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Mail
Magazine 24...
Labor Department
wants to ban farm chores for children under 18
by Patrick Richardson
Editor’s Note: Due to the outcry from rural farmers, this proposal has
been reportedly withdrawn. However, the mentality that suggested it
should be a major point of concern to all.
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, 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 this. 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.”
Boswell chafed at the government’s rationale for bringing farms
strictly into line with child-labor laws.
“They have said the number of injuries are higher for children than in
non-ag industries,” she said. But everyone in agriculture, Boswell
insisted, “makes sure youth work in tasks that are age-appropriate.”
The safety training requirements strike many in agriculture as
particularly strange, given an injury rate among young people that is
already falling rapidly.
According to a United States Department of Agriculture study, farm
accidents among youth fell nearly 40 percent between 2001 and 2009, to
7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms.
Clark said the regulations are vague and meddlesome.
“It’s so far-reaching,” he exclaimed, “kids would be prohibited from
working on anything ‘power take-off’ driven, and anything with a
work-height over six feet — which would include the tractor I’m on
now.”
The way the regulations are currently written, he added, would prohibit
children under 16 from using battery powered screwdrivers, since their
motors, like those of a tractor, are defined as “power take-off
driven.”
And jobs that could “inflict pain on an animal” would also be
off-limits for kids. But “inflicting pain,” Clark explained, is left
undefined: If it included something like putting a halter on a steer,
4-H and FFA animal shows would be a thing of the past.
In a letter to The Department of Labor in December, Montana Republican
Rep. Denny Rehberg complained that the animal provision would also mean
young people couldn’t “see veterinary medicine in practice … including
a veterinarian’s own children accompanying him or her to a farm or
ranch.”
Boswell told TheDC that the new farming regulations could be finalized
as early as August. She claimed farmers could soon find The Labor
Department’s Wage and Hour Division inspectors on their land, citing
them for violations.
“In the last three years that division has grown 30 to 40 percent,”
Boswell said. Some Farm Bureau members, she added, have had inspectors
on their land checking on conditions for migrant workers, only to be
cited for allowing their own children to perform chores that the Labor
Department didn’t think were age-appropriate.
It’s something Kansas Republican Senator Jerry Moran believes simply
shouldn’t happen.
During a March 14 hearing, Moran blasted Hilda Solis for getting
between rural parents and their children.
“The consequences of the things that you put in your regulations lack
common sense,” Moran said.
“And in my view, if the federal government can regulate the kind of
relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s
farm, there is almost nothing off-limits in which we see the federal
government intruding in a way of life.”
The Department of Labor did not respond to repeated requests for
comment.
Watch Sen. Moran lecture Hilda Solis, plus read this and other articles
at Mail Magazine 24
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