The administration's
logjam on issuing the first new child labor regulations in 40 years finally broke, and last week the
new rules were officially proposed.
The revisions would extend restrictions on child labor, including barring children under 16 from cultivating tobacco or operating most power-driven equipment, in the first update to the Fair Labor Standards Act concerning child farm workers since 1970.[...]
The proposal comes in response to health and safety concerns for young workers. Earlier this month, a Colorado company pleaded guilty in federal court for violating workplace laws in the death of a 17-year-old boy who suffocated after being sucked under flowing grain while cleaning a bin.
The proposed revisions would extend regulations to prohibit child agricultural work with animals, pesticides, timber, manure pits and storage bins.
Public comment on the regulations is open until Nov. 1. These are long overdue and common sense rules that shouldn't be controversial, but expect farm state Congress members to oppose them anyway, even though they could have been much more stringent.
[Norma Flores López, director of the Children in the Fields Campaign at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs] is cautious when speaking about the issue. "We do recognize it as a historic step forward," she says, but making the workplace less hazardous isn't the only step necessary to move toward what she sees as true parity.
Flores believes the new tobacco rules, for instance, won't go far enough. She points to the fact that workers who participate in the harvest absorb as much nicotine as one would get smoking 36 cigarettes a day. Younger workers are especially vulnerable to nicotine, and often fall ill with something called "green tobacco sickness." (a non-lethal but harmful form of nicotine overdose). And because the harvest takes place in southern states like North Carolina during the hottest time of year, wearing protective clothing puts workers at risk for dehydration.
"If you think about the way our federal laws are set," she adds, "kids aren't allow to buy cigarettes until they're 18. And even if these new rules pass, we'll still be allowing 16-year-olds to work in that environment."
Closing that two-year gap would take an actual law, rather than regulation, so even if these regs are approved, 16-year-olds will still be harvesting tobacco. But at least it wouldn't be 10-year-olds. The rules are supposed to exempt actual family farms where child family members are employed, but there's some confusion on how farms that are incorporated but still family farms would be treated.
