National Affairs: The Beet Business

• Share

During the debates in the Senate on the sugar tariff The New York World charged sugar producers with extensive employment of child labor in the beet sugar fields. These charges have now been fully substantiated according to reports made by the National Child Labor Committee after an exhaustive investigation.

The Committee found that what amounts to contract peonage exists in the Michigan beet fields.

Of 681 families visited by the Committee's agents, 407 were "grower" families and 274 contract labor families. The total number of persons in those families between the ages of five and sixteen working in the beet fields was 1,358, or 67 per cent of the workers. More than 50 per cent of these children worked on a contract labor basis.