Argentina: Cranberry producers condemned for child labor
"It was like going back a hundred years," declared one of the inspectors from the provincial Ministry of Labor about the feeling he had upon arriving at the Santa Teresa blueberry field where in 2016 they found children working. Now the Justice of Villa Constitución sentenced in an abbreviated trial the couple who employed them in a precarious and unsafe manner to a sentence of one year of conditional prison with rules of conduct. This is the first conviction in the country for the crime of illegal economic use of child labor, of which five boys between 12 and 16 years old were victims. Their families received support from the Social Development area.
Inspectors from the Ministry of Labor led by Julio Genesini arrived on November 10, 2016 at an agricultural farm on kilometer 54 of provincial route No. 90, at the access to Santa Teresa: "Sale of blueberries," announced the sign at the entrance. . On a day of full sun, a woman received two inspectors and one inspector in the field located 60 kilometers from Rosario. "The woman began with denials, saying that she did not know the owner and that she was only in charge of the place"; However, when consulting data on the Internet, she was able to find the name of her son and the woman revealed that he was not the owner, but her husband. When surveying the field, they saw a group of people working, including minors. "The youngest was twelve or ten years old," they said. The work they observed consisted of manually picking the blueberries from the bushes and placing them in a small basket that hung from their body. Then they transferred that load to larger baskets and these were transferred to the scale, where the woman wrote down on a piece of paper the number of kilos that she collected each one. Apparently, at the end of the week the establishment paid the pickers at a rate of 11 pesos for each kilo of fruit. But in public sale, however, the price was 100 pesos per kilo.
The shed was precarious, there was only a table, scales and an old-fashioned refrigerator where the blueberries were refrigerated. "There was no drinking water, since the woman said there was only well water," said an inspector. "Moving the drawers involved excessive force for the boys," she said. She also didn't see bathrooms, kitchens, places of refuge or rest. "People work around the clock and without fixed hours," she said. "The feeling was one of total apathy."
Those convicted by Judge Marisol Usandizaga are Héctor Osvaldo Balducci and Silvia Edit Bava. Both were accused of "having taken economic advantage of the work of at least five minors, making them manually collect the fruits of the blueberry plantation they own for the purposes of private marketing, in exchange for the payment of 11 pesos per kilogram collected, representing this "a risky job, in unhealthy conditions and with excessive effort for the age of the children," says the court verdict.
Guillermo Cherner, Undersecretary of Employment and Decent Work Policies, said yesterday in radio statements that in the case there was an administrative process with financial fines; but that in parallel the judicial case was promoted. The official said that in rural work the employment of minors is "common." «They are cases of great need. Many times these minors carry out these tasks because it is necessary for family support, therefore a whole protocol is applied where the first thing that is done is to stop these tasks," he told LT8.
Among the rules of conduct ordered by the judge, the convicted will not be able to approach the victims of the act and put them at the disposal of the Provincial Office of Control and Post-Penitentiary Assistance for two years.
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