This week, the Department of Labor announced a series of citations against blueberry farms and contractors in North Carolina. Five of the nine farms cited, and two of 17 agricultural labor contractors, were employing underage workers.
To its credit, the DOL’s Raleigh District Office did uncover many, many violations by a number of companies. The penalties, though, seem a bit light. They totaled just $31,445 – barely $1,000 per violator. And the agricultural employers were forced to repay only $40,010 in wages, or about $93 per employee. The low numbers aren’t all that surprising. Because DOL’s investigators are judged on fines paid – as opposed to, say, amount of citations – fines are often negotiated down. That doesn’t leave employers with much incentive to follow the rules.
At lease one of these cases was extreme: a child (or children?) picking blueberries was only eight years old, young even by the standards of migrant agriculture workers. Yet the fact that so many farms are guilty is further evidence that illegal child labor is more than just an occasional problem in the agriculture industry. These cases also show that practices first spotted along the Mexico-U.S. border are migrating along north along with the workers.
Filed under: Uncategorized, agriculture, blueberries, blueberry, blueberry farms, child labor, child labor violations, department of labor, north carolina, raleigh
