Child labour in USA

[4321lynx]

It is legal in the US to employ children as young as 12 years old in agriculture. Many work in tobbaco fields.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/12/9/tobacco-fields-laboring-teens-dangers.html

Human Rights Watch says:-

In July the group interviewed 26 children, ages 16 and 17, working on tobacco farms in North Carolina, a major tobacco-growing state, along with Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Nearly all the teenagers reported feeling sick while working in tobacco fields or after going home.

“I get headaches and … my stomach hurts,” said a 16-year-old worker identified as Elena G., who has worked on tobacco farms every summer since she was 12. “And like, I feel nauseous … I just feel like my stomach is like rumbling around. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

Headaches, nausea and dizziness are symptoms of green tobacco sickness, or GTS, a kind of nicotine poisoning that can result from handling tobacco plants, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nicotine can be absorbed through the skin and make people ill. The CDC says the risk rises when tobacco is wet — from rain, dew or sweat, for example

Comments?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Sheesh. At least the South is paying people to work in their tobacco fields now. It's a step forward and we should commend them for it.

 

[untermensche]

This is the spirit of capitalism.

Exploit the weak and helpless to the greatest extent possible.

Use them up and spit them out.

A projection of sadism into economic life.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

They're not "children" in the sense of industrial revolution scamps working for pennies a day and losing limbs in the process. They're legally old enough to work, and therefore this is not child labor. Manual labor is common work for teenagers of 16 and 17 years of age, but if this type makes people ill, then there should be regulations against it.

There. Problem solved, for all 26 "children."