Summary

According to one estimate, about 116,000 15- to 17-year-olds worked as hired agricultural workers in 1997--a number that may be understated because of methodological limitations in making the estimate. Children employed as migrant and seasonal agricultural workers face greater risk of serious injury and death than do children working in other industries, yet they receive less protection under the law, working at younger ages and for longer hours than children employed in other industries. Weaknesses in current enforcement and data collection procedures limit the Department of Labor's ability to detect violations involving children working in agriculture. Changes to better protect children's health are needed, along with measures to address educational needs.

GAO noted that: (1) according to one nationally representative estimate, about 116,000 15- to 17-year-olds worked as hired agricultural workers in 1997; (2) this estimate may undercount the number of children employed in agriculture because of methodological limitations in making the estimates; (3) of all children working in agriculture, between 400 and 600 suffer work-related injuries each year; (4) between 1992 and 1996, 59 children lost their lives while working in agriculture; (5) changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have resulted in more protection for children working in agriculture than when the law was first passed; (6) nevertheless, FLSA and state laws provide less protection for children working in agriculture than for children working in other industries; (7) consequently, children may work in agriculture under circumstances that would be illegal in other industries; (8) weaknesses in current enforcement and data collection procedures limit the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division's (WHD) ability to detect violations involving children working in agriculture; (9) enforcement activities devoted to agriculture have declined in the past 5 years, as has the number of detected cases of agricultural child labor violations; (10) WHD has not established the procedures necessary for documenting whether children are working in agriculture in violation of child labor laws, nor has it routinely followed established procedures for facilitating enforcement coordination for better detecting illegal child labor in agriculture; (11) WHD's enforcement database does not identify all child labor-related violations under FLSA, nor can WHD and other enforcement agencies identify the extent to which children are involved in other types of labor law violations; (12) the Departments of Education and Labor have many programs to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged school-aged children; however, few of these programs specifically target migrant and seasonal agricultural child workers or children of such workers, and most collect no information on the number of such children served; and (13) even for the two largest programs that target some or all of this population, program operations and subsequent data limitations impede a national evaluation of these programs' results for this target population.