Our family was very poor in Las Animas, Colorado, and we needed more income to feed our large family in 1956. My father, a respected farmworker, was getting 65 cents an hour. Or $6.50 a day for 10 hours of work.
Marcos, my father, convinced the crew boss to hire me at the same meager wage, and there I was under the hot sun working side by side with my father. Because of my inexperience, my father had to work extra hard to keep us up with the rest of the crew. Now with the two of us working, we were bringing home a total of $13 a day, the wages for two individuals working 10 hours.
At the age of 12, I got a job working all night at a dry ice plant 20 miles south of town. I had to present a social security card you could not get unless you were 14. My friend Paul Fernandez lent me his card, and I went to work packing train cars with dry ice without the proper gloves and clothing. It was super hard and dangerous work.
By age 13, I left with a Texas Sheep shearing crew to shear sheep in the Dakotas, far from my Las Animas, Colorado home. It was an adventure and very hard on a young teenager. We did not have cell phones and no medical plans should I get injured. At one point, one man, a fellow worker who gave haircuts, tried to shoot me with his 22 pistol when I refused his services. I was lucky that he was drunk and was not a good shot. But as I ran amongst the sheep, I was scared and moving fast like a pro football halfback dodging right and left quickly.
I continued to work at many farms and not farm jobs as a hard-working laborer during my youth. Later I would find out that none of my early employers paid into social security. I never learned to enjoy baseball as a young man, given that my summers were spent working for very little money in the hot sun.
Today many states are lowering the ages for children to go to work with no protections. At the same time, they are deporting immigrant workers who could fill these jobs correctly.
One startling situation is young children under 18 working in bars and serving drinks. I did these bar jobs when I was 19 years of age and knew of the abuse and problems a younger person might encounter with some clients who have had too much to drink.
Many children already working and filling these new opportunities will be children of color, immigrants, and poor white kids. The children of these legislators who are changing the laws will not have to work at these precarious jobs, and their families will have enough money not to be forced to work to survive. We must protect our children from this expanded form of CHILD ABUSE.
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