Organizing the tobacco fields.

• Author: Bacon, David

As a hot August sun beats down on a field in Nash County, North Carolina, Manuel Cardenal moves down his row almost at a run. He pauses for a second in front of each tobacco plant, breaking off the new shoots at the top. They have to be removed so that the growing strength of the plant will flow into the leaves below, making them broad and heavy.

Five other workers race down their own rows in the same field, deftly plucking out the right parts of the right plants. To do this well, rancher Corey (the workers don't know his full name) says they have to use their bare hands. Gloves would be too encumbering, he says, and might damage the plants. In addition, they're being paid a piece rate, and have to work fast just to make the minimum wage.

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By one in the afternoon, the temperature swirls around 100 degrees. Cardenal's arms shine with sweat. Since six that morning, when they went into the field, the hands of all six workers have been covered with a sticky green tar--the residue of tobacco juice and gum from the leaves. The same thing that gives cigarettes and cigars their kick--the nicotine--is not just present in the tar, but permeates even the dust.

"I feel it as soon as I start work," Cardenal says. It makes the workers lightheaded and when the heat reaches its peak, they sometimes feel nauseous as well.

Of the 103 workers interviewed for a recent report by Oxfam America, "A State of Fear: Human Rights Abuses in North Carolina's Tobacco Industry," a quarter said they were paid wages less than the legal minimum. A majority reported the same physical symptoms Cardenal and his co-workers describe--a syndrome called green tobacco sickness--and most had no gloves or other protective equipment. Every year North Carolina's Department of Labor reports the deaths of several field laborers from heat exposure.

Such workers are...