Caution: children at work.

• Author: Nixon, Ron
• Position: Child agricultural laborers

The next time you buy fresh fruit or vegetables from the supermarket, think about the true costs. Rosa Rubina will. Her five-year-old son Jacob lost his hand while helping to grade and package watermelons in Tifton, Georgia. The boy's hand was caught in a conveyor belt and ripped off. "I saw his arm wasn't there and his hand was stuck in the conveyer belt. I went crazy," Rubina remembers.

Even though the boy was rushed to a nearby hospital and eventually to Atlanta, doctors were unable to save his hand. Today, because of the injury, the child keeps to himself. "He doesn't go out," Rubina says. "Some days he asks me, `Ma are you still gonna love me with one hand?' "

Accidents like Jacob's are becoming all too common for children in the workplace. Thousands of young people are injured, some even killed, on the job each year in the United States. A report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that 64,000 children, ages fourteen through seventeen, were treated in hospitals for work-related injuries in 1992. Another report by the Institute found that from 1980 to 1989, 670 sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds died in work-related accidents.

These statistics tell only part of the story. Thousands of children like Jacob Rubina are not counted in the data gathered by the Department of Labor and other agencies because they work in largely unreportable jobs or help out their parents on the farm where they aren't listed as workers. This problem is particularly acute for minority youth. "Though they are less likely to work than their white counterparts, minority children often work in more dangerous and unreportable jobs," says Charles Geszeck of the Government Accounting Office, the investigative wing of Congress.

Nowhere are the dangers of children working more apparent than in agriculture. On any given day during the harvest season, children as young as five are in the field picking cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, and other hand-harvested fruits. Growers say that they don't hire children, but in 1992, on a tour of ten farms in Ohio, the Associated Press found dozens of children working. Many of these farms were selling their crops to major agriculture corporations like Vlasic Foods, Heinz USA, and Dean Foods. According to the American Friends Service Committee and the United Farm Workers, between 800,000 and 1.5 million children work in agriculture.

While agriculture is not the only industry that employs large numbers of...