Virginia recalled being several hours into her shift at a clandestine tobacco factory in northeast Brooklyn in early February when she abruptly abandoned her shift, overcome by dizziness and a pulsing headache that she said made her feel like she was drunk.
She was stripping, by hand, Fronto tobacco leaves that are illicitly sold crushed to be mixed with cannabis, available in dozens of bodegas and smoke shops across New York City and the region. Virginia performs this work at the dank, unventilated warehouse alongside more than a dozen other women, 13 hours a day, six days a week, for what she says is the equivalent of $8 an hour — when she gets paid at all.
“Suddenly I had this headache, I couldn’t stand it. I had to retire for the day,” said Virginia, who asked that her real name not be published. She returned to work the next day.
She and two other women who spoke with THE CITY say the job consists of stripping 15 pounds of tobacco leaves a day each, under what they say in law enforcement complaints are threats of deportation, for a brand of loose tobacco, HotHead Grabba, that boasts of 70 retailers in New York, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, more than 40 in the five boroughs.
When they were hired, the women were told by a supervisor they’d be paid by the pound for a total of $105 a day in cash — an amount that comes down to half of New York’s $16-an-hour minimum wage. Most of the time, three workers told THE CITY, even those payments don’t materialize. The women allege they routinely work 78- to 84-hour weeks to meet their daily quota.
Posters and product labels shipped to the factory bear the HotHead Grabba name and logo, put on five-gram packs that sell for $4 each. The Instagram account claimed by HotHead Grabba LLC boasts to 20,000 followers of the “clean” tobacco used in spliffs.
HotHead Grabba is one of an array of unlicensed cannabis-related products for sale in bodegas and smoke shops, as New York State struggles to launch legal cannabis retailers.
As shown in videos recorded by workers and others posted on the brand’s Instagram, the tobacco curing process involves steaming the leaves in clear plastic containers. “Steam cleaning process keeping y’all lungs clean of dirt and bacteria,” reads the caption on a June 2022 Instagram post. “WE ARE THE FIRST clean grabba company.”
This week, seven current and former workers at the HotHead factory filed complaints with the New York State Department of Labor, alleging tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. One of them also submitted a complaint to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. An OSHA spokesperson confirmed to THE CITY that the agency received the complaint but has not yet launched an investigation.
The women, many of them Quechua from Ecuador, were aided in their efforts by local labor organizers and were surprised to be informed about how much they were underpaid — not just for promised payments for days of work that never materialized, but also thousands of dollars of unpaid minimum wages and overtime that they are entitled to under the law.
Three of the workers who filed complaints spoke with THE CITY as they prepared their paperwork, on the condition that their real names and certain identifying details — such as their ages and exact start dates — not be used, for fear or retribution from their bosses.
Virginia alleges that she is owed more than $17,000 in unpaid wages and overtime since her November start date, according to her complaint filed under her name to the state DOL. Another coworker, who asked to be identified for publication as Flor, alleges in her named complaint that she is owed $23,000 over four months, and Teresa (also a pseudonym), who has been working for the past month, alleges in her complaint that she is owed about $3,000.
Flor tracked her hours in ink in a log reviewed by THE CITY, while Virginia, Teresa and a fourth woman at the factory worked with organizers to document their hours before submitting their complaints to the state.
Maryland business records show a company by the name HotHead Grabba LLC registered in Silver Spring in July 2022. THE CITY did not get a response to messages sent to the Instagram account, and the person who responded to a call to the phone number associated with the most recent listed resident at the Maryland address hung up after being informed they were speaking with a reporter.
When THE CITY visited and knocked on the factory door on Wednesday, no one answered.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Labor confirmed that the agency received wage complaints against HotHead Grabba, and that those complaints are currently under review.
‘I’m Going to Deport You’
Virginia and Flor learned of the job through word of mouth at a food pantry in a Fulton Street church where they’d first met. They were talking with one another about how they were desperate for work when another woman told them she worked at a warehouse in Brooklyn. It was hard work, the woman told them, but they could get hired easily.
“She said they don’t ask for any papers, and said they don’t always pay when they say they will,” recalled Flor. “But it was a job.”
At the factory, a female supervisor hired them more or less on the spot and told them they must meet a daily 15-pound quota to make $105 for each shift. Wages would get paid at the end of each week in cash by another supervisor, a young man the women know only as “El Niño.”
Flor was skeptical about the job right away. “One day I came home to my husband and said to him, ‘I think they’re making drugs in there,’” she recalled in an interview with THE CITY. Virginia said in an interview that the unmarked, ad hoc factory was an immediate red flag.
That was four months ago. Since then, Virginia and Flor said, supervisors have strung them and other workers along waiting for payment for shifts they have already worked, leaving them unpaid for weeks at a time, or paid only a fraction of their wages due.
Attempts by workers to demand payment were met with threats to report women to immigration authorities, the workers recalled to an organizer during their meeting with them. On Jan. 15, Flor recalled, a different supervisor — whose name the women say they do not know — told the whole room in Spanish after one woman asked where the money was: “Stop complaining about the pay. If you keep complaining, I know you don’t have papers, I’m going to deport you.”
Virginia and Flor said they and other workers have repeatedly confronted their supervisors about the nonpayments. In one incident around the holidays, the supervisors told several employees, including Flor and Virginia, to report to work as usual, to collect the cash they were owed over the previous weeks.
The women waited until nearly midnight for the person with the cash to arrive, they said. No one ever came. There would be no toys for Christmas for their children that year.
The hope that they will one day get paid is what keeps Virginia, Flor and Teresa coming back to work. “They simply promise and promise but never deliver,” Virginia said.
Piercing Headaches
In accounts of how the factory works, the women say their work preparing HotHead Grabba is anything but “clean.”
The leaves arrive throughout the day in batches, dumped at the warehouse in black plastic bags, their exact origin a mystery, workers say. The leaves, which they say often carry mold and other pests, are rinsed by the workers on the dirty floor of a shower at the back of the factory, and then sorted among the women to be stripped and shipped off to another location.
Their supervisors don’t provide gloves, masks or drinking water, according to the complaint to OSHA.
Stripping the tobacco leaves releases what workers described as an acrid powder that makes their eyes, nasal passages, throats and skin itch. Workers say the smell is so strong that it is not unusual for workers, particularly new hires, to faint, vomit or get piercing headaches.
“We had one just the other day,” said Flor. “We were fanning her, trying to get her to wake up,” she said, noting that no supervisors came to the woman’s aid to offer as much as a glass of water.
Also common among the tabaqueras, workers and advocates say, are urinary tract infections. Their employers do not provide toilet paper and bathroom breaks are scarce.
During a meeting with labor organizers in late February, Teresa, another factory worker, recounted that she was recently out of the job for about a week with a painful urinary tract infection. Because she does not have health insurance, she treated herself with herbs and supplements while she waited for a pharmacist in Ecuador to send her medicine, she told an organizer.
There are no federal occupational health and safety standards governing the production of tobacco or cannabis products. But all employers are bound by federal standards that must provide conditions free from hazards that could cause death or serious physical harm, known as the general duty clause, even in the absence of a specific standard.
“Because there is well-documented evidence that the nicotine in tobacco can cause workplace illness, OSHA may be able to cite using its general duty clause,” said Jordan Barab, a former assistant deputy at OSHA.
Federal regulators recommend that workers who plant, cultivate and harvest tobacco agriculturally wear gloves, long sleeve shirts, long pants and water-resistant clothing to prevent exposure to harmful nicotine.
The work is already wearing on the women.
Flor and Virginia told THE CITY they notice they experience fatigue even on their days off. Virginia gets out of breath walking up the stairs to the subway or her apartment. Flor’s husband has told her that her breath has become more labored since she started working with tobacco.
The women report to work at the warehouse every morning just before 9 a.m. and work until 10 p.m. or later, workers said. During intermittent moments of downtime between tobacco leaf deliveries, the women are asked to label plastic vials and baggies used to retail the product.
Teresa has not been paid at all since she started working at the factory about a month ago, she told an organizer. That amounts to about $2,800 worth of unpaid wages and overtime, a claim she later submitted to the DOL.
Absent pay stubs, some women began logging their payments, wages and schedules by pen and paper; those logs were submitted as evidence in the formal complaints reviewed by THE CITY.
Using $7 per pound wage set by her employers, Flor had calculated she was owed about $3,000 in unpaid wages going back four months. She struggled to understand when an organizer helping her compile her claim explained that, actually, according to New York’s minimum wage law, she was owed $23,000 in unpaid wages and overtime over that same period under the state’s minimum wage law.
In utter disbelief, Flor repeatedly asked the organizer to calculate the numbers again, insisting that her actual wages could not be $16 an hour plus overtime — that she could only be paid by the pound.
She sat wordlessly at a desk, raising her eyebrows as she darted her eyes back and forth at both documents in front of her — her own estimates and the organizer’s.
Many of the women who work there are friends, relatives or roommates in their 30s and 40s. Flor and Teresa said they are used to manual labor, having worked harvesting carrots and potato crops in their home country before crossing over to the United States.
What they were not prepared for at the tobacco factory was getting sick on the job. Many believed the dizzy spells, headaches and nausea were just the stuff of beginners. It wasn’t until they began talking amongst themselves and witnessing more women getting sick on the job that they realized something was amiss.
When an organizer helping them file their claims to federal and state regulators explained that their working conditions were likely unlawful and dangerous, the women had a difficult time getting their heads around the right to demand safety on the job, even as undocumented workers.
They absorbed news of the possible side effects of prolonged nicotine exposure with fear and alarm, and became emotional as they discussed the guilt that they feel knowing that their work also keeps them away from their families and children.
“I truly have no idea what I’m going to do,” said Flor of her looming March rent.
“My husband works, and it makes me sad that I work, and I work, and I work, and have nothing to show for it.”