Did you know about, and how do you feel about, the fact that according to US law, children as young as 12 can work up to 12 hours per day picking tobacco?

When child labor laws were put into play, they focused more on factories and the urban workforce. Farmers were left to live how they were. I think we could farm so many more useful crops in place of the tobacco, but I think it’s a right violation to force a child to do this job if they can get sick from the nicotine. That would be considered reasonably hazardous in my book.

Someone explain to me, how working from 6 to 18 does not interfere with school work, if they are supposed to be at school from 7 to 15.

I don’t have any problem with them working those kind of hours. I did it all the time when I was younger than that. But my parents always made school the priority. And I have a problem with them being exposed to nicotine. That’s nasty stuff.

@ragingloli From @jca‘s description, it doesn’t necessarily mean those hours are being worked every day. Perhaps they were working for 12 hours on a Saturday, a day students commonly have off from school in the USA. Then, they only work for 2–3 hours, say, on a weekday when they do have school.

The Amish raise a lot of tobacco, and I imagine their kids along with other family members do the picking themselves. I bet it’s the same way with all the crops. Also, exposure to nicotine would be limited if the pickers wore protective clothing and gloves (waterproof gear after a rain).

In any case, I do have a massive problem with children having to work 12 hours a day.
We have negotiated and in some cases legislated an 8 hour workday for adults, and it makes no sense that it is somehow ok for children to work longer than that, especially since it is damaging to their health and detrimental to their development.

@ragingloli: From what I gather, it’s in the summer months. They said the temperatures can get up to 100 degrees during the day. That’s how it doesn’t interfere with their school work. Not sure if they do it also on Saturdays and Sundays during the school year.

@snowberry: The 12 hour per day for children as young as 12 is just an exception for tobacco farms. I believe the laws for regular farm work and other labor does not allow children as young as 12 to work, and to work so long. That’s the issue with this expose’ that was discussed on NPR.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/14/312181116/too-young-to-smoke-but-not-to-pick-tobacco

I forgot to link this.

Hey, if you’re in agriculture, it isn’t how many hours you want to work, it’s how many you have to work. You work in Mother Nature’s windows, not your own. I can remember a lot of nights working by the tractors headlights.

Didn’t know about this law, but it doesn’t bother me at all…

Labor laws? Who are you kidding?

These get in the way of plantation owners (largely southern, overwhelmingly republican) and their god-granted right to own slaves!

Sure, in 2014 it isn’t called “slavery” – that would be politically incorrect. But the fact is that this is child labor, outdoors, with a pittance of pay.

This sort of thing is a continuation of pre-civil war agrarian southern economy. And we all know what happened in 1861.

Maybe it is a law that was superseded. I once heard that Idaho still had a law on the books that said schoolchildren could carry guns to school to protect themselves from Indians.

@kritiper – but they can’t take those guns into Panera Bread….

This is a harvest law, so laws regrading harvests apply. The crop has to be taken in when it can, not left to the timing of a 40 hour/five day week.

A friend of mine, when she was 12 and 13, worked 12 hour days picking strawberries in Washington for a few weeks of the summer.

While I agree that exposure to nicotine is not good, admission of such would lead to outlawing a variety of products. If it’s not good in the fields from a plant you are not ingesting, why would it be okay in an e-cigarette?

Farm kids and farm workers have always been exempted from laws hovering over the rest of us. I can remember my astonishment as a teenager traveling through rural Nebraska to see a nine or 10 year old girl nonchalantly piloting a huge tractor down the highway. On the other hand, the backbreaking rigors of fieldwork are so notoriously egregious and compensation so meager, that the only white folks left picking crops in this country are convicts, and no one should be surprised to discover that terms and conditions are particularly brutal in our former slave states.

Yes.

My feelings about it?

The government’s reduction of choices or options for individuals is almost never a good thing.

When I was a kid, we used to have summer jobs detassling corn.. We never thought of it as being exploited. Most of us put the money into savings, with a portion kept for fun and goodies. Several young men counted on it for a way to save up to buy a car when they were old enough to have one. It was a way of life. none of us resented it. I don’t know of anyone who was forced to do it. I know some places were better to work for than others.
A tobacco farm seems disgusting to me. The smell would have to be difficult to put up with.

@Here2_4 Living tobacco plants don’t stink, at least the one I was close to.

I heard that being in a tobacco field smells sickening sweet, almost to the point that it seems like there is no air. It probably makes a difference how many are around, and if they are near or not

On the NPR radio report, they said the tobacco made the teens sick, nauseous, dizzy.

^ Because there is not one single solitary positive aspect to tobacco.

@SecondHandStoke No positive aspect to tobacco??? What about MONEY? But I suppose you meant not one single solitary health related positive aspect to tobacco.

From a money perspective, it makes money for the shareholders and big shots at the corporate level, but costs the rest of us in higher health care costs due to lung cancer, emphysema, oral cancer, etc.

^ Because there is not one single solitary positive aspect to cancer.

That’s been going on forever. I was one of those kids. I spent a summer picking tobacco in Connecticut, working in the warehouse mostly. I was thirteen. It was hard work, I was treated well, fed well. We lived in barracks, kids our own age. We had a kind of den mother. It was a lot like camp in many respects. i never got sick and don’t remember anyone else getting sick. Homesick, maybe. And I got paid. I don’t see anything wrong with my experience.

The fact that we were picking a weed that was killing millions of Americans never occurred to us. The fact that there might have been an element of worker exploitation never occurred to us. Our parents were depression era kids, many who knew real hunger and the hopelessness of displacement, who then spent their early adulthood years fighting Germans and Japanese. Nearly all of them came back from that fucking war with a cigarette hanging from their lips. They would laugh at such things as the dangers of tobacco and worker exploitation. Us kids didn’t know any different and it was good money for a kid, with one big payoff at the end of the summer.