Many Child Workers Not the Ones You See

They are children, yes. But is this childhood?

She sweats into the soil of a vast Ohio field. A baseball cap keeps the sun and her unruly dark hair from her almond eyes. Adult rubber gloves engulf the small hands that snap cucumbers from their vines. Her name is Alejandra Renteria. She is 6.

Six hundred miles away, a girl who dreams of being a fashion designer fingers a cheap jacket in a Manhattan sweatshop where rats scurry across dirty floors. Amid noisy machines and the hubbub of women stitching, Li-qing Ni laments: “I like New York, but not this place. It smells.” She is 15.

Ervin Smith once had free time to play baseball, but no more. “I know there is another world out there,” the Amish boy says, “but I have to work.” He has been a construction worker in Ohio since eighth grade. He is 14.

From America’s fields they harvest onions, peppers, mushrooms, beans, berries, pecans. In garment factories, they iron pants, hang shirts, trim clothing. In meat-packing and egg-producing plants, in sawmills and furniture factories they toil.

Among them are about 61,000 child fieldworkers, ages 14 to 17, who live apart from their parents, according to an unreleased U.S. Labor Department survey. In thousands of cases, their parents aren’t even in the country. In all, about 123,000 children in that age group work in America’s fields, the survey said. Younger children in the fields are an all but hidden, untracked work force.

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Many of America’s working children are not the ones you see. They are not the teenagers who flame-broil Double Whoppers at Burger King or bag groceries at Food Lion, though they are governed by the same laws.

Federal law bars children under 16 from working while school is in session. Outside school hours, anyone 14 or 15 may work in farm jobs that the U.S. Labor Department deems safe. Younger children, those 12 or 13, can work only on farms and at a few other specific jobs.

Many of the children working in America are frequently underpaid, often unaccompanied and largely unprotected--a shadow generation made prematurely adult, moving from coast to coast, border to border.

Listen to Mercy Gandarilla, 10, kneeling in a cold New Mexico field since 6 a.m. Dew has soaked her shirt and a deep cough has taken her voice. “Cutting the chile,” she rasps. “I like it--in the sun.”

Listen to Omar Cruz Gonzales, 15, who rises at 2:30 a.m. to pick mushrooms for 12 hours in a windowless Pennsylvania shed. He sees no sun until midafternoon. “I have to work,” says Omar. “The dollars are here.”

Listen to Jaime Guerrero Jr., who loads crates of cabbage six days a week in Delaware. Three years ago, when he was 12, he heard his arm break as a conveyor caught his sleeve. “I’ll do something else someday,” he says.

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Why do they live these lives?

Some kids want spending money to buy into the consumer culture they see as necessary to being American. But many, especially migrant children, work because their parents don’t earn enough.

“If adults were paid a living wage, we wouldn’t have child labor,” says Ann Millard, a Michigan State University anthropologist who studies migrant labor. Three out of four migrant families say they earn $5,000 or less yearly, according to a national database of 54,000 families compiled by a farm-worker advocacy group.

Near Homestead, Fla., sisters LaKesha Brooks, 11, and Marie, 10, are already training the family’s next breadwinner--their sister, Angelica, just 20 months old. “She can pick the beans one by one,” LaKesha says.

Many working children endure such lives. In some Manhattan garment shops, children eat lunch in dank, urine-soaked stairwells. Others sleep in overcrowded apartments or houses. Pennsylvania mushroom picker Rigoberto Rosales, 17, shares a house with more than 25 other Mexicans and carves a certain privacy for himself by erecting a cardboard box around his bare mattress. “I look around and say to myself, ‘Is all this worth it?’ ” he says.

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Some, like Yvonne Li, do get out.

When she was 6, she went from school to a New York City garment factory to help her grandmother button, sew and trim clothing with scissors. “It was hot and humid,” she remembers. “The bathroom was always yucky.”

That stopped when her mother found out. Now a happy 9-year-old, Yvonne concerns herself with professional basketball standings and her favorite subject in school--math. Asked what she wants to be, she raises both fists and shouts, “The best at whatever I do!”

The working kids she leaves behind have their hopes, too, reaching beyond produce fields and garment shops for education, careers, success--and a need to just be kids.

Alex Ledezma, 11, harvests sorghum, cotton and onions near Lubbock, Texas. Though he misses weeks of school each year to follow the crops, he has reached sixth grade. He makes $2.25 an hour hoeing. He wants to become a police officer.

Beside the sorghum plants that tower above his head sits a van that carries his family and the hoes to the field. On its rear window is a sticker.

It says, “I believe in America.”