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Obama Caves to Farm Lobby, Youth Workers Suffer

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Child labor

Think child labor in the US is a thing of the past? Think again.

Twenty-five to 30 kids die at work in the US each year. Through its advocacy, the Child Labor Coalition, has worked to reduce that number. Each spring, NCL produces a report called “The Five Most Dangerous Jobs for Teens,” which highlights the year’s most dangerous and deadly.

Last year, we worked to help enact proposed rules to protect kids working in agriculture. Ultimately that effort failed, and the organized farm lobby was able to force the Obama administration to withdraw the rules—a decision that we estimate will lead to the unnecessary deaths of 50 to 100 youth working on farms over the next decade.

In recent weeks, the national media in the United States has focused much-needed attention to a particular type of farm-related death: work in grain silo facilities, which in a typical year kills 15 or more workers. According to recent data, 20 percent of the victims of grain engulfments are young workers.

National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System’s News Hour each featured in-depth stories in late March, highlighting a terrible tragedy at Mount Carroll, Illinois nearly three years ago. Two teens were engulfed by grain and killed while working in a silo. The teens, 14-year-old Wyatt Whitebread and 19-year-old Alex Pacas, suffocated under a mountain of grain. Will Piper, a 20-year-old co-worker, escaped with his life only because someone threw him a bucket that he was able to put over his head. The bucket prevented the flowing grain from asphyxiating him. Today, Piper lives in guilt because he found the job that killed his best friend Alex.

Among the worst aspects of the case are the facts that Wyatt, at 14, was too young to be doing such dangerous work. He and Alex also should have been wearing safety harnesses as they walked on top of the crusty grain trying to loosen it. The facility had the mandatory harnesses but did not instruct or compel the teens to wear them.

The NPR and PBS stories grew out of reporting from the Center for Public Integrity, which found something very disturbing: fines levied by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a result of preventable grain engulfments were  typically reduced over 50 percent and in some cases by well over 90 percent.

In the deaths of Alex Pacas and Wyatt Whitebread, OSHA found 12 “willful violations” and initially leveled $555,000 in fines. This amount was later reduced to $200,000. A Center for Public Interest/NPR analysis found that the $9.2 million fines proposed by OSHA for engulfments that killed 179 people between 1984 and 2012 were eventually reduced to $3.8 million.

NCL and the CLC strongly believe that youth working on farms and agricultural facilities need to have better protections. We urge the Obama administration to reconsider the youth occupational safety rules it withdrew last April. Why allow teen workers to engage in jobs that we know to be extremely dangerous? And in cases where employers are found to be at fault for the death of teen workers, why are fines consistently and dramatically reduced?

Follow @ChildLaborCLC on Twitter

See More in Social Justice.

–Photo: CBC/Flickr

The post Obama Caves to Farm Lobby, Youth Workers Suffer appeared first on The Good Men Project.


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