Tom Cotton's tough love: rolling back the clock on child labor laws
by digby
So I hear Arkansas is trying to clear the way for Tom Cotton to run for president in 2020. No, I'm not kidding. I'm just surprised they aren't drafting him for 2016. He's their new leader. He's been to Iraq and Afghanistan. What more do we need?
True, he is a little bit confused about some things, but so what? So was Sarah Palin and they put her on the ticket. Like this, for instance, from when he was first running for congress three years ago (for the one term he served before becoming a Senator and taking over the foreign policy and national security leadership of the Republican Party.)
WASHINGTON -- Tom Cotton, a GOP candidate for Congress, says he would like to see more children working long hours out in America's agricultural fields. The Republican from Arkansas' fourth district apparently isn't a big fan of child-labor laws pertaining to farms.
"We need more young people who've worked all day in the fields, not less," the Army reservist and Harvard grad fumed in a recent post on his 2012 campaign website (his italics). "It's time to tell Washington to get off our land."
The swipe at Washington is apparently a reference to some pending federal regulations pertaining to minors working on farms. The Labor Department has proposed a rule that would bar children under age 16 from performing certain agricultural duties deemed dangerous, such as driving tractors, operating power equipment, or castrating bulls. Although farm-worker advocates say the rules are decades overdue, some farmers have argued that bureaucrats are meddling needlessly in their industry.
Cotton is running for the seat that will be left wide open when Democratic Rep. Mike Ross retires next year, and he seems intent on making the new rules a campaign issue. His blog post urges visitors to sign a petition denouncing the child-labor regulations, calling them "just another example of how Washington regulates our state’s farmers without understanding us or our way of life." (Again, his italics.)
But Cotton's post also appears to promote some misinformation about the rules, saying they would "forbid our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews from working their family farms."
Children working on their parents' farms would be exempt from the rule and permitted to do any chore their parents see fit. As a Labor Department fact sheet on the rule explains, "A child of any age may perform any job, even hazardous work, at any age at any time on a farm owned by his or her parent." And nephews, nieces and grandchildren could still perform grown-up duties on relatives' farms, so long as they're not formal, paid employees, notes a Labor Department spokesperson.
This is a pattern with him. How can I put this delicately? Uhm, he lies. But he knows that the truth is irrelevant in Wingnuttia (Bill O'Reilly, call your office) and that all that matters is to play into their peculiar paranoia.
Seriously, he believes that child labor should be allowed and that employers should be allowed to have kids using dangerous equipment. I guess if they lose a few fingers or a leg they'll learn their lesson.
You remember the good old days, right? When children did what they were told and knew the value of hard work?
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