Child Laborers on American Tobacco Farms

[jimmy olsen]

Law really needs to be changed. I believe the intent of the current law mentioned was aimed at family farms, not massive plantations.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/child-laborers-in-america-in-2014-111027.html#ixzz3DdWBoAqb

Child Laborers. In America. In 2014.

Kids as young as 12 report illness from working in tobacco fields. Why isn't the government doing anything about it?

By JO BECKER

September 16, 2014

The Obama administration has made curbing nicotine use by kids a public health priority, with efforts including mass media campaigns to reduce teen smoking and a proposed ban on selling e-cigarettes to minors. But when it comes to the serious health risks run by thousands of children who work each summer on tobacco farms in the United States, the administration has been conspicuously silent.

Lax federal labor laws allow kids as young as 12 to work in tobacco fields, despite mounting evidence that they can contract acute nicotine poisoning from handling tobacco leaves. Even some tobacco growers and companies take the position that U.S. laws and regulations aren't strong enough. But the Obama administration has said little and done even less. That needs to change.

A Human Rights Watch report released in May documented the dangers to children working on American tobacco farms based on a year's research and interviews with 141 child tobacco workers, ages 7 to 17, in the country's four largest tobacco-producing states: North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Tobacco grown in these fields is used to produce popular cigarette brands, including Marlboro, Pall Mall and Newport. Nearly three-quarters of children interviewed reported feeling sick—with nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, difficulty breathing, or other serious symptoms while working in tobacco fields. Many of these symptoms are consistent with acute nicotine poisoning, also known as Green Tobacco Sickness. A 2007 Journal of Public Health review of public health studies found that non-smoking tobacco workers have as much nicotine in their bodies as active smokers.

Most of the children we spoke to labored for 50 to 60 hours a week in sweltering heat, often without shade or adequate drinking water. They plant seedlings, weed tobacco fields and work among tall tobacco plants, breaking flowers off the top of the plants and removing leaves called "suckers" that reduce the yield and quality of the tobacco. In Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, children often hand-harvest tobacco plants by cutting them with small axes and spearing the stalks onto long sticks with pointed ends. Some climb high into the rafters of curing barns to hang heavy sticks of tobacco to dry. Many children described how pesticides—known neurotoxins that can cause long-term and chronic health problems—drifted over them as tractors sprayed in the fields where they worked, causing their eyes and skin to itch and burn.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Oh, I'm sure the intent of the current law is to allow slavery through the back door. That's how congress works.

We should have broken up these holdings 150 years ago. Give the kids 40 acres and a smooth, smooth camel.

[Tonitrus]

Tabacco

[CountDeMoney]

Tabacco

Fucking retard.

[Scipio]

Goddamn Tobasco plantations! That just ratified my decision to prefer Frank's Red Hot Original.

[Caliga]

There are tobacco farms all over the place where I live but I have never seen any children working on them.... only old guys and Mexicans.

[Eddie Teach]

A child and an old Mexican can be easily be confused at a distance.

[Savonarola]

There are tobacco farms all over the place where I live but I have never seen any children working on them.... only old guys and Mexicans.

A person I used to work with grew up in coastal North Carolina.  He picked tobacco when he was young.  He said he didn't do it every year; only when the crop came in early so that school wasn't yet in session and the migrants hadn't arrived.  He said that even with gloves you'd still absorb nicotine and he'd lie awake throughout most of the night totally wired.

[Caliga]

A child and an old Mexican can be easily be confused at a distance.

I never thought about that.

[Caliga]

He said that even with gloves you'd still absorb nicotine and he'd lie awake throughout most of the night totally wired.

That's neat.

[derspiess]

My grandparents grew tobacco on their land and kept their kids away from it, except for when they'd take it down to market.  That's when they'd all put on their Sunday best and hit the big town of Ripley, OH

[The Brain]

Last commercial tobacco farms in Sweden closed in the 50s. Those children are old now.