Virginia votes to keep kids toiling in tobacco fields

The US’ National Consumers League (NCL) has said it is deeply disappointed by the defeat of a Virginia State Legislature bill that would have been the first of its kind to protect children from working in tobacco fields.

“This takes us back a century ago when children in America were working in mines, factories, and mills,” said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the NCL and co-chair of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), which NCL co-founded 25 years ago. “The reactionary forces fought protections for kids back then, just as they are doing today. It’s just as intolerable to expose kids to these toxics today as it was in 1915.”

The bill (HB 1906), introduced last month by Alfonso Lopez, a Democratic Party member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, was defeated on Tuesday in the Republican-controlled Committee on Commerce and Labor.

The NCL said HB 1906 would have prohibited farmers from hiring anyone under 18, with the exception of family members, to work in direct contact with tobacco leaves. It would have overridden some of the outdated Fair Labor Standards Act provisions that allowed children as young as 12 to work unlimited hours while performing dangerous work on farms.

Recent reports of children being sickened by acute nicotine poisoning in tobacco fields – battling nausea, headaches, vomiting, and dizziness – had sparked a national movement to ban this practice, the NCL added.

“It is our obligation to protect our most vulnerable workers, said Reid Maki, who is a member of NCL and the director of social responsibility and co-ordinator of fair labor standards at the CLC. “It is very disappointing to see Virginia lawmakers cave to big tobacco interests and defeat this common-sense child labor protection. We will continue to ask lawmakers at both the federal and state levels to ban child labor in US tobacco fields.”