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Title: Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
Source:
The Daily Caller
URL Source: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/r ... dept-rule-banning-farm-chores/
Published: Apr 25, 2012
Author: Patrick Richardson
Post Date: 2012-04-25 07:42:39 by F.A. Hayek Fan
Keywords: None
Views: 239
Comments: 19
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.” 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 go into effect 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.
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#1. To: All (#0)
The federal government continues its war against family farms. This has nothing to do with the safety of children and everything to do with corporate agri-businesses using the force of government to remove competition.
Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
It's like they are doing everything they can to make people snap. Poking an animal in the eye with a stick over and over again to make the animal react violently.
Have no fear, the sheeple will show their anger and disgust by running straight to the voting booth and....voting Republican and/or Democrat! That'll show 'em! Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
I think at this stage, the government is really trying to push people to violence.
You very well could be right. Who knows what kind of Byzantine schemes they have going on. Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” —Samuel Adams America: Israel's Handmaiden
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one. "If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” —Samuel Adams America: Israel's Handmaiden
Not entirely unthinkable. They are Alinskyite radicals, seasoned with Gramsci's influence.
The face of Tyranny: A twat in a bad suit.
their laws are insane - kids can't have a paper route anymore either, selling cookies 'n lemonade is illegal geeze, nearly my entire childhood, if repeated today, would be classed as total child abuse and I would be taken from parents with them going to jail - struck now with memory of 9 yr old boy I was trying to understand why the sheriff said I can't go get fresh milk anymore from the farmer down the road ... Family farms are mostly white. 4H is a component of white civil society. An old lonely slave comes back from the grave Neither the farm or the kids belong to anyone other than Uncle Sambo ! What Constitution ? "APRIL 15th is really APRIL FOOL'S DAY"
Exactly independent uppity serfs are not part of the totalitarian plan. Small business owners and family farms are sources of independent thinking and self reliance - not good for a total dictatorship. Although it goes further than that as a lot of small farms are going organic, better profit margin, and not relying as much on petrochemicals - bad for Monsatan. Not only that the silly bastards don't want toxic Frankenseeds - they're cutting into the depopulation agenda (although if Fukushima gets any worse we'll have plenty more dead for the ghouls). So what are they really saying? Because it appears to me that the real issue has nothing to do with banning family chores on a farm but that the parents have been using their children as business assets thus claiming certain business "exemption deductions" on their taxes which means this involves more than just the Labor Department but also the IRS.
They are talking about exemptions from the Dept. of Labor regulations not tax exemptions. Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
It is insane. My very first job was at 11 years old de-tasseling corn for the Pioneer Seed Company in Rantoul, Il. American kids have been working on farms since before the founding of this nation. WTF are these people and who do they think they are?
Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
I sold seeds for them door-to-door as an 8 yr old, (illegal today I'm sure) earned all kinds of camping gear and a small telescope *s - detasseling corn was a gold mine for teens who had ambition, at 16 we could work the canning factories all summer too - modern day people think I'm full of chit when explaining all the dif jobs some of us have worked since very young ages the elites are going to be stuck if they win, they only know how to lie, cheat, steal and enslave ... damned if they could survive 2 weeks without all the luxuries their fiat money offers today I know. After my summer job I realized that I like having money and got a job as a full service gas station attendant for Kerr McGee. I've worked nonstop every since except for the last couple of years when I've been in school. Hell, I'm only 46 so we aren't talking about that long ago either, although the US is like a different country now. Calling Ron Paul an isolationist is like calling your neighbor a hermit because he doesn't come over and break your window - unknown Jesus said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. Evangelical Fundinuts say, "kill them all who will not bow down to the Zionist Jew." - F.A. Hayek Fan
I know that's what the parents are fuming about. They want exemptions from the dept of labor concerning child labor regulations. However, labor regulations and home business exemptions go hand in hand where it applies to children working on the farms nowadays. Things have changed.
#2. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#3. To: echo5sierra (#2)
It's like they are doing everything they can to make people snap. Poking an animal in the eye with a stick over and over again to make the animal react violently.
#4. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#3)
#5. To: echo5sierra (#4)
I think at this stage, the government is really trying to push people to violence.
#6. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#7. To: All (#0)
#8. To: echo5sierra (#4)
I think at this stage, the government is really trying to push people to violence.
#9. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#10. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
~ the truth will set ya free, but only after it pisses ya off ~
#11. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
Searching... searching... searching
For his master who's long gone on
#12. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#13. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#1)
The federal government continues its war against family farms. This has nothing to do with the safety of children and everything to do with corporate agri-businesses using the force of government to remove competition.
#14. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
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.
#15. To: purplerose (#14)
Because it appears to me that the real issue has nothing to do with banning family chores on a farm but that the parents have been using their children as business assets thus claiming certain business "exemption deductions" on their taxes which means this involves more than just the Labor Department but also the IRS. Because it appears to me that the real issue has nothing to do with banning family chores on a farm but that the parents have been using their children as business assets thus claiming certain business "exemption deductions" on their taxes which means this involves more than just the Labor Department but also the IRS.
#16. To: Amandil (#10)
#17. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#16)
It is insane. My very first job was at 11 years old de-tasseling corn for the Pioneer Seed Company in Rantoul, Il.
~ the truth will set ya free, but only after it pisses ya off ~
#18. To: Amandil (#17)
modern day people think I'm full of chit when explaining all the dif jobs some of us have worked since very young ages
#19. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#15)
They are talking about exemptions from the Dept. of Labor regulations not tax exemptions.
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