Labor Dept to ban children from doing farm chores.
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.”
Because nothing says “intelligent government oversight” like banning children from one of the last sources of a strong work ethic.
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.
Emphasis mine. Why does the idea of the government arrogating to itself the sole right to teach our kids ANYTHING make my f*cking skin crawl?
Naturally, the government’s tissue-thin pretext is that it will prevent injuries to children, an explanation which neatly sidesteps their own numbers:
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.
I’d just love to believe this is the government being concerned about the welfare of children. I’d love to believe that this isn’t some cynical plot to grab one more slice of power from average Americans and make them dependent on the government. I’d love to believe there isn’t a deeper game here involving job creation for a certain segment of voters.
But unfortunately this administration has forced me to look behind the curtain so many times I just reflexively assume they’re up to no good, and the only question is the degree to which they’re trying to screw us this time.
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27 Comments!
Yeah, of course they’re up to no good.
It’s all about the power.
Pretty soon it’ll be slavery to make them clean their rooms!
Does this apply only to Family Farms? What will happen when the whole famdamily comes here to work on the Jolly Green Giant farm?
Back around 1953 or so when I became a teenager, guys often considered the best jobs to be those on farms, primarily ‘cause you got what was then a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and at least two really great meals.
Guys competed for jobs such as detasslin corn, bailin hay, spreadin manure, shovelin grains, harvestin fruit, and so on. For bailin hay you generally got a half a cent per bail for bringin the bails in from the field and another half cent for stackin ‘em in the loft. On a good day you could put up several hundred bails, which translated to at least $5 a day, and if you worked two farms, that was $10. Sure as hell beat mowin lawns for half a buck or deliverin papers for five bucks a week.
A kid with $10 in his pocket every few days was sittin on top of the world in a small town in those days. Hell, back in those days, a postage stamp was 3 cents, a Coke was a nickel, and a pack of Luckies was twenny cents. Saturday afternoon shoot-em-up movies were a dime at the Lido, and first-run flicks on Saturday night at the Avon were a quarter.
By the time I was old enuf to drive legally, I could take a girl to the movies, buy her a burger and a shake after the show, and still have a good chunk of the 5-dollar bill I left the house with.
What the fletch is wrong with totin milk or shearin sheep or hoein corn or puttin up hay, facrissakes!!
I was not fortunate enough to grow up in a farming community, nor were my children. My father grew up in LA, and Mom was farm girl through and through.
I was fortunate enough to spend a few summer working on my Uncles farm in NW Texas. We would be out with the sun and work sometimes till dark. My cousin would work the same AND take a couple hours in the morning for football practice. Hoeing cotton, feeding animals, putting in barbed wire fences and plenty of farm equipment maintenance. Goodness the work was hard, but it really made me love the time we didn’t work. We would also do all kinds of stoopid things for fun like hanging onto the back of the truck and skiing on our cowboy boots along the dirt roads.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned a lot. Not about farming, but about work in general and about myself. I learned independence. THAT is what the government doesn’t like.
Well they have to find some way to keep the illegals here, else half of their effort to squash voter ID will be in vain.
Working on the family farm taught me so very many things.
The gun is a tool, not a toy.
I learned to eat what I killed and not simply to kill something because I could. I had to skin and clean my own kills.
I learned to work with animals of all kinds.
Hard work is worth it and it pays off, you get to SEE the fruits of your labors.
There is nothing wrong with hard work.
Sometimes work can be dangerous, but sometimes work can be a lot of fun.
When you get your pay (or allowance) you learn to spend it wisely as you worked HARD for it.
l learned more about nature working on a farm than I EVER learned public school.
THIS travesty is just sickening!
No one is allowed to “enslave” Teh Chiiiildren but Teh State!!!!!
[/Family Farm]
Yannow, when I was about, I dunno, maybe 5-6, I saw my granddad climb over a fence and hit a bull between the ears with a 2×4 si he could put a ring in it’s nose. One of my earliest memories. As you might imagine, I was quite impressed.
Yeah. Tell him he can’t put his kids to work, why doncha?
So the govt wants to teach them about govt regulations…..
greaaaat.
They get enough of the crap spoon fed to them in school!
Nannies and tyrants and jerks, OH MY!
I can see this being expanded to other family-run businesses like restaurants, bodegas, and convenience stores. Soon, not only will it be illegal to have kids mow lawns (either at home or for money), no one will will able to mow their own lawns, trim their own trees and shrubs, or erect holiday decorations (e.g., Halloween, Christmas) unless they’ve received a government safety certification (providing work for all those politically-connected lawn and garden services and for a new class of government employees).
This is an extreme case of Nanny State, brought to you by the LibTard Folks who grew up in big box Malls! Who think our relationship with Nature can occur by day trips to zoos and picnics in wooded Parks. They are imposing their 100% urban concrete jungle mores on those declining rural areas under a false flag of *Safety*.
About 8 of 10 kids that I went to both grade school for 8 years and high school for 4 years, lived on a farm. The other 2 lived in a small town. I can only recall about 2 town boys during those 14 years that were FAT! The rest of us were healthy, trim and brimming over with energy. AND, not one of us came from a family that was rich!
I entered the farm labor force at the age of 6, a 2nd grader. I started off feeding/watering our chickens, hogs and hunting dogs. A short time later I was taught to milk cows. Summers allowed the additional chores of helping with the washing and hanging of clothes, whitewashing buildings, helping the women plant gardens and then hoeing weeds all summer. November meant butchering 7 hogs. I helped collect hickory tree logs for fires at butchering and maintained a huge iron vat fire for the boiling water and collected the hog fat chunks, stirred them in the boiling vat water to produce cracklings(after the women squeezed the fat oil for making soap…) for a winter`s supply of dog food.
At age 13 I was taught to drive and use a tractor in the fields, help load and put up in barns all the hay and straw bales, ride on a combine, sacking soybeans, wheat and oats. Some years I cut locust trees into fence posts, dug fence post holes and helped string the barbed wire. Picked cherries, blackberries, peaches, apples, pecans and walnuts. (…made apple cider and got to keep the money selling a gallon jug of cider for 5 cents on the highway near the farm.
The best part was fishing and hunting for food on all our tables! (…not counting picking up pop bottles on the highways in gunny sacks—to buy fishing tackle and rifle/shotgun shells…)
A FINAL NOTE: I would point out to these fucking people in DC, that the fucking United States Marine Corps, SPECIFICALLY had a recruiting policy until the mid-1960s to enlist as many FARM BOY recruits as possible!!!!!!!
Long experience had revealed they made better Marines and had almost zero attritions!!!!
Lastly, I cain`t post this w/o noting that my cousin put a .22 caliber bullet in my lower left leg one Saturday night frog hunting and my Aunt Emma Lou dug it out, poured the hole fulla iodine and bandaged me up with strips from a washed seed corn sack an I went to school on fucking Monday. Where all the kids, teachers and the principal thought it was fucking hilarious—-all day——
It is examples like this that confirm my suspicion that those who rise to the highest level of government are afflicted with a deep-seated hatred of humanity. Unable to face such a terrible truth, they set out to right the ills of the world, but what they are really doing is trying to find a way to live with themselves. What else can explain the urge to control other people’s lives this way?
Not to mention the fact that when you’ve worked a family farm or like my family had a family garden and chickens — you appreciate the importance of knowing where the hell your food comes from– and what it takes to grow it— it doesn’t come in a box on the shelf —or the freezer—by the way who’s going to enforce this law and how are they going to enforce it? That’s what I want to know. If you work on a family farm will you have to show your ID to prove your age to whom ever is spying on you?
More bureaucratic empire building.
The only way to get promoted in most bureaucracies is to find new crap to regulate.
They will push this unless there is an immediate political backlash, at which point suddenly no one will remember who came up with this plan … until they get brave enough to try it again later.
If you don’t want to see this again, you need to keep yelling for blood until the ‘crat who originated this ends up with his head on a platter.
Roger that, Geezerette.
I was about 5 when my grandmother had two of my uncles tie a Duroc sow on a rod between two trees. Slapped her head several times to agitate her and get the blood pumpin, then poked a hole in the neck and pulled out a purple thing.
She had me hold that thing in my hand while she sliced it, and I had to hold it while all the blood ran out into a bucket. Then my uncle picked me up, put a blade that resembled a linoleum knife in my hand, and guided me in cutting her open from end to end.
Next I had to pull out all the stuff that didn’t fall out. Collected it in a flat washtub. Later we dragged that stuff down to a creek and washed it off, cutting the small intestine into small pieces and turning ‘em inside out as we washed ‘em off.
She had me kill and pluck chickens, skin and slice up rabbits, and drag big ol piles of hickory and oak up next to her smokehouse pit. Also had to help her grow corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peas, bush beans, pole beans, squash, cabbage, carrots, and all that stuff.
“If you’re gonna have a pork chop,” she’d say, “a pig’s gotta die. And before you can have a hamburger, a cow has to be slaughtered and butchered.” She had a big ol’ list of things a man was s’posed to be able to do before he could call himself a man: keep and shoot a pistol, rifle, and shotgun; grow a truck patch; slaughter a calf or a hog; balance a checkbook; fix a roof; change a diaper; drive a truck (pickup); read the Bible; stoke a furnace; dig a well; ride a horse . . . . . and on and on.
Oddly enough my grandfather (her husband) had done maybe 2/3 of the things on her list — he was a mechanical artist and bookkeeper. Our kitchen stove burned wood, the heater burned coal, and we had a true icebox. We did have REMC power, but we got most of our water from a hand pump on a well ’cause Mom didn’t like to waste money.
Do I wanna go back and live like that again? No. But I wonder how well all the street tough guys would do on about week 3 after a ginormous solar flare blows every chip on the planet and the food stops coming to Wal-Mart and water stops comin out of the faucets and nothin happens when light switches are thrown.
Bocopro you hit the nail on the head — that’s why I love our camp in the woods— I feel so free and independent there. It makes you realize if you want to be freedom and independent you have to work for it. How will anyone learn that if they have someone telling them they can’t. It does make your skin crawl. Look behind the curtain and in under the rug.
I wanna see some pasty-faced bureaucrat pull up to a farmhouse in her Chebby Voltless, and try to lay this diktat down on some leather faced, iron-handed Texas rancher.
Dunno if there’s a bounty on bureaucrat hide, but seems there’s ample cause for one.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
This is pending ‘policy’ by the Dept. of Labor. Much of the Department’s ‘policies’ are by dictum, and theoretically can be undone again by more clear thinking public servants.
Problem is that we’ve got thousands of ‘new’ jobless college graduates with diplomas all vying for those cherry-gubmint jobs in DC, and precious few that get hired will not be a ‘like minded libtard robot’ of the people doing the hiring (at the Department).
How do we stop the circle of madness???
Didn’t the First Lady have children working in the WHite House Garden? Na ah— can’t do that—- I can’t see how this could get any further than it is— wondering how it got this far.
In the words of Brick Top (Snatch):
“Never annoy a man who keeps pigs.”
Joe nailed it. All the illegals are heading home because the Obama economy sucks. Each illegal is about 6 illegal votes so he has to stop the losses fast. This will guarantee jobs for illegals and votes for Obama.
Yep, this is the product of an unelected bureaucracy.
Since they don’t produce anything but regulations and can only seek to expand their control of new frontiers to justify their measly existence, we get saddled with this crap.
Lookey here, the administranium backed down on the regulations.
There’s no doubt that the only thing this is about is control. Control to the extent that you’re not in charge of your family.
Next election, send all these autocrats to Belgium, where they’ll fit right in.
mech: [From the article] “Child labor groups say they are stunned and disappointed that the Obama administration is backing off a plan to keep children from doing the most dangerous farm jobs.”
1. Nobody ever said they’d be put on “the most dangerous jobs”. That’s crap.
2. “the Child Labor Coalition” : a group whose only aim is to make sure our children never get any work experience.
Yup, they backed down. It’s on Drudge today “Obama flips on farm chores for children”. Leading from behind again…