12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes -- but they can work in tobacco fields

[Jilly_in_VA]

José Velásquez Castellano started working in agriculture when he was 13 years old. Ten-hour days, five or six days a week, in North Carolina's summer heat. It was sometimes blueberries, sometimes cucumbers — but mostly, it was tobacco.

"Its prime hits right at the peak of summer," Castellano told NPR, and the tobacco created a greenhouse effect. It would be 90 degrees outside, "but inside those fields, it feels like well over 100 degrees."

He'd go home dehydrated and exhausted and then wake up at 4 a.m. the next day and do it again.

For children 12 and older in the United States, difficult, low-paying and dangerous work in tobacco fields for unlimited hours is legal, as long as it's outside school hours. Child labor laws are more lenient in agriculture than in other industries, and efforts to change that have repeatedly failed, leaving growers and companies to decide whether to set the bar higher than what's legally required of them. In the meantime, kids work, often trying to help their families make ends meet.

Today, Castellano is a sophomore at Tufts University. But when he worked, he felt "this sense that working in those fields was going to be the rest of my life, that I had nothing else going for me."

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1168824035/child-labor-tobacco-legal-dangerous

In one hospital in E. TN where I worked ICU, we'd get people every summer with acute nicotine poisoning. See comment below

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. Nicotine poisoning

It's not pretty. In east Tennessee, most of the tobacco, IIRC, is grown for cigar wrappers, and a lot of it is grown on small family operations. In those cases, any family member, including children, can work in the tobacco field. Most farmers are relatively solicitous of their kids, however. Most of them. Occasionally we might get one in who was kind of badly dehydrated or even with mild heat exhaustion. It wasn't them we worried about so much.

It was the Hispanic workers on the big farms who suffered. Repeatedly. We'd get several in every summer with acute nicotine poisoning. We knew who the offenders were, but the guys (uniformly young, maybe lying about their ages, with limited or no English) would never say, so nothing could be done. They were all kind of the same, stoic, with fear behind their eyes. The best we could do was treat them, make them comfortable, and send them back out to do the same work, knowing that they, or some of their compadres, would be back before the summer was over.

And don't get me started on the chicken processing plant in town, which was repeatedly busted.

[lindysalsagal]

2. and "get married" in some states. Total insanity.

[Probatim]

3. Addressing concerns - republicans pass legislation legalizing cigarette purchases for 10 year olds.

It hasn't happened... yet.

[yellowdogintexas]

4. I grew up in a tobacco growing region in KY

Most of the farm workers were young - most began working in the field about age 10. Tobacco is very labor intensive and the pesticides are horrible. Nowadays, there just aren't as many young folks to work the patch; my brother in law hires Mexicans to do a lot of the work on their farm.

a friend went out to work the patch early one morning wearing a short sleeved shirt.(usually he wore a light cotton longsleeved shirt) The patch had been sprayed the day before, and with our famous heavy dew, he was soaked in moisture from the leaves. By 10 am he was sick as a dog.

This is in addition to any nicotine poisoning.

Ironically, he was going into his 3rd year of Medical School and as he put it "I don't know what I was thinking - I should have known better"