Summary of Findings

• Throughout its history—from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the Bracero guest worker program, and into the present day—the United States has used and exploited the labor of marginalized communities of color, and their children, to grow food. • The federal minimum age to work full-time in the agricultural industry is only 12 years old, the age of a sixth grader, while in most other industries, the federal minimum age to work full-time is 16, the age of a tenth grader. • Approximately 330,000 children under the age of 16, including over 80,000 children under the age of 10, are child farmworkers in the United States. • Neither the U.S. Department of Labor nor the U.S. Census Bureau collects data on the demographics of agricultural workers in the U.S., but researchers estimate that over 90% of farmworkers in the United States are persons of color—roughly 83% of farmworkers are Hispanic, 7% are Haitian, 6% are Indigenous, and 3% are African American. • Approximately 33 children are injured on farms every day, and a child dies in a farm accident once every three days in the United States. Although only 6% of child workers in the United States are employed on farms, more than half of child work-related deaths are in agriculture. • Since 2000, children have been killed in farm-related accidents in at least 49 states. • Our new survey of the laws of the 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico show: • 22 states have no minimum age to work in agriculture. • 14 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico have raised the minimum age to work in agriculture to age to 14. • All 50 states have laws protecting children from work more than 8 hours a day, but 25 states and D.C. set no limit on the amount of hours in a day a child farmworker under 16 can work in the fields. • 35 states and D.C. allow children under 16 to work 7 days a week in the fields. • 15 states and Puerto Rico have laws that say children can only work 6 days in a week. • All 50 states have laws protecting children from working at night, but 23 states fail to protect child farmworkers under those laws. • All 50 states give employers fines for violating child labor laws, but 15 states make that fine $500 or less for the first offense. Indiana, has the lightest penalty for an initial violation of state child labor laws: a warning letter.

Approximately 33 children are injured on farms every day, and a child dies in a farm accident once every three days in the United States.

The federal minimum age to work full-time in the agricultural industry is only 12 years old, while in most other industries, the federal minimum age to work full-time is 16.