CHILD LABOR IN THE U.S.A !!!!!!

Did you know that child labor also exist in the Unites States of America?
I used to think that child labor only happened in poor countries like in the Caribean Island out there where nobody knows about or in Asia and Africa until I came across an article that said that child labor still exists in the United States today!! I was in a state of shock because this is the richest country in the world..(well atleast thats what everyone says). Why would we need children to work in places where we could easily find adults who are unemployed to do the job? I didnt really believe it until kept on doing my research and I found more and more sites that say the same thing, child labor in the United States today!! If you thought that child labor was something of the past think again. The following is from one of the sites that I looked up and proved that child labor still exist in the U.S.
"The traditional picture of child labor is of something that takes place in poverty-stricken less developed countries. But the United Farm Workers union estimates that at least 800,000 children work in the fields of the U.S. And when the urban sweatshops of the garment and other industries are accounted for, the total number of child laborers in the U.S. runs even higher. In the richest country in the world, these children will never know a childhood that doesn’t include the stress, fatigue and cruelty of work."
In this site, there is a story of a boy, 9 years old, called Sharon Smith who used to work in a jewelry store with his family to help make money. Homework for them didnt meant school work, it meant working outside, making money, so Sharon never got away without doing his homework because it was something he had to do every day. At work him and his family would take a pair of tweezers, dip it into a jar of acid and pull out a piece of lead the size of a pinhead. Then they would put the piece of lead on top of part of an earring or ring. They got paid according to how many pieces were on a tray. "Technically, the factories don’t know about this--much like Nike and Kathie Lee today claim not to know about labor violations in their factories abroad. And chances are that there are no labor department statistics documenting homework in the jewelry industry, then or now." The worse thing about this story is that the owner of this jewelry industry still hasnt gotten caught. He still runs this so-called-business, has been running it for 30 years and still hasnt gotten busted for violating child labor laws for the past 30 years.
I also found a website called Young Migrant Workers Toil in U.S. Fields
By Karen Fanning. This website has a story of a young boy 6 years old, Santos Polendo and how he used to work in onion fields of Texas. He had been working ten years on those fields breaking his back along with 800,000 other children in the United States. "I had blisters on my hands. My back was hurting. My head was hurting. I never thought I was going to make that my life."




http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/child_labor/child_labor/index.asp?article=migrant
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/500Supp/500S_20000707_ChildLabor.shtml