Child Labor Rules Opposed By Ag-Friendly Dems 28MAR12

ONLY 12% of Americans approve of Congress, and here is a perfect example of why. Instead of standing up and promoting safety for children through the proposed child labor laws in agriculture we have a group of senators who are knowingly, deliberately lying about these new rules as being a threat to the operation of family farms. THAT IS A LIE AND THESE SENATORS KNOW THAT. But, since they are owned by big agribusinesses, political prostitutes if you will, they are mounting a vicious propaganda campaign to keep children of migrants in the fields, at risk of being maimed or killed by heavy machinery they should not be operating or even around, because hey, migrants generally don't vote and can't afford to buy senators to represent them. The right wing media and political groups are distorting and manipulating these proposed rule changes as another example of government control of our lives. And sadly too many, because of voluntary ignorance and self-centeredness will believe them, defending the abuse and mistreatment of children in our fields and orchards. To all you Christians out there, maybe you should pray for these children when you say Grace before your next meal and listen to what God, not politicians and agribusiness lobbyist, has to say about child farm laborers. From HuffPost.....

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has joined Senate Republicans in opposing new regulations for children working on farms.

WASHINGTON -- Republicans have stepped up their efforts to block new rules from the Obama administration that would limit the work kids can do on farms, getting a boost from a small handful of Democrats who say they're opposing the regulations in the name of family farmers.
GOP members of both the House and Senate introduced bills this month that would preempt regulations proposed by the Labor Department forbidding kids under 16 from doing certain agricultural duties deemed too dangerous. The Senate version quickly found a backer in Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the first Democrat to sign on as co-sponsor. Tester and fellow Democratic Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) have joined 39 Senate Republicans in opposing the new rules.
Tester, a farmer, is in the midst of a tough re-election fight this year, facing an opponent, Montana rancher Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), who happens to be among the most outspoken critics of the new child labor rules. Like agriculture trade groups, Rehberg has cast the proposals as an intrusion on family farms and the rural American way of life, though the Labor Department has said children working on their parents' farms would continue to be exempted from safety rules.
Tester asked the Labor Department in December to reevaluate the rules, saying he was worried they could hurt family operations or impact 4-H programs. Tester has since asked the department to abandon the rules altogether. His office did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.
According to the Labor Department, the rules would prohibit kids from working in certain capacities for employers that aren't family. For instance, those under 16 could no longer handle tobacco crops, due to health concerns; drive tractors that don't come with rollover protections; or work inside grain silos and bins.
The proposed rules would not change a long-standing family-farm exemption that's been in place since 1966 and allows a child to do any kind of work on a farm owned by his or her parent, according to the Labor Department. Nor would it eliminate the 4-H programs that teach kids agricultural skills. Children 16 or older would still be allowed to work for any farmer in any capacity.
Nonetheless, many Republicans and some Democrats have said the provisions would hurt small family farms. Speaking in a hearing last month, Rehberg said the "urban" Labor Department is meddling in a rural industry it doesn't understand, and is "overstepping its boundaries" and "its knowledge base." Rehberg, who oversees funding for the Labor Department through his House subcommittee, has vowed to withhold funding in order to block the rules.

Child and worker safety advocates, including Human Rights Watch, note that the regulations for children working in agriculture haven’t been updated in 40 years. Many of the proposed changes considered by the Labor Department have been recommended by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the federal agency that researches work-related safety.
Before undergoing a public-comment period, the proposed rules had been caught up in red tape at the White House for nine months, upsetting worker safety advocates who said the rules could have prevented fatalities. Last summer a group of occupational health experts sent the White House a letter urging the administration to finish its evaluation.
The Labor Department is still crafting the farm rules. If they aren't blocked by Congress, they still likely would not be enacted for months.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/child-labor-rules-opposed_n_1386007.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications 

REPORT: Five Things Unions Have Done For All Americans 5MAR11

TOO many people have a negative view of unions, not from any personal experience, but because of disinformation from corporate America. This from ThinkProgress.....
Over the past few weeks, right-wing legislators have unleashed a torrent of radical legislation upon the American electorate designed to gut collective bargaining rights and attack the middle class. As these conservatives have launched their assault, a Main Street Movement consisting of ordinary Americans fed up with living in such an unequal country has fought back.
Conservatives have sought to malign this movement by claiming that it is simply defending the parochial interests of labor unions, who they claim are imposing huge costs on taxpayers with little benefit. Yet the truth is that America’s public and private unions have been one of the major forces in building a robust and vibrant middle class and have fought over the past century to improve the lives of all Americans in a variety of ways. ThinkProgress has assembled just five of the many things that Americans can thank the nation’s unions for giving us all:

1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
2. Unions Gave Us Fair Wages And Relative Income Equality: As ThinkProgress reported earlier in the week, the relative decline of unions over the past 35 years has mirrored a decline in the middle class’s share of national income. It is also true that at the time when most Americans belonged to a union — a period of time between the 1940′s and 1950′s — income inequality in the U.S. was at its lowest point in the history of the country.
3. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
4. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
5. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”

In 2007, Australia’s Manic Studios produced a short film titled, “What Have Unions Ever Done For Us?” which satirically portrays a handful of employers asking that question and realizing that unions have actually done a lot for the average person in their country. Although the film deal’s with Australia’s unions and not the United States, many of the rights mentioned by the mock executives — like workers’ compensation and expanded health care — are exactly the same. Watch it:

Sen. Mike Lee Calls Child Labor Laws Unconstitutional from THINKPROGRESS 14JAN11

I have to wonder what kind of people elect someone like Sen mike lee (r UT) to office? Does he really reflect the views and attitudes of the majority of the people in Utah? If so how sad for them, and for the children, the elderly and those on Medicare in his state. I wonder how he justifies his lack of concern for the least among us with his professed Mormon faith? This from ThinkProgress...
Last week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted a lecture on his YouTube channel where he explains in great detail his views on the Constitution. As part of the lecture, which is essentially a lengthy defense of his radical tenther interpretation of the Constitution, Lee claims that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional:

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]
This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.
Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

Watch it:

Lee’s call for a return to failed constitutional vision that spawned the Great Depression is obviously wrong. The Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate commerce…among the several states,” and to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” this power to regulate commerce. Even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia agrees that these powers give Congress broad authority to regulate “economic activity” such as hiring and firing. Which explains why the Supreme Court unanimously overruled Hammer v. Daggenhardt in a 1941 decision called United States v. Darby.

Moreover, Lee is simply wrong to claim that child labor magically disappeared after the Supreme Court rendered Congress powerless to prevent it. The reason why exploitative child labor has largely disappeared is because Congress placed very strict limits on child labor when it enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the constitutional cloud over this law was removed three years later when the Court overruled Lee’s pet decision.

Child labor laws are also only one of many essential protections that would evaporate in Mike Lee’s America. The same legal theory Lee uses to impugn child labor laws applies equally to the federal minimum wage and the ban on whites-only lunch counters. And Lee doesn’t even stop there. In a subsequent section of the lecture, Lee attacks President Franklin Roosevelt for calling for the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.” Watch it:

So Lee wouldn’t just remove the most basic protections against child sweatshops, he would also eliminate Social Security and Medicare.