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 when he arrived 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 used them in a precarious and insecure way to a sentence of one year in 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 the ages of 12 and 16 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 a farm on kilometer 54 of Provincial Route 90, at the access to Santa Teresa: "Blueberry sale", announced the sign at the entrance . On a day of full sun, a woman received two inspectors and an inspector in the field located 60 kilometers from Rosario. "The woman began with refusals, saying that she did not know the owner and was only a person in charge of the place"; However, when consulting data online, she managed to get to 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 blueberries from the bushes and placing them in a basket that hung from her body. Then they transferred that load to some 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 for each one. Apparently, at the end of the week the establishment paid the pickers at the rate of 11 pesos for each kilo of fruit. But for sale to the public, on the other hand, the price was 100 pesos per kilo.
The shed was precarious, there was only a table, scales, and an old-fashioned refrigerator where blueberries were refrigerated. "There was no drinking water, since the woman said that there was only well water," said an inspector. “Moving the boxes involved excessive force for the boys,” she said. She also did not see bathrooms, kitchen, or places of refuge or rest. "People work in the sun and without fixed hours," she said. "The feeling was total neglect."
Those convicted by Judge Marisol Usandizaga are Héctor Osvaldo Balducci and Silvia Edit Bava. Both were accused of "having financially taken advantage of the work of at least five minors, making them manually collect the fruits of the blueberry plantation they own for private marketing purposes, in exchange for payment of 11 pesos per kilogram collected, representing this a risky job, in unhealthy conditions and excessive effort for the age of the children”, says the judicial verdict.
Guillermo Cherner, undersecretary for Employment and Decent Work Policies, said yesterday in radio statements that in the case there was an administrative process with economic fines; but that in parallel the legal case was promoted. The official said that in rural work the employment of minors is “common”. “These are cases of great need. Many times these minors perform 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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