Earlier in the month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced the beginning of its campaign to end child labour in US agriculture. The campaign, among other things, calls for the "same age and hour requirements to children working in agriculture that already apply to all other working children" and for the government to "strengthen provisions regarding children's exposure to pesticides".

HRW's campaign begins just as anti-immigrant action in the US has heated up. Arizona recently passed the draconian SB 1070 legislation that requires local police to check the immigration status of anybody they have a "reasonable" suspicion of being undocumented. Arizona also outlawed ethnic studies classes shortly thereafter and is forbidding teachers with heavy accents from teaching English.

Most of these actions (and subsequent actions in other states) are being justified based on the state of labour in the US. That is, undocumented workers are "stealing" the jobs of citizens and as such, we need to come down particularly hard on any who might be undocumented. The Southern Poverty Law Centre (an organisation that monitors hate groups), has done an excellent job in documenting how labour gets centred in the immigration debate:

"[The Coalition for the Future American Worker] ran an ad featuring a couple sitting at a kitchen table with a baby crying in the background. The husband tells his wife that he failed to get a job because 'they hired all foreign workers'. During a 2004 Texas congressional race, it ran television ads that included images of dark-skinned men loitering on street corners and running from police cars."

But the HRW campaign exposes a conflict between how immigration and labour is represented – and what it is in reality. HRW estimates that at least 9% of farm workers are children, and this number may be significantly higher. What this means is that a very big percentage of the actual people doing the "stealing" are kids rather than grown men, and those kids, more often than not, may actually be citizens, having been born in the US after their parents immigrated.

Unfortunately, the false representation of adult male labourers "stealing" jobs of citizens is becoming more mainstream, with the result being that consumers are largely ignorant of the immensity of the problem, or oddly, they even regard child labour as a good thing. Drawing on a mythical past where youth spent their summers on family farms working for a little spending money, the argument is that what was good for grandparents then is good for children today. It "builds strength of character" and teaches good lessons.

The problem here is that there is a significant difference between an agricultural industrial farm and a family owned farm. Most farms in the US today are owned by massive corporations that use tools, heavy machinery and engage in extensive pesticide spraying. Child labourers (who are often as young as seven or eight) working on these industrial farms can expect to work 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch breaks are often only a half hour and as with most farm workers, bathrooms and even clean water to drink are rarely supplied by the growers. Federal minimum wage is $7.50 an hour, but because farm workers are paid by the bucket rather than by the hour, their wages often average out to as low as $2.38 an hour.

For children, payment for labour presents a unique problem. Because children are often too young to collect their own pay, parents are paid instead. While it may not necessarily be a bad thing for kids to give their earnings to parents to help with bills, it does seem ironic at best that children are working full-time jobs but because they are not officially on the books, they are not eligible for worker's compensation should they get sick or hurt, unemployment benefits during any period they aren't working, nor are they even getting credit for paying into social security. If we have no problem "teaching" kids the benefits of working full time, then shouldn't we also be teaching them what rights they have as workers?

When I first read HRW's stance against child labour violations, I did not feel that the campaign went far enough to protect children. But given the context of the US political atmosphere in which the campaign was announced, I think it's a beneficial campaign if only for the education and worker testimony it provides to consumers who are being bombarded by messages that simply don't reflect reality. Whether this campaign will gain any meaningful momentum towards achieving the goals it calls for, however, remains to be seen.