Last week, U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, the Democrat representing Massachusetts, signed on as co-sponsor of a bill that would prohibit anyone under 18 from working on a tobacco farm, joining a handful of lawmakers from the region once again advocating for the legislation.
It is yet another sign of the shifts in the region’s tobacco industry, whose farmers grow the fine leaf to wrap the outside of cigars.
Decades ago, work in the field harvesting leaves and stringing them up in barns was a popular summer job for local teens, according to people who spent years in the industry. But the number of young people working at the local tobacco farms have dwindled to only a handful, and those tobacco farmers wonder why this legislation is even needed now.
In May, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, reintroduced legislation that would revise the Fair Labor Standards Act to say working with tobacco plants amounts to an oppressive child labor practice, because workers come in contact with nicotine. Working with the plants, some people experience dizziness, headaches, nausea and vomiting — symptoms of nicotine poisoning, Durbin said.
The Illinois senator pointed to a Human Rights Watch study released a decade ago that showed teens at farms in North Carolina, spraying pesticides, working in hot fields and spending up to 50 to 60 hours a week on the job.
While some tobacco companies have said they would only hire workers 16 or older, Durbin said researchers found teens under that age in the tobacco fields.
Markey is not the only local legislator to co-sponsor the proposed legislation. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut who backs the bill, said in a statement this week that the legislation would not only improve the health and safety of the teens, but their dignity, too.
“Child labor laws in the agricultural industry fail to properly protect children from this hazardous, low-paying work, leaving them subject to illness and potentially detrimental impacts on brain development,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
Over the years, local lawmakers have made moves on this issue. Blumenthal signed onto a letter in 2023, urging the Biden administration to change regulations to prohibit teens from the tobacco fields. Markey signed onto an earlier version of the bill a few years ago.
A House version of the bill is co-sponsored by 53 Democrats, including U.S. Reps. Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts.
Reached for comment, Markey’s office was unable to provide an on-record comment about the legislation. McGovern did not respond to a question on why he co-signed.
Both versions of the bill were referred to committee in May, where there has not been any further movement since.
In 2022, Massachusetts farmers produced $3.3 million worth of tobacco, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture census released in 2024. The industry consisted of about 31 farms, centered mostly in Hampden County, according to the USDA census.
At the same time, about 44 Connecticut farms mostly in Hartford County produced $25.9 million worth of tobacco, according to the USDA, making it the fifth most productive state out of the 18 that grow the crop in the country.
A job for the summer
These days, most workers on Connecticut Valley tobacco farms hail from places like Jamaica.
Dwight Arnold, who owns a farm in Southwick that grew 30 acres of shade tobacco and 20 acres of broadleaf this year, said the cost of living in Jamaica is so low that workers are able to travel here, work for $18.83 (a rate set by the federal government) for four to five months, and live for the rest of the year on their earnings.
While he has had problems in the past hiring workers through the federal H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, “the last few years have been OK,” Arnold said.
This year, he only hired 10 local teens. It’s a good first job, Arnold said, where a youth is paid the same rate as a temporary agricultural worker. He has found that youth are better at picking up and operating the stringing machine. “Kids just seem to have a knack for it,” Arnold said.
Duane Adams, docent for the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum in Windsor, Connecticut, said working on the tobacco farms was part of the culture growing up in area.
When he was 14, Adams starting working in tobacco fields for 61 cents an hour at a farm Windsor. He was not alone.
“The question was for most boys and many girls was not were you going to work on tobacco? Because that was the only thing available,” Adams said. “You couldn’t work in a grocery store unless your parents owned the store. So the question was, which farm were you going to work at?”
Adams ultimately worked 46 summers in the tobacco fields, using his earnings to buy a typewriter and then a college education, taking his summers off from teaching high school social studies to supervise a crew of about 50 workers.
In his last year in 2013, he oversaw a crew of 65, mostly made up of Jamaican and Hispanic men. Only four members of the crew were high school students. They “were not spectacular workers,” Adams said.
Over the decades that he worked in the industry, the culture changed. Parents, often both working, tended to fill up their children’s summers with soccer camp, Scouting and swim lessons.
“Working on tobacco, I guess just didn’t become one of the things that the kids were interested in,” Adams said. “Now, I don’t think it hurt anybody to work on tobacco. It was a learning experience. You learn that you are earning money.”
And while workers hands turned black from tar while picking shade tobacco, Adams said, “every now and then” a teen had an allergic reaction to the plant. Adams then found another job for them where they were not touching the leaves.
He said the effort to change the labor laws is “a day late and a dollar short.”
While teens have lost interest in tobacco as a summer job, Adams said, area farmers have switched from shade tobacco, which is typically harvested in July and August, to a broadleaf variety whose harvest is more physically demanding and is held when many students have returned to school.
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