in my household. Chores, no matter how hard, were apart of life.
I had to start doing my own laundry when I was 10.....WITH NO PAY. They would probably have my Aunt arrested in today’s culture.
It's only nothing to get hung about if it's forever. For five years, ages 6-11, you get hung to the tune of $73,000.
I just purchased some Michigan blueberries. Terrific! better than NJ’s this year.
5 cents/quart. 34-40 quarts a day. If the government can do anything about using kids age 6-11 retroactively, I’d like to have all of the Junes from 1960-1965 back, with interest.
No one ever says anything about the child labor in the Girl Scouts who are encouraged to sit at card tables outside supermarkets during February and March every year hawking their terrible cookies. The money raised selling these cookies goes to the council and then a few bucks are sent back to the troop. My daughter and all of the girls in her troop sold GS cookies for years and their troop never got much back. Because I believed my daughter was basically raising money for the muckety-mucks, I called the headquarters and asked for the salaries of the people in charge and they refused to tell me.
When I lived in Anderson County (TX) there were several You-pick fruit farms. In the summer (when the fruit was ripe and the days were hot) I would take my sons to these farms and we would pick fruit — blueberries, peaches, plums, and blackberries.
We would pick all day. My kids would be exhausted by the end of the day. On the drive home, I would ask them if they had fun. I would always get pretty much the same answer — “It was okay for a day, but I’d had to do it for a living.” And I’d always say, “that’s why you want to work hard at school. So you can do better than find a job picking fruit.”
It must have stuck. Two are now engineers (and EITs) and the third is a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering.
(Didn’t hurt that when my wife canned the fruit we picked, she made them help. Same comment — fun for a few days, but you’d hate to do that for a living. But I miss those days now that I am in the Houston area.)
Kids picking strawberries is a natural. The berries are low to the ground and so are the kids. Better than raising couch potatoes.
WoW! I picked blueberry’s in Michigan as an 11 year old.............. it never hurt me. In fact, I enjoyed spending the money I earned.
“”When I was a kid in California they would delay the start of school in the fall until the prune harvest was in.””
Prune harvest? You have to be kidding!!!
It doesn’t really matter much at all
The reason our school system was set up as it is(summers off) was to allow children to work on the family farm.
It wasn’t until after the wars did we start referring to it as summer vacation.
Here in Maine, the school systems in many areas still close for a week in the late fall for potato harvest.
(Mainers,chech my tag)
Prune harvest? You have to be kidding!!!
Nope. The area around Santa Rosa was all prune orchards...a really sweet, juicy plum. In the fall they would shake the trees and collect the prune plums.
The orchards have been replaced by neighborhoods, or wineries.
Prune harvest? You have to be kidding!!!
Nope. The area around Santa Rosa was all prune orchards...a really sweet, juicy plum. In the fall they would shake the trees and collect the prune plums.
The orchards have been replaced by neighborhoods, or wineries.
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