Labor Dept. cracks down on child labor on farms

"The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators," Erik Eckholm reports for The New York Times. That's just the beginning, and the Labor Department will make farm labor a priority, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, the daughter of a migrant farmworker, told Eckholm. The department "announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000."

"Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction," Eckholm writes, adding that his visit to the blueberry fields of eastern North Carolina, above, "indicate that the changes, for this crop and this region, are real." (Photo by Angel Franco)