By Jonathan McQuarrie
Tobacco is in the news again. Outlets from the New York Times to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have reported how children–primarily Hispanic and as young as twelve–work in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The news reports drew on extensive research conducted by the organization Human Rights Watch, released as Tobacco’s Hidden Children: Hazardous Child Labor in United States Tobacco Farming. (See the full report here). As Human Rights Watch noted, these young workers toiled daily for twelve or more hours in all weather conditions and were subject to all the hazards of tobacco labour, including back pain from harvesting, risk of injury from the sharp tobacco knives, and exposure to the pesticides sprayed on fields.
One of the greatest risks from working in the tobacco fields comes from the plant itself. The Human Rights Watch report indicated that a staggering 97 of the 133 children interviewed reported feeling nauseous, dizzy, short of breath, or demonstrating some other symptom of nicotine poisoning. Recovery from Green Tobacco Sickness, the name given to the broad range of symptoms that comes from working with tobacco, can take from one to three days, but many of the youth interviewed indicated that they were able to rest for only a couple hours before resuming work. The affliction is contracted through exposure of the skin to the nicotine secreting from the leaves. Some farm owners provide workers minimal protection from this exposure, usually in the form of rubber gloves or garbage bags. However, according to Human Rights Watch, most children had to rely on their families to provide them with this rudimentary equipment, further cutting into the minimum wages that they earned. When Samantha Bee of the satirical Daily Show interviewed three youth tobacco workers and found that they generally had to bring their own garbage bags, she noted, with a sigh, “You’re making it very hard for me to ironically support child tobacco labour.”
As someone who researches the early (pre-World War II) development of tobacco cultivation in Canada, Green Tobacco Sickness largely eludes my archives.