Department of Labor proposed rules for child labor!!!!

I posted this earlier and it got poofed real quick. We need to let our Congress people know that we oppose these new rules. It would make it illegal for your kids to work on your relatives farms. That includes Grand Parents and siblings. If your farm is in a corporation then the new rules would apply to your own farm, LLCs too. This also effects ALL family businesses even non-agriculture ones.

The new rules say all over the place that family farms are exempt. The trouble is when you read the attachment that lays out what a family farm is then most of the modern farms do not qualify.

IT could even endanger 4-H clubs that have livestock shows. The club could be held liable for any one injured.

I am not just crying wolf here. I had my lawyer read this thing. It is scary the number of ways you can violate these new rules.

My Grand sons wash the equipment and semis on Saturday morning each week in the winter. They would be operating power equipment and it would be illegal as the semis are owned by a private Corporation that is made up of myself and my sons. The ones that do most of the washing are just 13 and 14 years old. I always thought that it was better making them do real work for their spending money. I guess that I will become a criminal if these rules pass.



Some of the rules in a snap shot:

1) No children allowed in direct contact with livestock over a certain weight. It just about excludes all cattle over a few hours old.

2) No one under 18 allowed on a grain elevator property. Do any of you have your kids in your tractor or semi when you haul grain to town????
If these rules pass the grain elevators will have to bar anyone under eighteen from the property.

3) I hire a few neighbor kids to help put in hay. I would be subject to these new rules. One of which is that they can't work more than six feet off the ground. So how high is a flat bed wagon going to be stacked and still be under six foot tall??? Two or three bales high??? How about in the barn. My lofts will not hold very much hay stacked six foot deep.

4) We have to pickup rocks and roots on several of the farms. It is real common for use to put a younger kid on the tractor in low gear at low engine speed to drive alone as we pickup the rocks and roots. These new rules would make it illegal for my grand kids under 14 to drive that tractor on my farm or rented ground.

You can read the rules and interpretations in the attached link.
Child Labor Regulations, Orders and Statements of Interpretation: Violations Civil Money Penalties

I just had my kids and thier friends fill the wood shed, did I break the law??

It all comes down to this:
You can be sued IF a kid gets hurt on your farm.
And the LAW clarifies it for you, just so that when a kid does get hurt they can say "see here is the law in black and white"
If it is your kid or grandkid then be prepared to be sued by who ever for any accident.
I would think that most kids dont give a rip about the law when it comes to making money, but if they get hurt.......the ambulance chasing lawyers crawl out of the sewers.

You're in Canada. I don't believe the insanity level has reached as high up there, yet.

Does this mean that a kid taking the mower and going to the neighbors the earn a few bucks in the summer, hits a roll of wire, tears up something, gets a small cut.....things snowball from there?

I agree Bob, never see Amish women or children in the fields.

Started working on family's dairy farm when I was in the 3rd grade. Looking back, it is a wonder my brothers and I didn't get killed. My brothers wrecked 7 trucks. Oldest brother got ran over by a tractor and broke his arm when he was 10. I flipped a tractor. Good think a log kept the tractor from rolling on top of me. We ran combines, corn pickers, planters, cultivators, grain drills, bailers, plowed, disked, grain augers, grain elevators, tractors, dozers, backhoes, chain saws and the list goes on. I started driving trucks and tractors when I was 5. We were very lucky not to get killed.

the problem is letting people other than congress pass law , they say it's regulation . take that to court and you'll find it to be law . only congress should pass law . We need to rewrite the Representative we sent to congress . this will awaken the people .

So as not to get tied up in politics, I won't say who said it. I'll let you figure that out.

A month or two ago, at some sort of campaign rally in Iowa, a farmer asked the fella who was up on stage doing the campaigning about the proposed epa rule banning dust and how it would affect farming. Well, the fella up on stage and in the know if anyone would be, responded back to the farmer "Don't believe everything that you hear", implying that what the farmer had heard was a bogus rumor. Well, that bogus rumor goes into affect in January 2012. That begs the question of when that fella campaining in Iowa told that farmer, "Don't believe everything that you hear", was he meaning not to believe what we hear from him? Can't be any other option that I see.

Yes, I am familiar with both of these rules going into affect, neither legislated, both enacted by UNelected (appointed) politicrats in Washington from both the EPA and Dept of Labor. Of course these rules are going to necessarily raise the cost of doing business, and its going to hit the suppliers (farmers) wallets, and therefore necessarily be passed down to an already also struggling market of struggling fellow americans, millions unemployed, millions more living off of welfare, historical records.

We as a nation voted for this, and we are getting it. Perhaps if we don't like what we are getting, more of us really oughta get more involved with those that we elect that we think are going to represent us?

By the way, a family owned pizzaria in Phillidelphia, I think is where it was at, got nailed by the Dept of Labor because the parents allowed their children to help out making pizzas for the family business. One of the kids was 14 years old, and POW!!!, that was another no no. They got nailed as though they were modern day slave owners for letting THEIR children help out in THEIR business. I saw the story, and pictures of the family a while back, so am sure it can be Googled as proof easily enough.

America aint America anymore.

Mark

re: we never had these kind of problems in this country when women stayed at home and raised the children. Once women started there movement this country has gone down hill. Women should be seen and not heard.

It use to be that women WORKED at home, because they had many children ( In Catholic families, if you had ONLY 5 children, people assumed there was something medical impediment. For like 50 years now, no one has children. So, what exactly does a woman do if she stays at home today? Watch soap operas, eat, and get into trouble. If you eliminate children from the formula, it changes everything. That's what's happened in the last 70 years.

It has nothing to do with "Women should be seen and not heard". Actually, if todays women had 8 to 14 children like our grandparents had, they would not have much time to be "heard". So true [u:654c4848f0]was[/u:654c4848f0] it, that "a womens work is never done".

There's no better social security than a large family. But, today, people think they invented a new way.

If you never see them, you must not be in PA.

How this works is by counting children in family farms as employed, external_link hopes to increase the number of "Jobs created or saved" by his Stimulus. You think I'm kidding, yet, your son mowing your yard is about to be a job created by external_link.

I was startled the first time I saw an Amish lady on a tractor raking hay-wearing a dress.

I've seen it many time since.

Or Indiana,Ohio and Michigan.

The best I can tell you guys is write your congressman and senators. At least you will have done your best to change things. I just finished writing mine tonight. In all of my years I have never been so worried about the future of our country and it's just stuff like this that does it. Isn't there anyone in Washington, D.C. with any common sense?

To "protect" and "aid" the people, is the [u:654c4848f0]excuse[/u:654c4848f0]. The real reason for all the regulations is for big business to monolopolize all the independent competition. All these regulations do not in the least bit faze big business, they have a slew of employee lawyers, tax experts, etc. to handle all this stuff. They have production from other countries where people are paid $3 a day if they are lucky. Who needs child labor when you can pay a man $3 a day and have him work 12 hours a day?

It's about monopolizing ALL business.

The following was copied from the proposed regulations introduction.

"The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers." Not your kids

What does it say verses what everyone wants to believe to fit their particular beliefs.

One final comment; The elected Congress writes the laws and the elected President signs it into law. The unelected fed workers write regulations to implement Congress's intent after public discussions with the electors and with the the writers, Congress.


The proposed agricultural revisions would impact
only hired farm workers

> Well, that bogus rumor goes into affect in January 2012.

<a href="http://www.agweb.com/article/epa_will_not_regulate_rural_dust_at_stricter_levels/">EPA Will Not Regulate Rural Dust at Stricter Levels</a>

(quoted from post at 17:26:50 10/23/11) You're in Canada. I don't believe the insanity level has reached as high up there, yet.

Click to expand...

Ha! I'd like to wager our bureaucrats and politicians are stupider than yours. You should try and work with Dept of Labour in Ontario. Most of private businesses in my age bracket are turning in our coporate identities, at least small businesses.

Can't afford the stupidity of the blame game from government.

This child labor thing has been going on for a long time.An Amish family got nailed because their 14 year old daughter was running the cash register in a show room of small wooden items.I talked with a fellow who had a small shingle mill.A woman who packed shingles wasnt in the same building with the machines.Business was slow.Big brother wanted high comp rate on her.He had to lay off the whole crew and do all work alone.There a shop that rebuilds old cook stoves and wood fire heaters.Big brother wanted the help classed as foundry workers even tho no iron was melted in the shop.They had to let the help go.Four more jobs lost.You cannot legally hire any one to stack fire wood. cut grass or help weed your garden.Pay a neighbor to help paint your house or bring in hay, forget it.You can be fined.Laws that are supposed to protect workers keep people from having a job.Thats why most jobs have gone to China.My nephew bought 2 old riding mowers when he was a teenager.He got one running and went to work mowing lawns along his street,did well enough to buy a used dump truck and hauled sand and gravel.Hes a contractor today with men working for him and plowing town roads and pumping septic tanks.For many years he kept the plow truck in his yard.Some neighbors complaine about the truck noise in early am during snow storms.Town told him he had to park the truck a mile away in a commercial zone with rest of his equipment.Now when a bad storm hits he drives his 4wd out to the lot and plows all the contract roads and does his street last.Now neighbors are late for work any time a big storm hits, they cant get out to the state road.A kid put up a note on a grocery store bulletin board saying he would mow lawns, listed home phone.Local telephone co manager saw it and wanted to charge his mother a business rate on her phone.

Doesn't the "less government" party have control over 1/2 of the legislative branch of the Federal Government right now? If they practice what they preach, this shouldn't stand a chance of passing.

If you care to look it up it's been illegal to hire a kid to mow your lawn with a power mower for a while. Look up the laws for a kid operating power equipment. The big exceptions has been on their parents property (your kids can mow your lawn) and family farms.

My thoughts are that these rules went into affect to protect children from being injured while operating equipment they some were really too young for. The over zealous child protection people couldn't come up with an age that was reasonable because they sometimes count people as young as 24 or 25 as children when they present statistics like "between 09 and 11 XXXIX number of children were injured of killed doing......." kinda thing. I know they did that when they wanted to force bike helmets on kids, the age numbers were from birth to 21. It's pretty easy to fudge the numbers on something like that and then claim your figures are good and justify those numbers only if asked. An anti gun group counted kids killed by guns from birth to 28 and when asked stated that it was the age when children started leaving gangs so they were still thinking as children

I do agree that we need to let our elected Representatives that we are not happy with the regulatory agencies in the government.

Rick

does anyone have a link to these proposed rules?