New rules proposed by President Obama’s Labor Department (DOL) could prevent teenagers under 16 from doing a variety of chores around farms, even those owned by their relatives, citing the danger of the work environment.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is concerned that “the fatality rate for young agricultural workers is four times greater than that of their peers employed in nonagricultural workplaces.” DOL’s new rules, the Washington Times reports, “would restrict the range of chores children could do for pay, including driving tractors, branding cattle, working above a certain height and herding livestock on horseback.”
“Farmers and ranchers are more interested than anyone else in assuring the safety of farming operations,” said American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman. “We have no desire at all to have young teenagers working in jobs that are inappropriate or entail too much risk.”
There are already laws limiting the jobs minors may perform perform on farms, as a Labor official noted in a recent statement.
Opponents say will block teenagers out of good-paying jobs and deprive farmers of a much-needed workforce. The Times quotes an Iowa farmer who says that the rule changes “would eliminate 40 [percent] to 70 percent of my workforce. It would probably eliminate about 1,200 out of the 2,000 kids I hire.”
