HuffPost: Tobacco Giant Philip Morris Is Hooked on Child Labor

Everyone knows smoking is a costly habit, taking a toll on your health and your wallet. What you probably didn't know is that the tobacco industry extracts a much dearer price from children laboring in the remote fields of Central Asia.

Despite some legal and political troubles in recent years, the Philip Morris empire is still squeezing handsome profits from a vast migrant labor regime in Kazakhstan. A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently shamed the company by revealing that migrant tobacco harvesters, many of them young children, are regularly subjected to abuse, wage theft, and even physical captivity. (Video below.)

Of course, labor abuse in the cultivation of tobacco is as old as the industry itself. In the colonial era, the tobacco crop gave rise to a thriving international trade in the Chesapeake, leading to environmental destruction, the displacement of indigenous communities, and political clashes. Over time, the great tobacco …

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-chen/tobacco-giant-philip-morr_b_649956.html