US blueberry farms accused of using children as pickers
Supermarkets blacklist firm after young children exploited for small hands
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Independent Minds
Stills from ABC News footage shows children as young as five working alongside their parents on a blueberry farm in Michigan
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Walmart, the world's largest retailer, is embroiled in a child labour scandal in the United States, after children as young as five were found working on a farm that supplies blueberries to the company.
The revelations came as federal authorities said spot checks on farms in the state of Michigan found that more than half were violating child labour or migrant housing rules.
Human rights groups have stepped up their calls for a clampdown on agricultural businesses, where they say children are routinely exploited. Poor families put their children to work to make ends meet, while agriculture bosses, struggling to meet supermarkets' relentless demands for lower-priced goods, are turning a blind eye, campaigners say.
Walmart and two other supermarket chains said they were suspending dealings with Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Co, the Michigan-based supplier at the heart of the latest scandal. Walmart will not buy anything from Adkin "pending the outcome of an investigation by our ethical sourcing team", a company spokesman said.
Adkin general manager Tony Marr said the company did not condone the use of children at its growing facilities. "Walmart, Kroger and Meijer are very large customers of ours," he said. "We're cooperating with them in providing information about our internal investigation, trying to figure out what the kids were doing there."
The children were being put to work because their small hands are more efficient at picking the tiny fruit. They carted buckets of blueberries and provided other help to their parents, also workers on the farm, according to footage obtained by ABC News.
A five-year-old girl named Suli was shown lugging two full buckets of blueberries picked by her parents and her brothers, aged seven and eight. An 11-year-old boy on the farm said he had been picking blueberries there for three years.
Government investigators found four children working in Adkin's fields during an unannounced visit in July. At least two of the children were under 12, including a six-year-old.
Federal law does not allow children younger than 12 to work on farms. Children who are 12 or 13 can have non-hazardous farm jobs outside of school hours if they work on the same farm as their parents or with written parental consent. In all other industries, the minimum age for workers is 14.
Human Rights Watch, which is campaigning to have the minimum age equalised, says that the laws covering child labour on farms reflect a "bygone era". The group's executive director, Lois Whitman, wrote to Congress last month saying: "Today, the vast majority of child farmworkers are not working on their parents' land but are hired labourers employed by large commercial enterprises, and exposed to the increased hazards of heavy mechanization and pesticide use."
Thomas Thornburg, attorney of Farmworker Legal Services, said labour law violations are rampant among farms that use migrant workers. "This isn't one abusive employer," he said after the ABC News investigation at Adkin.
Michigan is America's largest blueberry producer. Federal checks of 35 farms in the state led to eight being fined for violating child labour laws. Adkin was fined for both housing and child labour violations, and it paid more than $5,500 (£3,345) in penalties.
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Comments
Only a 150 years ago, less in some places, children were put to work by their families here in the UK, again to make ends meet. Then, as now, no-one wanted their children to have to work, they wanted them to play, they wanted them to go to school, they wanted them to have a childhood, but food in their bellies is more important.
When you read about this sort of thing happening in Third World countries you deplore it but you probably understand that over the years they will catch up with life in the West, but when it's happening in the USA then something is very wrong.
So, what is wrong? Do the supermarkets encourage this type of behavior by the farms that supply them? Of course they don't. Are the farms wrong in 'turning a blind eye' to keep their supplying costs down? Yes! If they can't supply the fruit at the price the Supermarkets are prepared to pay then they need to withdraw from the contract they have with them or cut costs elsewhere.
The end result needs to be that the (adult) workers who do the job need to be paid a livable wage. If they can't and they know this before they arrive in the US they shouldn't make the journey and not expose their children to that life.
Walmart policies have driven independent farmers out of business, and caused cost cutting like this to happen in the first place. But the grower, not the retailer, will face the penalty.......and then some more low paid workers will get laid off.
the parents should be punished too
It's not as if they are leaving luxury mansions behind them in Mexico and other nations that act as feeder states for America's legalised workhouses is it? These people are doing the best they can to survive, they are recruited on purpose and promised riches and wealth and realise that once they got there... they are held in a limbo, they are trapped, seldom able to afford to go home probably being coerced to remain and to keep silent but hey, its the parents fault as much as the companies after all.
They are exchanging one form of poverty for another and they are being enticed into this by unscrupolous American corporations.
Walmart are very aware of this because Walmart themselves do this all the time, Walmart purposefully brought in great amounts of cheap labour and kept them there with threats of immigration services being tipped off and horror stories of American prisons and what they would do to these immigrants.
I think people need to be very aware of the vast difference that exists from over here to the US, there is no per se "welfare state", you can quite literally starve to death on the streets and because of the racist hysteria drummed up about illegal immigrants, these people are being exploited.
Now consider this, that if it takes a mother and father and two children to scrape enough together to be able to barely survive, is this not indicative of how badly they are being exploited...?
Exploitation is bad, yes, definitely, but the nature of family labor for first generation emigrants should not be impuned by those not in the family system.
We have "low-bush" berries that grow about 6-8 inches from the ground in "blueberry barrens," and "high-bush" blues that grow on shrubs from 4-8 feet. Backbreaking either way. This year was a bumper year for blues, so was last. Because of the now-insatiable demand for blues world-wide because of their reported health benefits (never mind that they are delicious fresh, cooked, frozen, or canned), they are now a major seasonal crop. ...Like potatoes...another big New England (Maine) product. In the old days, whole families used to pick potatoes--schools were let out for the harvest. Hard work, hard life. Kids worked alongside parents--all hands on deck for the harvest, and it had the side benefit of being a good way to keep an eye on the kids. About 100 years ago, some of my family were migrants--they couldn't stand mill work, were incredibly strong, and three brothers became legends--followed crops out a northern route in the summer to the west coast, came back via the south for fall and winter harvests. Earned enough money to live on, support family back home in hard times.
But there's a big difference between all hands on deck for a local product and a local way of life (or three huge and physically powerful brothers working a crop circuit) and exploiting the poverty and desperation of migrants (who are now ubiquitous in this country). They are in every region doing menial labor as housekeeping staff in hotels and corporate offices, as crews for landscaping and lawn-care companies, and as migrant workers for crop harvests. The image of the little girl with the buckets breaks my heart. That's dead wrong. A five-thousand buck fine is NOTHING to a big grower. Throw the book at the agri-bosses, and boycott the product. And if you're local, try to do something at your local level. Got a chi-chi garden center with workers "from away"? Find out how they're housed, paid, and looked after--do their kids have schooling, physicians, etc.? DON'T let them become part of the invisible poor. You, the individual, CAN do something.
Further, as a resident of Michigan’s “Blueberry Growing Capital of the World”, I can attest to the callous disregard of several blueberry farmers regarding a host of issues. As an example, I happen to own property on a small Michigan Lake (Coffee Lake) that abuts one of these industrialized blueberry farms and, rather than dig a well, the blueberry farmer prefers to drain the lake every summer in order to water his blueberries (again, a factory farm & not a nostalgic family farm). I have watched the wildlife on this lake be decimated but, oddly, even though this lake is designated as a federal wet-land, given that a "grandfathered" Michigan law permits a farmer to "take water" from any lake that abuts his property, our blueberry farmer continues to wantonly withdraw water without concern for the wildlife or the property values of his "neighbors". Further, this is not the only lake being drained in Van Buren Michigan by these industrial “blueberry farmers”…several lakes in Van Buren County are being drained in order to produce Michigan blue-berries. So, given the disregard by several blue-berry farmers for their impact on the environment and their neighbors’ property values, it doesn’t surprise me at all that they use child labor and continue to provide sub-standard housing. Truly, many of them are just interested in cutting-costs as much as possible & if this means using child-labor, providing sub-standard housing & damaging our environment, they will continue to do so as long as they make a profit. Therefore, I applaud any and all actions that would make these farmers adhere to any government law (be they State and/or Federal).