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Kids have been helping out on mom and dads or grandpas farms for generations. In addition to this issue with the labor dept, the EPA has been hammering farms over farm dust, and now this new legislation...I mean everywhere you go American farmers, coal miners, energy employees, etc are under the gun and under increased legislation while billions in insider loans are wasted on "green companies". I dont need to go over the list.
Govt backs off new limits on child labor on farms
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Under heavy pressure from farm groups, the Obama administration said Thursday it would drop an unpopular plan to prevent children from doing hazardous work on farms owned by anyone other than their parents.
The Labor Department said it is withdrawing proposed rules that would ban children younger than 16 from using most power-driven farm equipment, including tractors. The rules also would prevent those younger than 18 from working in feed lots, grain bins and stockyards.
While labor officials said their goal was to reduce the fatality rate for child farm workers, the proposal had become a popular political target for Republicans who called it an impractical, heavy-handed regulation that ignored the reality of small farms.
"It's good the Labor Department rethought the ridiculous regulations it was going to stick on farmers and their families," said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "To even propose such regulations defies common sense, and shows a real lack of understanding as to how the family farm works."
The surprise move comes just two months after the Labor Department modified the rule in a bid to satisfy opponents. The agency made it clear it would exempt children who worked on farms owned or operated by their parents, even if the ownership was part of a complex partnership or corporate agreement.
That didn't appease farm groups that complained it would upset traditions in which many children work on farms owned by uncles, grandparents and other relatives to reduce costs and learn how a farm operates. The Labor Department said Thursday it was responding to thousands of comments that expressed concern about the impact of the changes on small family-owned farms.
"The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations," the agency said in a statement.
Instead, the agency said it would work with rural stakeholders, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Farmers Union and 4-H to develop an educational program to reduce accidents to young workers.
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., a grain farmer known to till his fields on weekends away from Washington, had come out strongly against the proposed rule. The Democrat continued to criticize the Obama administration rule even after it was tempered earlier this year, saying the Labor Department "clearly didn't get the whole message" from Montana's farmers and ranchers.
Tester, who is in a tough race for re-election, on Thursday praised the decision to withdraw the rule and said he would fight "any measure that threatens that heritage and our rural way of life."
The move is sure to disappoint child safety groups who said the rules represent long-overdue protections for children working for hire in farm communities. Three-quarters of working children under 16 who died of work-related injuries in 2010 were in agriculture, according to the Child Labor Coalition.
Last month, the child advocacy group criticized GOP legislation that would have stopped the Labor Department from issuing the rules.
"They will save lives and preserve the health of farm children so they can grow up to be farmers," said Reid Maki, the CLC coordinator. "The department should implement them as soon as possible."
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.
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i diDn't knowhaving your arms ripped off by a PTO was a "way of life"... After His Arms Were Severed in a Terrible Farm Accident, John Thompson Saved His Own Life. Now, Overcoming Fear and Pain, He's Learning How to Live It Again
Gallant first steps on a long, hard road back
IN HIS FAMILY'S MODEST NORTH DAKOTA farmhouse, John Thompson wanders from the kitchen to the living room and back, his tiny toy poodle, Tinker, barking playfully at his feet. "You think you're real cute, don't you," John says with a laugh. Then, coaxing the dog onto his lap, his arms hanging rigid at his sides, John uses a knee to lift Tinker up to his face. Rubbing his nose in the poodle's soft fur, he says quietly, "It's the only way I can feel him."
That John can feel Tinker at all is, by all accounts, a near miracle. Four months ago he survived a nightmarish farm accident in which both his arms were torn from his body (PEOPLE, Feb. 3). The arms were reattached eight hours later, but John's ordeal was far from over. Though doctors say feeling will gradually return to his fingers, the teenager lives with constant frustration because his fragile, slow-healing arms will not obey his will. He is beginning to come to terms with the physical and psychological scars, enduring the frustrations of rehabilitation and even testing the subtle perils of sudden celebrity. Thus far he has struggled with impressive success. "The human soul needs heroes," says Dr. Allen Van Beek, John's surgeon, "and John meets the bill."
John's appointment with heroism began at about 11:30 A.M. on Jan. 11, when he was shoveling barley from his father's Ford pickup into the auger, a device commonly used on farms to move grain into feeding bins. As he recalls, he jumped off the pickup, slipped on a patch of ice, tripped on the auger and fell onto the power take-off (PTO), a swiftly rotating shaft connected from a tractor to the auger. In a split second, the PTO tugged one arm. then the other, into its rapidly spinning mechanism, flinging John around and around. "The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground," he says. "I couldn't feel my left arm. I couldn't see my right arm. I went to pick myself up—and my arms were gone."
Since his parents were in Bismarck, 90 miles away, John knew no one would hear if he screamed. "I thought I was going to die," he says, "and I didn't want to die." A cool head was his only hope for survival. He rushed 400 feet to the sliding glass door in the back of the house, tried in vain to use the bone dangling from his left shoulder to nudge it open and then, blood oozing from the slumps of both arms, ran to the front door, kicked it open and made his way to the push-button phone. Using a pen clenched in his teeth, he pecked out his uncle's number and asked his cousin to send for help. Finally, concerned about getting blood on his mother's carpet, he walked to the bathroom, kicked aside the shower curtain, and sank, crying, into the bathtub, where he waited, alone but for the company of Tinker, until help arrived.
By 6:30 A.M., an air ambulance had delivered Thompson to North Memorial Medical Center near Minneapolis, where a microsurgery team led by Dr. Van Beek reattached the limbs that John, despite the loss of half his body's blood, had thought to remind the local ambulance crew to retrieve.
Then, as now, John dismisses any notion of heroism. "You do what you have to do," he said at the time, propped in a hospital bed with no idea what the future might offer. "I'm Irving to figure out how I'll finish high school, if I can drive again."
Today, less than three months after John returned from the hospital to his family's 1,600-acre farm on the outskirts of Hurdsfield, N.Dak. (pop. 100), the 18-year-old high school senior has already found answers to many of his questions. With the help of a specially equipped 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, sold to him at cost by a local dealer, John can in fact drive again, with his left hand secured in a customized steering device. Speeding along a road to school in the shiny black Cutlass, John marvels at the attention he's received—and the money. Admirers have sent some $600,000 in donations for his future (his medical bills are covered by the family's insurance). "My life is so much better than it's ever been," he says, still reveling in his newfound fame. "It's hard to explain, but there are more possibilities, the world seems more open to me." Best of all, on May 17, he graduated with his nine classmates from Bowdon High School.
this is no isolated incident...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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