On Saturday, I went to the Day of the Dead event put on by the Farmworker Advocacy Network at the Oakwood Cemetery Raleigh . There, we honored the farmworkers in North Carolina who died this past year due to heat stroke or difficult working conditions. Local farmworkers spoke and told their stories. They spoke of the need for equal rights for all people, for enough bathroom breaks and water to drink and wash their hands.
This is not a lot to ask. Yet, for our legislature has not made these simple labor rights a necessity. More than 150,000 farmworkers risk their lives in the fields every day. Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry is aware of the dangers that farmworkers face, and the fact that the law continues to allow children as young as 12 to face these dangers in the fields.
The Human Rights Watch recently did a report which stated that children as young as 7 were working (illegally) in tobacco fields. 75% of these children said that they had gotten sick at work, with nausea, headaches, skin conditions and respiratory illnesses.
This kind of child labor should not exist in our country. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free? Give me those people, so I can put their young children to work in the tobacco fields?
Cherie Berry, stop turning a blind eye. Act to STOP child labor in North Carolina .
How do we [Americans] submit?
By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
― Wendell Berry
― Wendell Berry
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