California's child farmworkers: Exhausted, underpaid and toiling in toxic fields
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Leer en español MONTEREY COUNTY, Calif. — The summer sun burned through the clouds in the Salinas Valley, where a bounty of berries and leafy green vegetables grows across this rich farmland renowned as the “Salad Bowl of the World.” Jose, a quiet 14-year-old, was squatting and bending over for hours with other workers in a sprawling strawberry field.About This StoryThis report was produced in partnership with Capital & Main, a California-based nonprofit investigative news publication and the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.It was supported by the California Health Care Foundation and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.The pickers, many of them also minors, snapped berries from plants and placed them in plastic cartons, eight of them in a cardboard box.
They moved quickly along the long rows that lined the field.Jose was exhausted but working as fast as he could; he was being paid $2.40 for each box he filled.As he ran with a full box, he fell on the uneven ground and twisted his ankle.
It hurt for days, he later recalled, but he didn’t say anything to his boss for fear of losing his job.Jose, seen at 13, picks strawberries in the Salinas Valley.He started working in the fields when he was 11 years old and has injured his ankles and knees after falling down at work.
He says he has been paid piece-rate wages for less than minimum wage and he has worked in fields on hot summer days where employers failed to provide shade.He also described working in a field where a strong smell of chemicals gave him a headache.“You just gotta suck it up, and you gotta work through it,” he said on a recent Sunday, his only day off that week.
He has labored in the fields every summer and on weekends during the school year since he was 11 years old to help his mother, who also picks ber...