These are migrant farm workers, traveling from one job site to the next with their parents, going where the work is. Norma reported seeing kids as young as seven out in the fields, learning the virtues of soul-grinding menial labor instead of wasting their time playing with their friends or going to school. If you're wondering how these farmers avoid getting busted by the feds, it's because there's nothing to be busted for: according to the U.S. Department of Labor, it's totally okay for children as young as six to toil away in the harsh, unforgiving elements, helping harvest your food with their tiny little hands. Some states have set more strict rules, but still, some 500,000 kids work in American fields every year.

You're welcome to scoff and say that it's good for these kids to get some exercise and learn the value of hard work, but keep in mind there's a reason no other industry allows this. Federal labor laws generally set the minimum work age at 16, and there are a whole bunch of restrictions on how many hours those kids can work and, say, how much poison they can legally inhale in a day. However, farm work is exempt from all these pesky regulations, because it's traditional, and lawmakers are still imagining a wholesome Normal Rockwell scene in which a farmer and his son get up at dawn to milk the cows together.

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Case in point: this is what Getty kicked back for "child farm labor."

Instead, dirt-cheap child labor has become a part of the business model. And no, they're not just helping out here and there so they can get their hands dirty:

"When I was out there, it was typical to do 8 to 10 to 12-hour days. At the peak of the season, we worked seven days a week, maybe three weeks straight, with no days off. Then maybe six days a week, eight hours a day. I'd also spend my spring break working in the fields. I don't know if you've ever been to the Rio Grande valley, it's very hot. Very humid. I'd be out there picking onions."

Via Youtube
Note how the huge knife is totally something that should be in the hands of a third grader.

So, yeah, we're talking hours that would seem excessive for a coked-up Wall Street trader trying to pay off a catastrophic gambling debt:

"Kids wake up before school and work, then work from when school ends until late at night. Even during the school year, a lot of kids work that way ..."

Depressed yet? No? Because it keeps getting worse ...

Incredibly, what Norma grew up in was even more primitive than that plywood beast:

"In Iowa, we lived in chicken coops converted to apartments, with communal bathrooms and showers. It was the same thing with the laundromat. Those were nice places, by the way ... [some] are huge barracks, no privacy, nowhere to lock up your stuff. Toilets just sitting next to each other with no stalls and walls. You have to sit there, staring at someone staring at you."

Let that sink in -- Norma and her family lived in a goddamned chicken coop. Some people lived in trailers, sharing a single trailer with fifteen to twenty others. Unbelievably, many landowners charge rent for the privilege of living in one of these palaces, which, again, is completely legal.

Via Norma Flores
The listing may have been a little generous in describing this as an "open floor plan."

And as soon as they got settled in to one place, it was time to pack up and move again:

"I'd start school in Indiana, in late August. I'd be in class until the end of apple season, October. Sometimes we'd [stay] into November. We'd travel during the weekend so we wouldn't miss school days, and Monday morning I'd be registering for classes in Texas. In Indiana, I was able to stay up late and study and get A's, but then I'd get to Texas and they'd say 'because of the different school systems' I had to make up a ton of the work. So I was not only catching up, I had to make up all those assignments. I'd have to make up every assignment, quiz, all of this without a tutor or anyone helping me out."

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"If Sara had 6 apples and added 4 more, how many more bushels before she's collected enough to escape crippling poverty?"

If you've ever had to switch schools in the middle of a semester, you know what a nightmare it can be. You have to deal with new teachers, new bullies, and new standards of coolness with zero friends in your corner and little chance to make any before the end of the year. And studies show that kids who move frequently have fewer quality relationships and die younger than their more stable peers. And while it's hard enough when you have to move because, say, your dad is the lead singer of Van Halen and you need to follow him on tour, it's even harder when you're trying to find the next round of backbreaking labor:

"It's overwhelming, year after year. Sometimes we'd leave early to try working a different season -- I got pulled out of school in late April once to work the asparagus fields. My parents would enroll me in Michigan for the last few weeks, and I'd just be lost in the curriculum."

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Not to mention how depressing it was to have to reread Grapes of Wrath while kind of living it.

And all those springs and summers spent working in the fields gave Norma the dubious advantage of looking like she'd spent her "vacation" getting a tan. Her classmates initially assumed she'd earned it at the beach:

"And then I'd say 'no I got my tan working in the onion fields.' That was the first time I realized every kid didn't do this."

Hey, don't leave yet -- we're still executing our "it gets worse" promise from earlier:

First of all, virtually everything you come into contact with on a farm is poisonous as shit -- chemicals designed to kill bugs and weeds usually aren't the kind of thing you can use as mouthwash. Also, mechanized equipment designed to stab the earth so hard that vegetables start growing out of the wounds aren't the kind of things you want your kid climbing on. Now, as you're probably aware, one of the defining characteristics of young children is their smallness, which makes them exponentially more vulnerable to poisons and more likely to suddenly disappear beneath a wheat thresher. However, as Norma points out:

"Sixteen-year-olds can't operate a forklift on a construction site. But on a farm? It's fine. The pesticide regulation exposure is based on an adult male. Not a woman, not a child."

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But at least OSHA does take a hard line to ensure workers under 12 can be paid sub-minimum wage.

So children are legally permitted to be exposed to the same levels of poison as a grown man with years of tolerance-building whiskey consumption. And if you're imagining these kids are prohibited from picking crops that have been proven to be physically harmful to them, then you're hopelessly optimistic -- tobacco is often harvested by children. A kid picking tobacco can make as much as $150 per day, which is more than most liberal arts majors, but it comes with a brutal downside. Researchers with Human Rights Watch interviewed a bunch of these Marlboro Boys and Girls to find out whether all this hands-on time with one of the world's most addictive drugs was doing them any harm. The answer was an emphatic "yes."

Human Rights Watch
Followed by an equally emphatic "duh."

They found that 75 percent of the child tobacco workers interviewed reported "vomiting, nausea, headache, dizziness, skin rashes and burning eyes." Bear in mind, these are kids who are still old enough to go trick-or-treating, complaining of symptoms generally attributed to chemical warfare.

All right, you've come this far, might as well keep going. Here where we find out that ...

"These situations keep setting back and setting back. It was difficult for me to keep up. Fortunately, I'm a smart person, but I saw the classmates who came in late and didn't have my ability to pick up subjects quickly and it added up. It kept getting to be a bigger and bigger problem, and a lot of my family members kept dropping out."

In fact, it's estimated that kids who labor in the fields drop out of high school at a rate four times higher than the national average. And what's the only job those kids can get once they've failed out of school? If you said "farm labor," you are absolutely correct. (If you said "astronaut," we appreciate your optimism). It's a brutal circle of life too depressing to be softened by any number of singing cartoon animals. But in the end ...