Food & Labor
Children, Agriculture, and Human Rights
The thing about writing timely pieces a week in advance is that sometimes you get scooped! I wrote this on Monday, which I didn't realize was World Day Against Child Labor until the estimable Heather Cox Richardson wrote about this same topic on Wednesday. Oh well! My take is far less succinct, but more focused on food. Here you go:
For most of human history, putting children to work was not uncommon. Family and village units were organized around the pursuit of food. Children learned trades and farming by helping their parents, much like they also learn household chores. Tasks were generally tailored to the child’s abilities, and it was understood that children were learning; while mistakes were frowned upon, were part of the learning process. In Western culture, from the Medieval period on, children were generally regarded as smaller, more malleable adults. People matured quickly as death was a constant threat. Although life expectancies rose significantly in the Western world as it recovered from the Black Death, malnutrition and overwork were still generally an issue among the lower classes. But because families suffered equally, not much though was given to children as a group separate from their parents.
With the advent of formal education for the working classes, which really did not take off until the late 19th century, ideas about children’s lives began to change. For upper- and middle-class families, a whole culture of child-rearing and education developed as early as the 18th century. By the time the Victorian period arrived, we had child rearing experts and a whole separate culture of books, periodicals, clothing, education, and play.
In contrast, for lower-class families, children were treated the same or sometimes worse as before. As families were squeezed out of farming, more and more went to urban areas where food was much harder to come by. Rural people could garden, own a chicken or two, forage for wild plants, and hunt or fish. Urban people had to exchange cash or labor for food. People went where jobs were, and factory towns that had initially attracted men capitalized on first young unmarried girls (think 1830s Lowell, Massachusetts), and later women and children as sources of cheap labor. For any task that did not require great upper body strength, factory owners preferred women and children. At this time, the prevailing idea of nutrition was that women and children needed significantly less food than adult men, and that children could essentially survive on cooked cereals and some occasional milk. Wages were wages, no matter who earned them, and one benefit of a large family was that children could be sent out to earn wages as soon as they were old enough.
This did happen with rural families as well, especially poor ones. Children as young as 10 would be sent as hired help to more prosperous neighbors. Boys would assist with agricultural labor, girls with household labor. And of course, in the centuries of slavery in the United States, enslaved children as young as six would be removed from their parents and put to work, often with little care for their personal safety.
Public schooling started to change that, but people forget that public school in the United States was largely funded by local families until the 20th century. Someone would donate land for the school, others would donate money to build the school. Families pooled their resources to pay the schoolmaster, who often rotated boarding with individual families, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Families who couldn’t afford to pay or board the teacher, or who lived in areas without enough children and political will to have a school, went without, especially if their children were already earning wages.
Child labor became the secret shame of the United States by the end of the 19th century. Children worked in appalling conditions, famously in textile mills and as newsies. But food processing and harvesting was also a huge employer of children.
You may be familiar with the work of Lewis Hine, a sociologist and photographer who set out to force middle- and upper-class Americans to understand the hardships of labor, especially child labor, through photography. In his work for the National Child Labor Committee in the early 1900s and 1910s, he faced violence and harassment from everyone from local foreman to powerful business owners alike as he strove to reveal the horrific conditions that children routinely worked in.
You have probably seen some of his work. Much of it focuses on coal mines and textile factories. But food processing was a big part of it, too.
Oyster shucking was (and is) a terribly dangerous business, especially when you’re going as quickly as you can. Like many jobs where you were paid by the piece or the pound (in this case, the pot), children were a major part of the workforce. Although they were often less efficient or strong than adults, they were far, far cheaper to employ. They also tended to be more docile and accepting of whatever was given to them. Canned oysters were major business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and like other fish and seafood canneries, underpaid, overworked children (and women) wielding sharp knives on assembly lines were a huge part of the profit margins. According to Hine, children started work as early as 3:30 AM (when the oystermen started delivering pots) and only stopped at 5 or 5:30 PM.
Hine’s work in exposing the horrors of child labor eventually helped pass labor laws banning it. A law passed in 1916 was overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1918. In 1924 a Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution was proposed, but it failed to ratify. Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported the amendment, but like many other child labor laws, it did not survive the courts. It took until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, passed under the FDR Administration as part of the New Deal, which not only set a minimum wage, but also severely regulated the employment of minor children.
With one exception: agriculture.
Americans, especially White Americans, tend to see agriculture with rose colored glasses. Yeoman farmers working independently as “pioneers” to “tame” the American West are a huge part of our cultural consciousness. Agricultural writer and crop scientist Sarah Taber has challenged the idea that family farms are the ideal vehicle for agricultural production, and the more I learn about agricultural history the more I tend to agree with her. A better solution remains elusive, however. Our modern system, in which a very few labor to produce truly epic amounts of food very cheaply has allowed our cities to proliferate and grow, allowed the majority of Americans to spend just a fraction of their days in food acquisition, preparation, and consumption and pretty much no time at all on food preservation - tasks that dominated everyday life for thousands of years. But there have been costs. Environmental costs, and human costs as well. Not the least of which is children’s labor.
We tend to think of child labor as a thing of the past. But as recent studies have shown, it very much isn’t.
In mid-April, thanks to an expose by the New York Times, we learned that unaccompanied minors - the migrant children fleeing violence in their home countries in Central and South America via the U.S./Mexico border - had not been well-tracked by the federal government. In fact, thousands of children had been “lost” - most to sponsors who agreed to take care of them. The rapid placement of these children was an attempt by the Biden administration to end the whole children in cages thing, but it had some nasty repercussions. Not the least of which was that a huge number of these migrant children were pushed into the workforce.
That quote sounds like something from the 19th century - going to the poor house to “adopt” children or give them “apprenticeships” that in practice end up being abusive homes with labor practices akin to slavery. But it’s a direct quote from “unvetted sponsors” of minor migrant children. In order to pay back “expenses” of travel, housing, clothing, food, etc., children as young as 12 were sent to work by their “sponsors” in restaurants, construction, packing plants, factories, even meat packing.
In February, the Department of Labor sued a food sanitation company for employing over 100 minor children in cleaning and sanitizing meatpacking factories. Children between the ages of 13 and 17 did things like use hazardous chemicals and clean hazardous machinery, including meat saws. Can you imagine the trauma of just working as a cleaner in a meat packing factory, much less doing it as a child? The DOL sued the company for about $15,000 per child - the maximum allowable penalty. The company paid about $1.5 million overall. Packers Sanitation Services, the company that was sued, made $460 million in 2022 alone. Their fine was not even 1% of their annual revenue. They probably saw it as a cost of doing business.
Reading some of the comments on these articles, you’ll see the same arguments people made in the 19th century - that work is “good” for children, that it is job training, that it helps them earn money and be less of a burden on their families and society. This rhetoric, which generally is spouted by those who also think poor people are in poverty through their own fault, or are “lazy,” infuriates me. They often compare summer agricultural jobs they did as teenagers (back when you could pay for a year of college on 3 months of full-time minimum wage work) as equivalent to children working full-time overnight shifts at age 13. But an 18-year-old picking stones out of a field, while backbreaking, is not the same as a 14-year-old working nights in a meatpacking plant while they’re trying to also go to school.
Of course, meat packing isn’t the only source of illegal child labor. According to the DOL, illegal child labor increased 69% since 2018. Notably, restaurants also engage in illegal child labor regularly. We’re not talking teenagers answering phones or packing takeout orders in their family restaurants after school. We’re talking about multi-national corporations like McDonald’s employing children as young as 10.
Agricultural work has even fewer regulations. Because these labor laws were passed in the 1930s, when a large percentage of Americans still owned or worked on small farms, agricultural labor was exempted from most of the regulations, including child labor laws. Most farming families needed child labor to help care for livestock and get crops in. And since farmers rarely paid themselves, or their families, a wage, they were considered exempt. There were other reasons, too. Urban reformers have long sacrificed agricultural labor in order to maintain lower food prices for urban labor, thereby preventing the expansion of socialism/communism and things like food riots. Child labor on farms was considered an acceptable compromise. They knew most farmers would not be able to afford to hire adult workers for wages. So child labor helped keep food cheap.
And, of course, racism also played a role. Many of the Congresspeople who wanted carveouts for agricultural child labor in the New Deal laws were from the South. Post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and sharecropping kept millions of Black farmers from making a living wage. Keeping their children working also prevented them from getting an education, and stifled upward mobility. In addition, fewer child agricultural laborers would have meant fewer laborers overall, allowing adults to negotiate better wages. The exemption prevented all that.
After World War II, farming changed. Large farms abandoned sharecropping in favor of mechanization. Smaller family farms started to die off. They couldn’t keep up with the high costs of mechanization and expensive agricultural inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. In the 1980s, federal agricultural policy to “get big or get out” combined with a recession killed millions of family farms. Those that were left got big; corporate farming expanded dramatically, and so did exploitative contract agriculture. While mechanization helped keep farm labor in the family for some, especially grain and dairy farmers, others relied increasingly on migrant labor.
In 1960, CBS’s Edward R. Murrow narrated an expose on migrant labor called “Harvest of Shame” (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube). It sought to expose the terrible conditions of migrant farm labor in the United States. But by making migrant labor seem unavoidable, and even natural, it inadvertently cemented migrant labor as a facet of agriculture.
In the 19th century, with the exception of huge bonanza farms in the Midwest in the 1870s, most farmers had hired help - adults who often lived on site were given room and board and a small wage to help the adults in the family with the daily tasks of farming. Often they were the young adult children of neighbors who were saving up for their own farms. Sometimes they were landless people who could not afford to do anything other than sell their own labor. They were rarely turned out at the end of the season, especially since most farms in the 19th century were diversified - raising multiple varieties of livestock and different crops - meaning that work changed but did not end.
In the 20th century, agriculture became increasingly specialized. Farmers might keep a cow and a couple of chickens for home use, but their cash crops were their main focus - grain, beef, chickens, pork, orchards and fruit farms, “truck” farming (i.e. vegetables). Farmers were increasingly participating in vertical integration - farming for canneries and food processors. Crops were harvested all at once, processed, and then the need for farm labor subsided until next harvest season. This was the cycle that gave rise to migrant farming in the United States. Migrant farmers were largely Black former sharecroppers, poor landless Whites, and increasingly, former farmers from Mexico and Latin America.
Today, migrants and people of color (especially from Mexico and Central America) make up a huge portion of the agricultural workforce. They by-and-large have Indigenous backgrounds - pushed out of farming in their home countries by economic depressions, violence (including from drug lords), and an inability to compete with American agricultural subsidies (see: my last article on NAFTA and Mexican maize). They are also subject to some of the most egregious labor conditions in the country.
Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution published an article that had this to say about migrant agricultural labor:
U.S. fruits and vegetables for export are harvested by migrants under conditions that violate core labor standards. Migrants work in the aspects of agriculture that are too difficult or too expensive to automate. They are paid wages below the minimum, exposed to pesticides and relentless heat, crowded in housing not fit for humans, and subjected to sexual harassment and violence.
All true. In fact, after the success of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, founded in 1993 to fight modern-day slavery among agricultural workers in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida, other migrant groups are also suing for labor violations, including human trafficking, slavery, etc.
But what is often not mentioned in these articles is how often children are doing labor. Because the U.S. has such lax labor laws when it comes to agriculture, for decades children have been working in fields alongside their parents, subject to intense heat, lack of water and sanitation facilities, sexual abuse, violence, and overwork. Most agriculture that cannot be mechanized and relies on humans to harvest it is also backbreaking. And instead of getting paid by the hour, workers are “incentivized” by getting paid by the piece or the pound. Meaning the faster and more efficiently you work, the more you get paid. Of course, this also dramatically increases the risk of on-the-job injury and illness.
The National Center for Farmworker Health outlines some statistics on child labor in agriculture, including that agricultural labor generally allows hazardous work and work during school hours at younger ages than any other labor. It is legal for children as young as 10 to do agricultural work outside school hours. And in practice, many children even younger do work under their parents’ social security numbers.
And of course, this is just in the United States. Globally, child labor in agriculture, including slave labor, is an increasing problem. According to the United Nations, child agricultural labor increased in 2020 for the first time in two decades. Chocolate, coffee, tea, and shrimp are all noted for using child labor globally, including slave labor.
What can we do? Well one thing we can remember is that while child labor is still an issue in the United States, it used to be much worse. Political will from the general public forced change via regulation. The regulations aren’t perfect, by any means. Enforcement is sporadic at best. Fines are often so low companies consider violations an acceptable risk, or even a cost of doing business.
Heather Cox Richardson reported on Wednesday that “On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.”
Although 14 is still too young for most agricultural labor, in my opinion, it is a step forward. We'll see if it passes, but political pressure from constituents does still have an effect sometimes - so call your Congresspeople!
Americans tend to spend less on food overall than other developed countries, in part because our agricultural subsidies make processed foods so cheap, but also because our labor costs are so low. Inflation during the pandemic has started to change retail food prices. My real question is, where is all of that increased profit going? Because it isn’t going to laborers. Of course, that’s a topic for another day…
Until next time, friends,
Sarah
What I’m Writing
Published a book review, with another on the way.
Working on articles on the history of French toast and Black WWI food demonstrator Portia Smiley - stay tuned on The Food Historian Blog.
What I’m Reading
Too many fun books, not enough history books. On the docket is a re-read of the secondary source material for my in-progress book, and probably some more book reviews. I’ve found they really help me understand the author’s primary arguments as well as provide examples of what to do (and what not to do) in writing history books. At the top of my list is Modern Food, Moral Food by Helen Zoe Veit - one of the only other books written about US domestic food history in World War I, and also where I got my first tantalizing reference to Portia Smiley.
I also just finished A Modern Cook's Year by Anna Jones, a British cookbook author whose work is chock full of fascinatingly inventive and eminently useful vegetarian and vegan recipes. Check it out!