Anita Wadhwani

awadhwani@tennessean.com

Part two of a two day series

On a hot summer day last year, a 17-year-old migrant worker named Ivan Alavez was assigned to pull trays of tobacco seedlings from a makeshift shearing machine welded from an old lawnmower blade.

But Alavez didn't work quickly enough. The blade created to prune the new shoots instead sliced off three fingers of his right hand. Doctors couldn't reattach them.

Alavez, who had been living and working at the Macon County farm full time for seven months, was given a check for $100 and sent on his way. For the next few months, he was homeless.

The lawsuit that an attorney for Alavez and six other teenage tobacco workers ultimately filed against Marty Coley Farms describes the accident. It also details deplorable living conditions in a three-bedroom home infested with vermin and roaches, where the teens lived with up to 13 adult men on the tobacco grower's property.

They lived rent-free, but their checks were sometimes shorted without warning for electricity and water payments. Paid less than minimum wage, they worked six days per week and sometimes after hours, when the owner would stop by the bunk asking them to do odd jobs.

PART ONE:Kids work on Tennessee's tobacco farms with few protections

It's a scenario that advocates for tobacco teenage laborers describe as common among the nation's tobacco-growing states, among them Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky.

But unlike some other states, Tennessee has virtually no oversight of child labor on tobacco farms.

The Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the state agency charged with inspecting and enforcing safety and sanitation standards on the state's farms, has conducted no tobacco farm inspections since December 2006.

North Carolina, by contrast, conducted 240 in the same time period.

Tennessee officials point out that North Carolina lawmakers have crafted specific laws requiring inspection of tobacco and other farms. North Carolina lawmakers also have approved extra funding — about $616,000 — to conduct farm inspections and to educate tobacco growers and other farmers about hazards to adults and children from pesticides and agricultural equipment.

Immigrants' fears

Barriers to ensuring safe conditions or negotiating fair wages on the large tobacco operations go beyond a lack of state oversight.

Workers are illegal immigrants, fearful that any complaints to their employer or state officials about working conditions will expose their illegal status.

Tennessee is one of 17 states that specifically exempts agricultural workers — of any age — from workers' compensation claims, although a federal court in New Mexico struck down such exemptions as unconstitutional.

The same agency that handles claims — the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development — also is charged with verifying legal work status, deterring those who are injured on the job from stepping forward.

And a secretly recorded conversation between workers and their boss after Alavez's accident appears to justify that fear.

When one worker spoke up after the accident to say he and others were leaving to work for another tobacco grower who would pay them more, the farmer threatened retaliation, according to a transcript of the conversation filed in federal court.

"I no like it here," the worker told owner Marty Coley, one of the largest tobacco growers in Macon County. He explained that another tobacco grower near the Kentucky border had offered to hire him and his co-workers for $2 more per hour, instead of the below-minimum wage of $6 they were earning from Coley.

"I'll tell you all what," Coley said. "You all go there and I'm going to call immigration and clean the whole damn bunch out."

"Why, Marty?" the worker asked.

"I'll call immigration and clean the whole damn bunch out," Coley repeated, telling the worker that he did not believe the new employer would pay them more and reminding the worker he had been good to them, providing a free place to live, electricity, water and occasional loans.

"So nobody come talk to Marty and say, 'Thank you for all these years, Marty' — just go behind Marty's back and find another job," Coley said before the conversation ended.

Coley, the top recipient of federal tobacco subsidy payments in Macon County, who has received more than half a million dollars in federal subsidies since 1995, entered into a confidential settlement with the seven workers this summer.

Three years ago, the Department of Labor proposed to update the list of hazardous occupations to include all work in tobacco production and curing. But these regulations were never finalized.

Farmers struggle

Coley did not respond to requests for comment. But the Coley farm, like those of other tobacco farmers, faces an uphill struggle to stay in business even as cigarette corporations prosper, benefiting from cheaper overseas tobacco and the end of a 65-year-old federal price support program that forced the companies to pay farmers higher prices.

They also struggle with factors that are entirely out of farmers' hands. The Coley farm was nearly wiped out in 2008 by tornadoes and has had to rebuild.

A program to legally employ migrant workers, known as the H-2A visa program, is expensive and cumbersome for many burley tobacco farmers, who need workers only a few months each year, according to Paul Denton, a burley tobacco specialist with University of Tennessee Extension in Knoxville.

Reach Anita Wadhwani at 615-259-8092 and on Twitter @AnitaWadhwani.

Health and safety inspections on tobacco farms

From 2007-present:

Tennessee: 0

Virginia: 1

Kentucky: 10

North Carolina: 240

Source: Occupational Safety and Health Administration