Editorial | Child labor and tobacco

The nation’s two largest tobacco manufacturers appear to be starting the New Year off right by declining to do business with tobacco growers who use child labor.

That would be here, in the United States, and mainly in states that grow most of the country’s tobacco — including Kentucky.

Both R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Altria Group Inc. have said that starting in 2015, their contracts with tobacco growers will bar the employment of tobacco field workers under 16, according to a report this month in the Winston-Salem Journal.

That’s an important step following a very damaging report earlier this year by Human Rights Watch that found children as young as 7 — often children of migrant workers — labor in highly dangerous conditions in four states where 90 percent of U.S. tobacco is grown. They are Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Through a loophole in federal labor law, children too young to buy tobacco products routinely are exposed to dangerous conditions in tobacco fields. That includes using hazardous machinery and equipment and being sickened by prolonged exposure to nicotine on tobacco plants they harvest, which results in headaches, nausea, vomiting and dizziness.

“You throw up right there when you’re cutting (tobacco plants) but you just keep cutting,” one teenage girl working in Kentucky told authors of the report.

The two tobacco companies will require that their growers not hire anyone under 16 to work in the fields. Workers ages 16 and 17 must have written permission from their parents and receive safety training and equipment.

The rules will not affect children working on family farms, an argument some in Congress have used speciously to try to block any restrictions on the ages of farm workers.

While it’s commendable of the companies to adopt the policy, what’s really needed is a change in the federal rules to close the loophole in a 1938 labor law that allows children to work in tobacco fields.

It’s unlikely that states will act if Kentucky is any example. Earlier this year, Sen. Paul Hornback, a Shelbyville Republican and tobacco farmer, told Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” that such work builds character in kids and that “acute nicotine poisoning really is not that big a problem.”

Sen. Hornback is chairman of Kentucky’s Senate Agriculture Committee.

Action in Congress is unlikely, even though legislation has been proposed to prevent workers under 18 from cutting, harvesting and curing tobacco because opponents continue to claim falsely it would keep kids from working on the family farm.

That leaves the U.S. Department of Labor, which has the authority to rewrite the rules, according to The New York Times.

President Obama has shown a new willingness to enact executive orders on hot-button topics ranging from immigration reform to renewing relations with Cuba

Now he must order labor officials to protect young children from the Dickensian practice of laboring for minimal pay and long hours, often alongside parents hired to work in tobacco fields.

When even Big Tobacco believes some things are bad for kids, the government should act.