Overview Have you ever watched or participated in a debate? Typically both sides in a debate are very passionate about their viewpoints. Have you ever taken a moment to try to understand what sources

Marjorie Elizabeth Wood May 8, 2012 The New York Times The New York Times Company Editorial 782 words (Level 5) 1400LFull Text: In the following article, Marjorie Elizabeth Wood argues that child labor laws are needed to protect children from being exposed tohazardous working conditions on American farms. She writes in response to a 2012 controversy over proposed legislation that wouldhave banned children younger than 16 from using heavy machinery such as tractors, and would have banned children younger than18 from working in grain silos, stockyards, feed lots, and other accident-prone farm areas.According to the federal government, at least 300,000 children younger than 18 work on farms, many around potentially dangerousequipment or materials. The Washington Post reports that children are more likely to die doing farm work than any other kind ofwork. In fact, they are four times more likely to be killed while undertaking farm work than children in all other industries combined.Underscoring this point, sixteen children younger than the age of 16 died in farm-work-related injuries in 2010.To protect children from death and serious injury, in 2011 the Labor Department introduced a proposal that would have limited thekind of work children could do on certain kinds of farms (family farms were exempt from the proposal). But Republicans criticized theproposal, saying that it would cripple farm efficiency and was out of touch with the realities of farm life. "Those regulations were veryspecific, things that seemed very lacking in common sense and in many ways just crazy," said Jerry Moran (1954–), a Republicansenator from Kansas. After the Obama Administration scrapped the proposal, it received heavy criticism from Democrats and childadvocates like Wood. "I am disappointed that the administration chose to walk away from regulations that were, at their core, aboutprotecting children and which could have been revised to correct some of the initial proposals that generated the most concern," saidDemocratic Senator Tom Harkin (1939–) of Iowa. Wood agrees, and laments that the government sided with the farm industry andnot child safety. [17 October 2012]Durham, N.H.LAST month, a proposal by the United States Department of Labor to prevent children under age 16 from working in dangerous farmjobs ignited a firestorm in conservative media outlets. The new rules would have restricted having young workers handle pesticide,operate heavy machinery, cut timber and perform other agricultural tasks identified as hazardous to children by the National Institutefor Occupational Safety and Health.Conservatives quickly went on the attack. Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, argued that ''if the federal government canregulate the kind of relationship between parents and their children on their own family's farm, there is almost nothing off-limits inwhich we see the federal government intruding in a way of life.'' Fox News posted a story entitled, ''Team Obama Wants ChildrenBanned from Doing Farm Chores.'' Sarah Palin chimed in on Facebook: ''The Obama administration is working on regulations thatwould prevent children from working on our own family farms.''So the Obama administration quickly reversed course, acknowledging ''thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effectof the proposed rules on small family-owned farms.''This is not the first time reform of agricultural child labor laws has been beaten back by a supposed threat to the family farm. In the1920s a proposed Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution was fiercely contested. The amendment would have given Congresspower to regulate the labor of people under age 18. But by orchestrating a sophisticated campaign that included front groups withnames such as Citizens' Committee to Protect Our Homes and Children, business interests frightened farm families with propagandaabout a government conspiracy to forbid chores on the family farm.In 1924, at the height of the controversy, the president of the Southern Textile Association, whose interest was to prevent regulationof cheap child labor in cotton mills, sent an estimated 50,000 pieces of literature to Southern farmers claiming that the proposedamendment would invade their homes and give the federal government control over their children. The anti-amendment campaign was so effective that reformers spent the majority of their time rebutting misinformation that was spreading throughout the country. Bythe spring of 1925, the amendment was a dead letter.The amendment's defeat was a great reversal for a movement to end child labor that had achieved enormous success, until the1920s. The child laborer had become, during the Gilded Age, a symbol of capitalism's worst excesses. Reformers, many thedescendants of antislavery activists, defined child labor as the worst national evil since slavery and invoked the passion of theirforebears as they pushed for federal regulation.By 1916, reformers had secured a federal child labor law -- the Keating-Owen Act -- without much controversy. The bill prohibited theproducts of child labor from interstate commerce. Two years later, though, the Keating-Owen Act was declared unconstitutional by apro-business Supreme Court that was out of step with national sentiment.Of course, the family farm was never the target of reform legislation, though it was used rhetorically by the opponents of reform. Inthe 1920s, as now, reformers were explicit that their legislative efforts would not affect children working on family farms or on thefarms of relatives acting in parental roles. But by shifting the debate to red herrings -- the supposed downfall of the private farm, andcorrespondingly of parental authority and rural ways of life -- the opposition managed, as it has again now, to distract us from the realproblem of exploitative child labor on farms.Before the bugaboo of prohibiting chores on the family farm was invented by business interests in the 1920s, protecting children fromall forms of labor exploitation was a moral issue that united the nation. Reformers' victories rested on the widespread conviction thatour nation would never be truly free until all forms of child labor were abolished from our midst. By the time New Deal legislation waspassed, however, child labor was defined much more narrowly. The reformers' goal of protecting children from every type of laborexploitation has been all but forgotten.The recent proposal by the Department of Labor was intended to protect poor migrant child workers who do seasonal farm work for''Big Agriculture.'' They sorely need it. According to Human Rights Watch, child farm workers are at greater risk of pesticidepoisoning, serious injury, heat illness, and death than any other youth workers in America.The hullabaloo revealed that the same commercial forces that thwarted the Child Labor Amendment in the 1920s continue to stymiereform today. In an age when Big Agriculture still benefits from the laxity of our child labor laws, the reformers' legacy is one we woulddo well to reclaim.By MARJORIE ELIZABETH WOOD COPYRIGHT 2012 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com (MLA 8th Edition) Wood, Marjorie Elizabeth. "Pitting Child Safety Against the Family Farm." , 8 May 2012, p. NA(L). , https://link-gale-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A288930514/GIC?u=aur58810&sid=GIC&xid=9b7bb173.Accessed 13 Feb. 2020. GALE|A288930514