Tag Archive for: Tobacco

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Open Letter to the President: CLC Members are Joined By Other NGOs and Ask the Adminstration to Protect Child Tobacco Workers in the US

Art work courtesy Human Rights Watch

Dear Mr. President,

We write to you as organizations representing millions of Americans, including teachers, healthcare professionals, workers, farmworkers, and advocates concerned about the safety, education, and welfare of children.  We are alarmed at recent reports that children are risking acute nicotine poisoning and other health and safety hazards in US tobacco fields, and would like to urge your administration to take immediate action to protect these children.

A study released in May by Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with 141 child tobacco workers in the four largest tobacco-producing states (North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee), found that nearly three-quarters of the child tobacco workers they interviewed had experienced the sudden onset of serious symptoms—including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, headaches, dizziness, difficulty breathing, skin rashes, and irritation to their eyes and mouths —while working in fields of tobacco plants and in curing barns. Many of these symptoms are consistent with acute nicotine poisoning.

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CLC Press Release: Ban Child Labor in US Tobacco Fields

For immediate release: November 22, 2013
Contact: Reid Maki, (202) 207-2820, reidm@nclnet.org

Washington, DC—In the wake of child labor exposés by The Nation magazine last week, the Child Labor Coalition is calling on the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to immediately ban child labor in tobacco fields—something the department had proposed to do in 2011.

In “Why Are Children Working in American Tobacco Fields?,” Gabriel Thompson’s reporting describes the alarming health risks young tobacco workers face. He tells the story of three young sisters age 12, 13, and 14 whose tobacco harvesting made them ill from “green tobacco sickness” or nicotine poisoning. Despite their health problems, the girls went on to work four summers of 60-hour weeks in the tobacco fields, absorbing the nicotine from the equivalent of 36 cigarettes each day, according to a study cited by The Nation.

“We don’t let 12-year-olds buy and smoke cigarettes,” noted Sally Greenberg, co-chair of the Child Labor Coalition and the executive director of the National Consumers League. “Why would we let them perform dangerous work in tobacco fields beginning at the age of 12? It simply isn’t right.”

“Children should not be allowed to perform dangerous work, especially in the tobacco fields,” said Norma Flores López, Chair of the Domestic Issues Committee for the Child Labor Coalition and the Director of the Children in the Fields Campaign at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. “Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of nicotine, pesticides and heat stress they are exposed to in the tobacco fields. We urge the Secretary to put the health of farmworker children over the interest of tobacco companies, and strengthen the protections for children working in agriculture.”

Thompson’s reporting cited a study that one in four tobacco workers contract green tobacco sickness.”Symptoms range from dizziness and vomiting to difficulty breathing and heart rate fluctuations requiring hospitalization,” reported Thompson. “The pain can be so excruciating that some workers call it ‘the green monster.’ A tobacco farmer in Kentucky said the sickness ‘can make you feel like you’re going to die…’”

Thompson notes that the known hazards of tobacco work have led countries “like Russia and Kazakhstan to ban anyone under 18 from harvesting tobacco,” and that the US “has played a role in such global efforts, recently spending at least $2.75 million” to eliminate child tobacco labor in Malawi.”

The US Department of Labor had called for a ban on tobacco harvesting by individuals under 18 in proposed “hazardous occupations orders” issued in 2011. These proposed occupational safety rules would have limited or prohibited teen work in 15 areas that are known to be dangerous for teen workers—unless the young individual was working on their family’s farm. Sadly, the rules were withdrawn in April 2012 after months of intense pressure from the American Farm Bureau and many members of the farm community. Many health and safety advocacy groups, including the CLC, felt the campaign against the proposed rules, which would have exempted children working on their own family farm, profoundly misleading.

When the proposed rules were withdrawn, the CLC estimated that not implementing them would result in the death of 50 to 100 working children on farms over the next decade.

“In withdrawing these badly needed safety rules, the Obama Administration yielded to industry lobbyists, but this new information about exposure to tobacco raises new warning flags,” noted Greenberg. “The Nation’s reporting makes it clear that the US government has a responsibility to protect 12-year-olds toiling in the fields. It must pick up the process it started and protect child workers from the known dangers of tobacco harvesting.”

In an accompanying piece, “Regulations are Killed, and Kids Die,” researcher Mariya Strauss notes that at least 12 young farmworkers under the age of 16 have died since the proposed regulations were withdrawn. “At least four of them died doing the hazardous tasks those rules would have prohibited them from performing,” said Strauss.

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Human Rights Watch’s Zama Coursen-Neff on The Hidden Victims of Tobacco

The smoking habits of the presidential candidates keep coming up: Barack Obama’s efforts to quit, Mitt Romney’s abstention. Romney signed a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, and indoor workplaces in Massachusetts in 2004; President Obama signed a law in 2009 that broadly restricts marketing cigarettes to children. Far less attention, however, is being paid to the nicotine exposure of children who work alongside adults cultivating and harvesting tobacco.

In eastern North Carolina I’ve interviewed children as young as 14 who worked in tobacco, and recent news reports describe children as young as nine and 10. Fifteen-year-old “Elena” is typical. She would get up at 3 a.m. to make lunches, she said, then go up and down the rows removing flowers from tobacco plants for 12 or more hours a day. “It smells of chemicals and it gives you a headache,” she told me. “Sometimes I feel like vomiting… We can’t get sick because then we can’t work.”

With no paid sick days or job security, and frequent violations of minimum wage laws, Elena echoed the worries of many working teens I spoke with. “We have to go into the fields just to get our bills paid, not to get what we want,” said a 15-year-old worker. “As I child I knew not to ask [for things I wanted].” Total annual farmworker family incomes average less than $17,500, and in some areas far less.

Elena’s sickness may have been more than an inconvenience. A 17-year-old tobacco worker told me: “They sprayed the field next to us yesterday. My head hurt. I could smell it, it blew. We kept working. People say this can hurt you. I’m a little, a little worried about it.” Children, whose bodies are still developing, are uniquely vulnerable to chemicals and may absorb pesticides more easily than adults. Long-term pesticide exposure is associated with cancer, brain damage, and reproductive problems.

But Elena may have also been sickened by the plants themselves. Workers absorb tobacco through the skin, especially when the leaves are wet, when the person is working hard, and when surrounding temperatures are hot. According to one study, on a humid day the average field worker may be exposed to dew containing roughly the nicotine of 36 cigarettes. This nicotine poisoning is known as “green tobacco sickness,” and children are more vulnerable than adults.

A 17-year-old worker described symptoms consistent with poisoning: “It’s hard to say what hurts the worst,” he said. “My legs hurt, my head hurts… I feel dizzy and then my nose is bleeding.”

Rain gear and water-tight gloves can protect workers but also increase the risk of heat exhaustion and dehydration. None of the children I interviewed mentioned wearing protective clothing. A 15-year-old boy said he wore a trash bag like poncho — others did not even wear gloves.

These children — mostly poor and Hispanic — are among the hundreds of thousands of children hired to work in U.S. agriculture. They exercise little political clout but deserve the protection from American politicians that all other working children already enjoy.

Remarkably, many of these children are working legally under a loophole in U.S. child labor laws. Federal law provides no minimum age for work on small farms with parental permission, and children ages 12 and up may work for hire on any size farm for unlimited periods outside school hours. Children not working in agriculture must be at least 14. Even then, the jobs they can perform and their hours are tightly restricted. Farmwork is the most hazardous occupation open to children. Under federal law, child farmworkers can also do jobs at 16 that the U.S. Department of Labor deems “particularly hazardous” for children, such as driving a forklift or operating a chainsaw — jobs no one under 18 can do anywhere else.

Only Congress can change the law and give children working for hire in agriculture the same protections all other working children have. But the Labor Department tried last year to update, for the first time in decades, the list of hazardous jobs, and to add tobacco to the list, along with other specific farm tasks that experts say are most likely to kill, sicken, and maim children. Although family farms were completely exempt, the Farm Bureau and several members of Congress claimed incorrectly that they would keep children from working at all and hurt family farms and agricultural training. Romney criticized the administration for, he said, telling farmers what their children could and couldn’t do on a farm. The pressure on the department — and the misinformation — was intense, and the administration withdrew the proposed rules.

In the upcoming campaign season, much attention will be focused on small things, like who smokes and who doesn’t. But America’s youngest, and poorest, workforce shouldn’t be forgotten. Leaders should promise to amend U.S. child labor law to provide the same protections to all working children.

Zama Coursen-Neff directs the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and is the author of Fields of Peril: Child Labor in U.S. Agriculture.

This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.

Follow Zama Coursen-Neff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZamaHRW

Human Rights Watch is a member of the Child Labor Coalition

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Smoking Kills: Child Labor on Malawi’s Tobacco Farms

Tobacco is Malawi’s top export but at the cost of its children’s health and education.

By Anna Rabin

Landlocked and with approximately 80% of its population living in rural areas, Malawi’s economy is largely structured around its agricultural sector. Agriculture accounts for more than one third of the Malawi’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 90% of its export revenues. Tobacco alone comprises over half of Malawi’s exports.

While large-scale cultivation of tobacco has historically been concentrated in the United States, today approximately 75% of the world’s tobacco is harvested in developing countries. Malawi is now one of the world’s five largest producers, and it appeals to cigarette companies “largely due to low tariffs on unmanufactured tobacco imports, cheap labor and lack of regulations.” Read more

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Kazakhstan: Children Help Harvest Tobacco for Phillip Morris Cigarettes

From the NY Times:


July 13, 2010

Philip Morris Is Said to Benefit From Child Labor

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW — One woman said children as young as 10 working in the fields developed red rashes on their stomachs and necks as they harvested tobacco for use in cigarettes made by Philip Morris.

Another migrant laborer working in the tobacco fields in Kazakhstan said a farmer confiscated her identification papers and withheld pay to force her to continue working despite dismal conditions.

Human Rights Watch, the group best known for documenting governmental abuse and war crimes, plans to release a report on Wednesday showing that child and forced labor is widespread on farms that supply a cigarette factory owned by Philip Morris International in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia.

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