In North Carolina, the tobacco industry is running roughshod over workers’ rights—and their most fundamental human rights, according to a recent report, “State of Fear: Human Rights Abuses in North Carolina’s Tobacco Industry,” issued jointly by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and Oxfam, the global relief organization. FLOC represents more than 6,000 farm workers in the state.

Tobacco farm workers, researchers found, routinely work in blazingly hot fields without access to clean water and contract nicotine-related illnesses because of employers’ refusal to outfit them with the most basic of protective gear such a gloves. Many say they are forced to live in overcrowded facilities infested with rodents and devoid of working showers or toilets. The report traces the deterioration of working conditions for tobacco workers to a 2004 deregulatory law passed by Congress. One in four of the 103 workers interviewed by FLOC, under the guidance of Oxfam researchers, say they receive less than the legally required minimum wage for their labor.

Yet even in this atmosphere of Dickensian working conditions, workers are afraid to form unions. Why? Because nine out of 10 North Carolina tobacco workers are undocumented immigrants, according to the report, and the extreme anti-immigrant measures sweeping legislatures throughout the South have strong advocates among North Carolina lawmakers. (Just last week, a FLOC organizer reported that one of the committee’s leaders was deported after a routine traffic stop.) Adding to workers’ fears, a legislative committee, chaired by state Rep. Frank Iler, is currently studying measures such as the draconian law recently put into effect in Alabama. Iler recently told a local reporter at the Wilmington StarNews:

My personal opinion is that we need to make North Carolina as unwelcome for any illegal alien from wherever they come from.

Among the largest tobacco producers in North Carolina is R.J. Reynolds. As we reported in May:

Late last month, the workers gained another major victory when executives of British American Tobacco (BAT), which owns 42 percent of Reynolds American, agreed to meet with FLOC later this month. This is the first time any corporation with close ties to Reynolds American has agreed to meet with workers.

That meeting has yet to take place. FLOC is applying pressure to Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) by targeting JPMorgan Chase, one of RAI’s major lenders, which cleaned up in the bank bailout. As FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez told us in March:

Chase and the other financial giants made a killing from government bailouts, and now they have turned their backs on the suffering of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.

FLOC has been joined in this effort by the UAW, whose president, Bob King, announced last year that, in solidarity with the farm workers, the UAW divested millions of its dollars from Chase. At that time, King explained:

With my own eyes, I witnessed the squalid conditions farm workers are forced to live and work in. Chase Bank has an opportunity and a social responsibility to bring Reynolds Tobacco to the table to stop this human exploitation.

Last year, International Labor Rights Forum named R.J. Reynolds as one of the worst companies of 2010 in the world, ”selected on the basis of their ties to suppressing workers’ right to organize,” according to the forum’s report.