5 Awful Things I Learned as a Child Laborer (in the USA)

[XemaSab]

We all love food, because it's delicious and without it we'd all die horribly. We also love the fact that we really don't have to worry where said food came from beyond "the store" or, if you think about it a little harder, "the ground." So what if we were to tell you our favorite foodstuffs are being harvested by tens of thousands of exploited children? This isn't some shady underground child labor ring run by the mafia, either -- it's 100-percent legal in almost every state of the union.

We sat down with Norma Flores, who sweated and toiled in the fields while her peers spent their time doing homework and having childhoods. Here's what she told us about the shockingly modern face of backbreaking child labor ...

#5. Your Food Is Harvested by Children (and It's Perfectly Legal)


Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_21750_5-awful-things-i-learned-as-child-laborer-in-usa.html#ixzz3Ei6xhoQ1

This is a really shocking article.

[CrispyQ]

1. That was a heartbreaking read.

...it's estimated that kids who labor in the fields drop out of high school at a rate four times higher than the national average. And what's the only job those kids can get once they've failed out of school? If you said "farm labor," you are absolutely correct. (If you said "astronaut," we appreciate your optimism). It's a brutal circle of life too depressing to be softened by any number of singing cartoon animals.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_21750_5-awful-things-i-learned-as-child-laborer-in-usa_p2.html#ixzz3EiNKygzM

For a country that claims to care for children we don't do a very good job of it.

[MohRokTah]

2. It's sad when Cracked.com is the only place to get stories like this.

[yodermon]

3. Cracked has been great lately.. did you see the recent one about sex slavery? n/t