Rural Kids, Parents Angry About Labor Dept. Rule Banning Farm Chores
25th April 2012
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.”
Thank you, Mr Community Organizer. Next will be a ruling requiring them to join a union.
April 25th, 2012 at 12:25
In a continuing attempt to fix what isn’t broken, they continue to marginalize children and prevent them from being productive and contributary.
Many studies have shown that pre-teens and teens get into trouble most often because they don’t have any meaningful responsibility, ‘meaningful’ being defined as contributing either to the family income or to the community in such manner as can be seen as valuable and/or necessary. In other words, delinquency isn’t a problem when kids have useful and needful jobs to do, so long as their labor is recognized and valued.
And since such children can no longer contribute any economic value to the family, this will constitute yet one more disincentive to having them at all.
April 25th, 2012 at 13:51
I agree with Dennis. Plus, if you protect children from even the idea of being expected to work, how will they develop into good employees as adults? If they don’t believe that work is something they should do, they will create problems with absenteeism and poor efforts even when present for their future employers.