Obama Admin. Proposes Rule That Stops Farm Kids From Performing Chore

[lonestar]

Obama Admin. Proposes Rule That Stops Farm Kids From Performing Chores
Posted on April 25, 2012 by Cowboy Byte


(Daily Caller) A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district member of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

http://cowboybyte.com/6955/obama-adm...orming-chores/

NOW this is right at the top of the stupid list..

Just when you thought they could not do something else stupid..

[Rohirrim]

That is just incredibly stupid. Obama should replace Hilda Solis immediately.

[Bob]

I heard about this legislation, if true it would not surprise me. It shows the disconnect that Obama and the elite have with real people.

The truth is, if people think that Obama is bad right now -- just wait and see how he will act if elected.

[Blart]

Obama is a Marxist because he wants to reduce child labor!

The Department of Labor announced last year that it was planning to restrict child labor on farms so that children under 18 could no longer be involved “pesticide handling, timber operations, manure pits and storage bins" Which are all child-friendly, fun jobs.

All children secretly wish to work in a manure pit.

http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/WHD20111250.htm

Intellectual powerhouse Sarah Palin weighs in,

The Obama Administration is working on regulations that would prevent children from working on our own family farms. This is more overreach of the federal government with many negative consequences. And if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.

My family is a commercial fishing family, and commercial fishing in Alaska is much like the family farm (but the year ’round farmers no doubt work harder than we do!). I guarantee fishing families wouldn’t stand for this nonsensical intrusion into our lives and livelihoods, and, as a former 4-H member, I don’t believe farm families will either. Our kids learn to work and to help feed America on our nation’s farms, and out on the water.

Federal government: get your own house in order and stop interfering in ours.

Well, working on a farm is slightly better, though also very similar, to being a janitor in one’s school. And how does school fit into this, again? This may be a concern of Obama’s, but it’s more likely that he just hates children.



http://wonkette.com/471026/obama-con...ms#more-471026

[alkemical]

actually - this is big Agra trying to shut down family farms. But it's nice to see our plotiticians behind this.

[Rohirrim]

I don't really care what the Right Wingers make of this. It has too much of the whiff of the nanny state to me. The world is unsafe. If you are born, you will die. If you have a farm, you have a much bigger chance of getting hurt than if you work at Walmart. That's just the way it is. It's none of the government's business. You can not child proof the world. Pesticide and chemical fertilizer regulations are one thing. Assuming that farm parents would be reckless with their own children is entirely different.

[Blart]

Originally Posted by alkemical

actually - this is big Agra trying to shut down family farms. But it's nice to see our plotiticians behind this.

Completely and totally backwards. Big agriculture has spent huge amounts of money lobbying against these laws. They love child labor. Why do you think this is a talking point today for the GOP?

http://www.demos.org/blog/big-agricu...es-child-labor

http://www.republicreport.org/2012/big-ag-labor-thune/

This debate isn't over whether a child can come home after school and feed the chickens. The Department of Labor's rules keep children away from dangerous situations like working in manure sites, applying pesticides, and handling explosives.

Big agra loves them some child labor, and children who might benefit from labor regulations don't have the political means to push back against industrial farms.

[Smiling Assassin27]

From what i've read this is nothing more than an R version of 'the other side wants to push granny off a cliff'.

The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers and in no way compromise the statutory child labor parental exemption involving children working on farms owned or operated by their parents

http://webapps.dol.gov/FederalRegist...th=9&Year=2011

As long as it isn't work for hire, kids can still do chores on the farm, from what i can see.

"On February 1, 2012, the Department announced that it will re-propose the portion of its regulation on child labor in agriculture interpreting the "parental exemption." The parental exemption allows children of any age who are employed by their parent, or a person standing in the place of a parent, to perform any job on a farm owned or operated by their parent or such person standing in the place of a parent.

http://www.dol.gov/whd/CL/AG_NPRM.htm

I know from personal experience that a substantial amount of risk exists in farm work, particularly tractors. My first question of any Federal statute is whether the Feds have authority to promulate it, and I'm not entirely convinced of this in this case. But the rule, from what i can see, does not do what Palin and DC say it does/would.

[Blart]

Industrial farms love to hire children because they're only $2 an hour. They're migrant children, or kids from rural towns working for summer.

This is not, I repeat, NOT about family farms. This is about child labor on big industrial farms.


"Most parents of farmworker children are themselves farmworkers. The average annual income for a two-earner farmworker family is just over $14,000 a year, ¹¹ well below the official federal poverty level, which was $16,700 in 1999.¹² These low earnings make it difficult for farmworker parents to meet their family's needs, which in turn puts pressure on their children to earn money as soon as possible-usually in the fields. All of the juveniles interviewed by Human Rights Watch were children of farmworkers. All of them began working either in order to help their family meet their basic needs or in order to take care of their own needs-for example, buying clothes for school-because their parents were too poor to do so. "

These laws apply mostly to industrial farms, as no family would put their child through conditions like this,


(Report by Human Right's Watch)
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/frmw...htm#P315_44390

Pesticides

When I was fourteen I worked in the fields for two weeks, chopping the weeds around the cotton plants. . . . I woke up one night, I couldn't breathe; I was allergic to something they were spraying in the fields. I stopped breathing . . . I tried to drink water but I couldn't so I ran into my mom's room 'cause I didn't have no air in me and I was like [wheezing gasps] trying to get air in there but I couldn't . . .

At the hospital they said I was allergic to something out there . . . something they were spraying. . . . They sprayed the fields in the morning. We'd be out there when they were doing it, or when they were leaving, or we could see them doing other fields. They'd spray by plane. -Richard M., seventeen years old²⁰

On June 27, 1997, seventeen-year-old migrant farmworker Jos_ Antonio Casillas collapsed and died while riding his bike near his home in rural Utah. Emergency workers found white foam streaming from his nose. According to Jos_'s uncle, the day before he died the boy had been soaked with pesticide sprayed from a tractor; a week earlier he had also been sprayed, while working in a peach orchard. After the second spraying he showed symptoms of severe pesticide poisoning, including vomiting, sweating, diarrhea and headaches. He had received no training from his employer regarding pesticide dangers and the symptoms of exposure, and reportedly slept in his pesticide-soaked clothing the night before his death.²¹

Water,

We had to share water from one big jug. It wasn't enough. You couldn't drink as much as you wanted. Maybe twice a week we would run out of water completely.



An old man took us there [to the field] in the morning, set us up, then would come back in the afternoon to pick us up. If you ran out of water, if you passed out, tough.

-Ricky N., age seventeen

The supervisors sold beer for one dollar each. Lots of supervisors did this. People buy it because they are thirsty, not because they want to drink alcohol. They [supervisors] also sell it to teenagers-whoever. They don't care about your age. . . . People might buy several beers in a shift.

-Sylvia R., age eighteen

Hours,

We would work as much as was needed. You could work up to fourteen or fifteen hours a day. But you're not forced to work more than twelve; beyond twelve is optional.

-Frank M., sixteen, describing the hours he worked the summer he was fifteen, in Avondale, Arizona


http://www.hrw.org/news/2000/06/19/a...us-agriculture

[lonestar]

Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
Published: 1:31 AM 04/25/2012
By Patrick Richardson
A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, most children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.

“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.


“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”

In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.

“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50.

“Losing that work ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old.”

John Weber, 19, understands. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm.

He’s now a college Agriculture major.

“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13.”

“The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.”

Weber is also a small businessman. In high school, he said, he took out a loan and bought a few steers to raise for income. “Under these regulations,” he explained, “I wouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

In February the Labor Department seemingly backed away from what many had called an unrealistic reach into farmers’ families, reopening the public comment period on a section of the regulations designed to give parents an exemption for their own children.

But U.S. farmers’ largest trade group is unimpressed.

“American Farm Bureau does not view that as a victory,” said Kristi Boswell, a labor specialist with the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It’s a misconception that they have backed off on the parental exemption.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/ru...#ixzz1tBYPc4Wg

[Smiling Assassin27]

Rule withdrawn due to influx of public comments about effect on small family farms.

[lonestar]

WH Backs Down On Regulating Child Farm Chores After Public Outrage
Written on April 27, 2012 by V2A, Filed under


Under pressure from farming advocates in rural communities, and following a report by The Daily Caller, the Obama administration withdrew a proposed rule Thursday that would have applied child labor laws to family farms.

Critics complained that the regulation would have drastically changed the extent to which children could work on farms owned by family members. The U.S. Department of Labor cited public outcry as the reason for withdrawing the rule.

“The decision to withdraw this rule — including provisions to define the ‘parental exemption’ — was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms,” the Department said in a press release Thursday evening. “To be clear, this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration.”

http://visiontoamerica.org/9416/wh-b...ublic-outrage/