Why Are Children Working in American Tobacco Fields?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/177136/why-are-children-working-american-tobacco-fields



The air was heavy and humid on the morning the three Cuello sisters joined their mother in the tobacco fields. The girls were dressed in jeans and long-sleeve shirts, carried burritos wrapped in aluminum foil, and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. “It was our first real job,” says Neftali, the youngest. She was 12 at the time. The middle sister, Kimberly, was 13. Yesenia was 14.

Their mother wasn’t happy for the company. After growing up in Mexico, she hadn’t crossed the border so that her kids could become farmworkers. But the girls knew their mom was struggling. She had left her husband and was supporting the family on the minimum wage. If her girls worked in the tobacco fields, it would quadruple the family’s summer earnings. “My mom tends to everybody,” Neftali says. This was a chance to repay that debt.

The sisters trudged into dense rows of bright green tobacco plants. Their task was to tear off flowers and remove small shoots from the stalks, a process called “topping and suckering.” They walked the rows, reaching deep into the wet leaves, and before long their clothes were soaked in the early morning dew. None of them knew that the dew represented a health hazard: when wet, tobacco leaves excrete nicotine, which is absorbed by the skin. One study estimated that on a humid day—and virtually every summer day in North Carolina is humid—a tobacco worker can be exposed to the nicotine equivalent of thirty-six cigarettes.

Their mother told the girls to stick together, but Neftali soon fell behind. “I was seeing little circles, and the sky started to get blurry,” she says. “It felt like my head was turned sideways.” Her mother ordered her to rest in the shade, but Neftali sat down only briefly. “I wanted to show that I could work like an adult,” she recalls. She soldiered on through a splitting headache and waves of dizziness. Several times, about to faint, she sank to the ground between rows to rest.

“I would find her looking confused,” Yesenia says.

[A Little Weird]

1. I grew up on a tobacco farm

I remember in elementary school that there were only 2 kids in my class that had never worked in tobacco. School would be cancelled on days when too many kids were out for work. They stopped that practice before I finished high school but there would still be kids that missed when it came time to get tobacco in. But these were family farms and it was certainly not working the kind of hours and conditions the kids mentioned in the article were working.

Agriculture is very broken in this country. Family farms are disappearing; you can not make a good living by farming. Farming in the past was dependent on having a large family (including extended family) that could help out. Now it is dependent on exploiting migrant workers.

[MostlyAmused]

3. There are family farmers making good lives in WNC.

Local food is a big factor in the quality of life in the Asheville area.

http://www.romanticasheville.com/farm_tour.htm

[bettyellen]

5. but it only takes one bad season or two to end up impoverished.

[Are_grits_groceries]

2. I worked on bright leaf tobacco farms every summer until I was out of college.

It is nasty and hot. You become covered with a black layer of dirt, sweat, and tar from the plants. I probably absorbed enough nicotine to equal years of smoking.

I never knew about that fun fact, and I never wore long clothes to prevent it. Even if I had known, I doubt if I would have worn them. I wore t-shirts and shorts because anyrhing else would make the heat unbearable.

I worked every summer for as long as I can remember. When I was big enough to walk, I would toddle around the barn and pick up stray tobacco leaves. As I grew older, the jobs increased and became different. The most I ever made a day was $11. I worked from 'can't see to can't see.'

Topping and suckering is the worst of the worst work. It is tedious and back-breaking. You go down row after row of tobacco breaking off the flowery plants that are on top. Suckers are smaller leaves that begin to grow among the bigger ones. They have to be pulled off so that the bigger leaves get the nutrition. Doing that requires that you practically become one with the plant.

There used to be a lot more involved, but as technology progressed, the last real labor-intensive jobs were topping and suckering. Hispanics now make up a lot of the laborers.

As far as child labor laws, I never heard of them in relation to farming. You farmed to live and you had to work no matter what age you were to help out. There were some people with larger farms who had their land sharecropped, and some were able to avoid the labor.

I picked cotton a couple of times. That was soul-crushing. Rows of crops can seem to be never-ending. If you can see one end of a row, you know you are nowhere near the other end. If you look around when you are in the middle of a row, it feels like you are surrounded by an infinite sea of green.

I learned a lot working those summers. The main thing I learned was to persevere. The saying that 'The only way out is through', was never more pertinent. You keep going through sheer force of will at times.

[LuvNewcastle]

4. My grandparents all worked in the fields when they were kids.

They raised cotton and various food crops, though, not tobacco. They had to tend to all their animals, too. It was a hard life, but it didn't kill them. Of course, they all lived on family farms. They weren't migrant workers being driven hard by someone who didn't care much about their welfare. Their parents made sure they were well-fed and healthy and went to school.

I hate to see kids having to cut short their childhood to work like that. Their parents should be paid more so that the kids don't have to work, or at least not work so hard. The article says that the owners wouldn't let them wear gloves in the tobacco fields because they were afraid the workers would hurt the plants. That's wrong; they should be required to supply gloves to the workers. Field work is hard enough without having to be sick on top of it.

The government also needs to make sure those kids are in school if they're under 18. It's one thing for them to be working in the summer, but the rest of the year they should be learning. Owners who have underage kids working while school is in session should face hefty fines.

[xmas74]

6. I've never worked tobacco (wrong part of the country)

I have walked the bean fields and have worked in the orchards. Neither are easy, though it probably was easier when I was 13. It's something that I've never allowed my own child to do, even though the money is still there. Heck, the wineries were hiring over the fall to harvest grapes and I even considered it.

[Romulox]

7. I once brought up this issue on DU, only to be shouted down. People don't want to believe it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2405793

[Igel]

8. No problem believing it.

Just don't know what to do about it.

Most kids do nothing over the summer. They'll work like dogs playing basketball or what they want to do, but as soon as they're asked to rake the yard it's too hot. The rest of the time they mostly sit and thumb-twitch over electronics.

Of course, the school year is set up to provide kids free time during labor-intensive agricultural seasons. We have this idea that childhood is a time of complete inactivity or at the very least obligatorily non-productive effort. Or a time to structure the crap out of their lives and work them in a way that produces nothing but activity and structure. They're not to be productive. They're not supposed to help the family. They're little emperors. Not what the labor laws were intended to do. But we've interpreted them as having this as their goal--to make the children of the poor as indolent as the children of the idle rich.

But Ms. Cuello has a special set of circumstances. Because she wanted more income she let her kids work and try to keep up with her. This isn't uncommon--I know parents who charge their teens food and board. There's a difference between working for the family as part of the family and just being used. Of course, both can be child abuse. Ms. Cuello is abusing her children. It's hard to say (out loud, at least) she's a victimizer, though, because she's also the victim of her circumstances and prior choices and there's this strange idea you can be either victim or victimizer but never both. Still... Three kids. No good education. Left her husband. Three strikes, even if each decision made sense at the time, in isolation, or could have been made to work given other choices and circumstances. She's in over her head. If she's not here legally, add a fourth strike.

Of course, it's easy to say that her kids shouldn't be working like that (and just as easy to say they shouldn't be working at all, or should have eclaires for breakfast every morning on the Riviera--words are cheap). I guess instead the 3 teen girls should be left at home, unattended, while she works in the fields. What could possibly go wrong? Again, she's in over her head--she's racked up responsibilities without having a way to fulfill them.

On the other hand I know a lot of kids who work themselves like dogs. Some lie to their employers. Some forge parent signatures. One kid had a part-time job on the weekend and another during the week, each employer thinking the kid only worked 15-20 hours a week. Their grades suffer because they have no time for schoolwork, they close the restaurant at 11, leave at 11:45, get home after midnight, and are in class at 7:25 am--but all they see is the short-term benefit of that minimum wage job. Pointless gew-gews. A sense of maturity as they make foolish choice after foolish choice and both they and themselves call it "wisdom". They choose to victimize themselves by valuing small short-term gains over large long-term gains. Not being of age, somebody else--say, their parents--is responsible for allowing the self-abuse, but their parents are proud of their little hard-working kid.