Federal law allows children as young as 12 to work on farms with no hour limits, and 62% of child workplace deaths occur in agriculture — yet the CARE Act to fix this has failed in Congress repeatedly

Under current federal law, children can work on farms of any size, for unlimited hours outside of school, starting at age 12 — and on small farms with parental consent, there is no minimum age at all. This is a carve-out that applies only to agriculture; in every other industry, the minimum working age is 14, hazardous work is restricted to 18+, and hours are capped. The result is that agriculture accounts for 40% of all child worker deaths among those under 18, and 62% of work-related deaths among children under 16, despite employing a small fraction of the total youth workforce. Researchers have documented children working 12-hour shifts in extreme heat, handling pesticides, operating heavy machinery, and performing repetitive manual labor that causes chronic injuries. These are not teenagers picking berries on a family farm during summer break. These are children of migrant farmworker families who work because their parents' wages are too low to support the family otherwise. The children miss school, fall behind academically, and enter adulthood with damaged bodies and limited education — perpetuating the cycle of poverty. The Department of Labor reported that child labor violations increased 88% since 2019. California, despite being a large agricultural state, issued only 27 citations for agricultural child labor violations across thousands of agricultural employers from 2017 through 2024. The enforcement gap means that violations are essentially cost-free for employers. The Children's Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act), which would align agricultural child labor standards with every other industry by raising the minimum age to 14 and the hazardous work age to 18, has been introduced in Congress repeatedly — most recently in 2024 by Senator Ben Ray Lujan. It has never passed. The structural reason is the same as every other agricultural labor issue: the farm lobby is powerful, farmworker families cannot vote, and the children affected are invisible to the broader public. Agricultural exceptionalism — the legal doctrine that farms deserve different rules than other workplaces — is baked into every federal labor statute from the 1930s onward, and Congress has never mustered the political will to repeal it.