UCONN Draft
2/25/08
Good afternoon.
I want to thank Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, the Thomas J. Dodd
Research Center, the Human Rights Institute and my dear friend
Shareen Hertel, the Department of Political Science and the Office of
International Affairs for inviting me out here to address you today.
I want to start off with a pop quiz this afternoon.
What country allows children under 10 to work in 100-degree
weather? What country allows children as young as 12 to work
unlimited hours? What country says that you don’t have to pay
minimum wage for many types of agricultural work? What country
says that no matter how many hours you work you are not entitled to
overtime? That you are not entitled to a day off?
India?
Mali?
Brazil?
Actually most of what I just described is illegal in those countries and
most others as well. The country where it is not illegal is the United
States of America.
70% of all child labor in the world is in agriculture, and 6 multinational
companies control 70% of the market. There is a stunning and lethal
symmetry to those numbers. Though Globalization in the form of
free-trade, open markets and agreement such as NAFTA herald
improved standards of living for all, nothing could be farther from the
truth and nothing could be worse for children in the developing world,
What many Americans don't know is that the same poverty that drives
children around the world into work also continues to push
generations of American children into a similar life of hard labor and
migrants and farmworkers and their children have always been the
first victims of these economic hardships.
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Welcome to the life of our farmworker children and their families. And
don’t be fooled by all the noise surrounding ‘illegal immigrants’- most
of these children are American citizens. And I can tell you from
personal experience that they are people of enormous dignity and
faith. People whose work ethic and family values take a back seat to
no one. These are the people who, like so many countless others, put
the food on the table for the best fed country in the world, and it is in
large part thanks to their productivity that The United States is the
largest food exporter in the world.
I’m going to reverse the advertised order of the presentation today
and show you a clip from one of my last films that I co-directed with
Len Morris- Stolen Childhoods. Stolen Childhoods was the first
feature length documentary about child labor ever to be released in
this country
The clip you are going to see is about the plight of migrant children
right here in the United States that I shot 5 years ago in Texas that
actually led to saber rattling threats from our government in an effort
to inhibit our releasing the film. Suffice it to say the film has now been
seen by over 70 million people worldwide and was featured on
Oprah, CNN and ABC’s Nightline.
The children you are about to watch are a window into the large but
seldom seen population of child workers in the United States.

VIDEO
Show Clip of SC

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I want to point out to you that the educational program you just saw The Farmworker Youth Program - that had been set up across this
country to help migrant child laborers like Mariela, Santos and Dora
had its funding cut 100%, thus closing down centers in 31 states and
Puerto Rico, abandoning thousands of children on their journey to
getting a diploma, leaving them all behind.

Recently the Senate passed their version of the Agricultural bill and
like the House version that passed earlier, it favors a relatively small
number of producers leaving behind most farmers, rural communities
and farm workers, and it falls short of meeting its obligations to
migrant workers some of them immigrants, and their children.
Although the Senate included a provision that would allow groups
such as MET and their umbrella organization the Association of
Farmworker Opportunity Programs- to provide a new set of services
to farmworkers, it is a tiny fraction of the aid that Congress grants to
wealthy farmers. This farm bill will continue the long history of
dismantling social programs and the exclusion for many from basic
rights that has plagued agriculture since the Fair Labor Standards Act
and the National Labor Relations Act of the 1930’s and has caused
one pundit to remark that we have gone from the Grapes of Wrath to
the Grapes of Graft. In short, there is 47 Billion dollars in direct and
indirect subsidies for a small percentage of wealthy producers but we
are still unable to find 16 Million dollars for Migrant Education that
helps tens of thousands of our own children.
The 19th century German Philosopher Siegfried Bonhoeffer said that
the measure of any moral society was how it treated its children. I
think it is fair to say that in America we continue to fail our moral duty
absolutely.
Let me set the table for you: In the United States where we are first
among industrialized countries in income, Gross Domestic Product,
the number of millionaires and billionaires, military spending and
agricultural exports we are:

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 13th in the gap between rich and poor, a gap that continues to
grow to historic proportions
 14th in our effort to lift children out of poverty
 18th in the percent of child poverty
In this land of plenty… 33 million men, women and children go hungry
everyday and malnutrition among migrant children is among the
highest. Think about that for a moment. The people who pick the food
for your table can barely afford to eat it themselves.
Poverty is usually blamed, first and foremost, for a family's decision to
put a child to work. But the poverty that forces children into the fields
has causes: prejudice that pushes entire groups of people to the
margins; policy decisions that either neglect the problem or make it
worse; and profit: subsidies, laws and the lack of regulation that
reward corporations and special interests at the expense of people.
I want to break this down for you. The average pay for a migrant
worker today is $7500 a year and for a family of 4, it is between
$12,500 and $14,500 a year. All of these are well below the poverty
level. As a matter of fact, 1/3 of all farmworkers live below the poverty
level and many farmworkers have not seen their wages increase in
25 years. As Maria Espinoza, a migrant farmworker you will see in the
upcoming trailer, said to me this past summer:
I’ve been coming to Minnesota for 6 years. 6 years ago they paid
$22 or $25 in the fields. Today they still want to pay you $22 an acre
and no more. As a migrant worker I think they are not paying us
enough… All we are asking for is for them to be fair, but because
they are not we are forced to place our children in the fields…We are
forced to think this way because of how little we are earning.

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Small wonder then, that backbreaking farm work is a part of life today
for some 400,000 to 500,000 children in the United States. Most of
these migrant child laborers are United States citizens. Their parents,
many of them United States citizens, were children of migrants
themselves, and came here dreaming of a better life. Unfortunately, in
far too many cases, things have only gotten worse. Child farmworkers
labor under grueling and dangerous conditions. They often work
twelve hour days and during peak harvest season even longer, some
paid as little as $2 an hour.
For migrant children in the United States, the workday begins before
6 a.m. and ends after 6 p.m. After returning home from work, they eat
dinner, take a shower, and go to bed to rest for yet another long day
of hard labor. A workweek consists of at least six days a week,
always trying to stay ahead of Mother Nature. In the words of Jesse
Sanchez from the Texas Migrant Education Program:
That’s what you do everyday in life. Just go back and forth and there’s
nothing to look forward to, because you know you are going to do this
the next day and the next day…

There are three main migrant streams in the United States originating
in Texas, Florida and Southern California. Every year hundreds of
thousands of children leave home and begin a 135-day odyssey that
covers 40 states throughout America leaving friends, family and
school behind. They pull onions in Texas and pick cucumbers in Ohio
and Michigan; they pick green peppers in Tennessee and cut grapes
in California; they stoop in the gloomy mushroom sheds of
Pennsylvania and pack peaches into crates in Illinois. They harvest
miles of rows of sugar beets in Minnesota and pick cherries in
Washington State. By some estimates more than a quarter of the
food we eat is harvested by kids.
And I want you to forget those idyllic and hearty and healthy images
of the American farm where families are out in the sunny fields
enjoying the fresh air.
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The reality is that agricultural labor is one of the most lethal
professions. Among the many dangers children face on the job are
pesticides. In the United States today we use over a billion pounds of
pesticides each year, of which 165 are potentially carcinogenic and
the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 300,000
farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year.

Migrant children regularly labor in fields that are sprayed with these
toxic chemicals, which can cause skin irritations and breathing
difficulties, and their small, young and undeveloped bodies are
especially vulnerable. Child farm workers are exposed to the same
pesticide levels as adults, yet children up to the age of fifteen are
three times as likely to develop cancer as a result. 90 percent of
migrant children do not have a health plan and it is shocking to note
that 20% of all farm work fatalities in the United States are children
and even for those that survive, the average life span for a migrant is
49 years of age.
By now, I am beginning to hear some of you say to yourselves: “there
must be a law”
Tragically there is not. Farm worker children are not being afforded
the same protection as other working children in the United States.
Federal laws permit a child aged 13 to work in100-degree heat in a
strawberry field, but may not permit that child to work in an
air-conditioned office. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) the
legal age to perform most farm work is only 12 if a parent or other
responsible adult accompanies the working child. Children who are
14 or older can work unlimited hours in the fields before or after
school hours. That same law requires a minimum age of 14 years for
nonagricultural work and limits such work to 3 hours per day while
school is in session. I would dare say that migrant children have the
highest dropout rate not because they drop out, but because they are
pushed out.

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The math is simple here, if a child works on average 30 hours a week
and has to leave their school early and return late then there is little
time left over for schoolwork and for being a child. Many of the
schools themselves are not helpful and seem almost purposely and
perversely inadequate to the task. Maria Espinoza’s words still linger,
she said that the schools her daughter Yaresse attended were more
than capable of totaling up Yaresse’s tardies and threatening
punishment but could not transfer her credits, making it far more
difficult for her daughter to progress. Surely our children deserve
better treatment.
When a 15 year old girl says that she would rather die than go back
to work in the fields you know that you have left the American Dream
far behind.
So how do we begin to change this? How do we begin to combat
these gross inequities in our country? How do we beat back the
waves of misinformation and prejudice? And perhaps most
importantly, what can we as individuals do?

We can support legislation such as the Children’s Act for Responsible
Employment, known as the CARE Act, that ends the double
standards in the laws for farmworker children. Groundbreaking
though it was in 1938, The Fair Labor Standards Act excluded farm
work and farmworker children and in the 70 years since then, little
has been done to end this discrimination. Congresswoman
Roybal-Allard (D-CA) reintroduced the CARE Act this past summer in
the 110th Congress. It amends the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
by bringing the age and work hours standards for children working in
agriculture up to the standards set under the Fair Labor Standards
Act for all other forms of child labor.

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Now I know that the University of Connecticut at Storrs was founded
as an agricultural college and that some here might worry about the
family farm exemptions. Well the CARE act preserves the Fair Labor
Standards Act’s family farm exemption. Under the CARE Act a
farmer’s children of any age would continue to be able to work for
their parents on their own farms. What many of you may not realize is
that family farms produce less that 1.5% of the food we eat today.
The CARE act also increases penalties for child labor violations and
as importantly will strengthen provisions for pesticide exposure in
agriculture to take into account the additional risks pose to children
and women. Remember that the standard right now is based on a
160-pound male.
But ending child labor is only one part of the equation and I along with
other human rights and children’s rights advocates have long
recognized that you cannot end abusive child labor practices without
linking it to educational initiatives. The fight to end child labor must
move in lockstep with the fight for and right to Education. We must
increase educational aid for migrant and farmworker childrensomething that was not done in the last Farm Bill.
And finally we can work on ending wage exploitation for farmworkers
in general and break the cycle of poverty that continues to drive these
children into the fields. I think all of us would be willing to pay a little
more for the food that we eat if we knew that the people who picked it
for us were paid a decent wage. Americans pay a lower percentage
of their income on food than any other country in the developed
world. Is it too much to ask Burger King to pay a penny more per
pound for their tomatoes? An increase whose total is less than the
bonuses paid to their top executives? It is a violation of decency that
tomato pickers have to pick and haul 2 tons of tomatoes just to earn
$56 a day. You can join the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they campaign for fairer
wages.

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What I intend to do is make a film about the problems facing child
farmworkers and their families. In “Stolen Childhoods”, we undertook
the effort to begin to explain the life of the migrant child in the United
States, but it was a section of a bigger whole.
Now I want to make a feature film exclusively about the lives of
migrants and agricultural workers and their children. And the film that
I am going to make is in part an update of Edward R. Murrow’s
“Harvest of Shame” (Cosecha de la Vergüenza).
It has been more than 45 years since Murrow's powerful report
highlighted the plight of migrant workers in the United States.
Considered by many to be the most important news documentary in
TV history, Harvest of Shame set a standard that has been long lost
in the juggernaut of today's media consolidation, co-optation and
consequent loss of gravitas.
Daring to challenge both government and agribusiness, Murrow and
his producer, David Lowe, set about to highlight the plight of farm
laborers, some of whom worked for as little as a dollar a day. The film
shocked viewers with its stark images of desperate poverty and the
callous greed of the big growers. In 1960 the exploitation of farm
workers in the United States was a revelation to viewersunfortunately in 2008, little if anything has changed.
Today the same images -- and reality -- of poverty and survival and
racial exclusion still exist. And today, with the hot button debates
surrounding undocumented immigrants, struggling farmers, a living
wage, food security and the state of the children in this country, a new
"Harvest of Shame" will cast a new light on these problems, looking
beyond the current set of acrimonious and stilted debates. It is my
hope to make a film that shows this country, and the world, the dignity
and decency and hard work of the migrant and farm-working
community.

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THE HARVEST will look three of the most heinous trends affecting
children in American agriculture today. The Migrant children that I’ve
already described and those among them who are being orphaned at
the rate of 65,000 a year while their undocumented parents are
deported and the children pushed across our border by the effects of
NAFTA, The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law
by President Clinton in 1994. Whatever NAFTA promised it has surely
not delivered.
One example of NAFTA’s ill effects was the dumping of US corn in
the Mexican market. In the United States corn is produced at $6
dollars a bushel, in Mexico it is produced at $4 a bushel, but NAFTA
and a 10.1 billion dollar government subsidy allowed for US corn to
be sold for $3 a bushel in Mexico, thus breaking the back of the
Mexican farmer and turning many rural communities into ghost towns.
In the 14 years since NAFTA was signed it has displaced over 1.5
million Mexican farmers and farmworkers. Further, buried in the
NAFTA agreement was the repeal of Article 27, a land reform act
dating back to the post revolutionary constitution of 1917, thus
destroying any chance that campesinos and indigenous people would
be able to farm their own land.
Many of those now forced to fend for themselves there are children,
some as young as 12 (or younger), who make the treacherous
1500-mile journey to our border in order to survive. They leave from
economically devastated regions like Puebla, Oaxaca and Chiapas
where unemployment is as high as 80%. And that is just the
beginning of the perilous journey. I have spoken with 14 and 15 year
olds who have braved crossing the deserts of Arizona, a crossing
where every group lost at least one person, one a child of 15. They
come here because they can make in a day what they would make in
a week and some in a month back home in Mexico. They come here
to survive. In short, they come because they have to. When we look
at the millions of Mexicans that have been affected by NAFTA we
should factor in a displacement coefficient to our economic calculus.

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My friend Sonia Mayo Hohnadel says it best when she writes:
“We did not cross the border, the border crossed us”
Long before there was talk of a wall at the border, we had erected a
wall in this country, a wall of inequality that made it difficult for our
own children and others to cross over into the American dream. In
today’s anti immigration rhetoric, it is easy to see that politically,
brown is becoming the new pink.
So much for lifting our lamp beside the golden door.
Edward Murrow asked 45 years ago if it was right to let the people
who help feed their fellow Americans labor under conditions that
wronged the dignity of man. Today we should ask the same question
and add to it: is this the type of country we want? Is this the type of
country that we can be proud of?
It is time for a new Harvest of Shame, one that sheds a humane and
human light on the plight of farmworkers and their children. It is time
to end the tragic disconnect between the meals that everyone,
including Lou Dobbs, eats and the people who pick the food in the
best-fed nation on earth. It has been said by many in this country that
America can no longer bear the burden of subsidizing migrants and
immigrants, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The truth is
that with their hard work and low pay, they subsidize us every day.
The truth is that they struggle everyday so we can live more
comfortably. Our sustenance is the weight they bear on their backs.
While we are fed, they go hungry.
You have heard my voice, now I am going to close with a short trailer
from the film I want to make where you can hear what the children
and their families say. This is a rough cut of a promotional trailer that I
am working on with Shine Global.
VIDEO
Clip from The Harvest/La Cosecha

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Agriculture is fast becoming the major battleground for activists and
concerned people where our health, our economic wellbeing, our
rights as citizens and the preservation of the environment is
concerned. It sits at the nexus of the three E’s- energy, the economy
and the environment and shows us the dangers implicit in the
Globalized and over-financialized world. Perhaps by making people
aware of what goes on at the ground level, literally, we can begin to
define a policy that is fair, transparent, healthy and humane: a policy
that uplifts our own and the world’s children, rather than grinding
them under the heel of efficiencies and profits.

I hope that you will join with me in this effort to right the many wrongs
facing farmworkers and their children in this country as part of a
broader movement towards a sustainable, stable and socially just
world. It has been and will continue to be a long struggle to bring
justice to the farm worker community, but I want to leave you with the
words of Martin Luther King: “Let us realize the arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
And remember, before there was Obama’s Yes we can there was
Cesar Chavez’s Si se puede!
Thank you/Gracias.

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