Child Laborers. In America. In 2014.

[theHandpuppet]

Human Rights Watch
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?
September 17, 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....

MORE at http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/09/17/child-laborers-america-2014

[Octafish]

1. That is child abuse.

Telling quote about going along to get along:

Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Labor proposed a draft regulation that included working in tobacco among the hazardous tasks prohibited for children under age 16. But the administration later withdrew the regulation after intense lobbying by agricultural interest groups. The administration has been virtually silent on the subject ever since.

[theHandpuppet]

2. Yep, very telling.

Bottom line, money trumps human rights -- even those of children.

[Octafish]

3. The rot is systemic.

What I hadn't counted on, it seems to rot all who touch it.

Of course, Corporate McPravda won't touch the story. Thankfully, there are good and brave people who still put human beings above personal wealth.

Thank you for opening my eyes to the problem of child and slave labor in the USA, theHandpuppet.

[theHandpuppet]

4. Kicking

Because this is legalized child abuse.