Farm families, along with the cause of liberty, won an important battle last week when the Obama administration scrapped plans to prohibit kids from doing a wide range of jobs in agriculture, even on farms belonging to their own family members. The rules would have barred youngsters under 16 from working with animals, storage bins, power-driven equipment, and various other things found on farms; perhaps most significant, they took an exceedingly narrow view of the so-called parental exemption provided by the law, so that (in the rules as proposed last year) kids would have been forbidden to work on an uncle or grandparent’s farm, or any farm less than “wholly” owned by their own parents. The Department of Labor was inundated by upwards of 10,000 comments, overwhelmingly negative, from farmers and ranchers; playing out in press outlets like the Custer County, Neb. Chief, the controversy was mostly ignored by the Eastern press, though NPR did do areport in December.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/obama-labor-department-wont-ban-kids-farm-chores
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