Philip Morris Is Said to Benefit From Child Labor

[onehandle]

Source: New York Times

MOSCOW — One woman said children as young as 10 working in the fields developed red rashes on their stomachs and necks as they harvested tobacco for use in cigarettes made by Philip Morris.

Another migrant laborer working in the tobacco fields in Kazakhstan said a farmer confiscated her identification papers and withheld pay to force her to continue working despite dismal conditions.

Human Rights Watch, the group best known for documenting governmental abuse and war crimes, plans to release a report on Wednesday showing that child and forced labor is widespread on farms that supply a cigarette factory owned by Philip Morris International in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. While child labor should be condemned in any setting, the report said, employing children on tobacco farms is particularly hazardous because tobacco field laborers are exposed to high levels of nicotine while doing their jobs.

Only a tiny fraction of Philip Morris’s global tobacco purchases are made in the country, and no tobacco raised on the farms employing child labor went into cigarettes sold outside of former Soviet countries. Philip Morris, after being provided with an advance copy of the report, said it agreed to sweeping changes in its purchasing policies in Kazakhstan.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/business/global/14smoke.html?_r=1&hp

[Heidi]

1. Recommended.

:kick:

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. Philip Morris is in the Pantheon of EVIL companies

Not only do they kill children harvesting their deadly crops, their business model for the last 75 years has had as its focus the addicting of children and teens to their product. Tobacco companies learned in the early 1900s that their most successful marketing stratgey was to get young people addicted to their products. They did studies that showed conclusively that if they could not get a young person addicted by age 21, they would usually not get them as a lifelong customer. In short, Philip Morris is now and has been for decades nothing more than child predators.

[IrishBuckeye]

4. Amazing what people will do for $

Targeting children during the day and going home at night to tuck their kids in bed and not losing a wink of sleep over it. After all they are just doing their job.

[Omaha Steve]

3. R #5