Farm workers harvest curly mustard in a field in February 2021 in Ventura County, California. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Republicans are rolling back child labor laws. But they’ve always been weak on farms.

While many middle schoolers spend their summers at the pool, biking around the neighborhood, or playing video games, Jacqueline Aguilar spent most of hers toiling in the lettuce fields of south central Colorado.

“My parents didn’t have enough money to buy new school clothes, and so that’s when I knew I had to go and work in the fields,” she said. Starting at age 11, from 5 am to 2 pm — six, and sometimes seven days a week, at $10 an hour — Aguilar would walk up and down rows of lettuce, weeding and adjusting lettuce heads to make sure they’d grow correctly.

“Physically, it was super draining,” Aguilar said. “My feet were constantly hurting … I remember just having so many blisters on my hands from the hoe.” She wrapped bandanas around her neck and wore long sleeves to prevent sunburn. “I would get dehydrated super fast and for lunchtime, we wouldn’t really get a meal. So it was like we weren’t eating, we weren’t drinking — they didn’t have clean water for us.”

Aguilar’s first summer of employment was technically illegal — though hardly unusual in agriculture — but once she turned 12, it was perfectly legal for her to work long, grueling hours under a scorching sun, even though her peers would have to wait until they were 14 to work in nearly any non-agricultural job.

In many states, including Colorado, children as young as 12 can harvest tobacco, milk 1,500-pound cows, or work in fruit and vegetable production like Aguilar, but they can’t tear movie tickets or bag groceries. It’s because the agriculture sector plays by a different set of employment rules than most of the rest of the economy.

“A 12-year-old can’t work in this air-conditioned office I have here, making copies, but we’ll let that same kid go into the field in 100 degree heat and do back-breaking work,” said Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy at the National Consumers League and the Child Labor Coalition. (Aguilar, who is now 20, is interning with Maki at the Child Labor Coalition this summer.)