Child Labor Reg Panned—Again

Don’t look for the Obama administration’s ill-starred regulation toughening child labor rules on farms to go into effect anytime soon.

A day after the Labor Department said it would redraft the regulation’s most controversial provision, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., ignored that concession and pledged to amend an appropriations bill to prevent the rule from being implemented.

“We’re not done with this,” Rehberg told a department witness at a Thursday hearing of the House Small Business Agriculture Subcommittee. “We do get to put the riders on … I know it will pass the House.” Rehberg has led bipartisan congressional opposition since the regulation was proposed last fall.

The regulation was repeatedly criticized at the hearing, which also heard from Missouri pork producer Chris Chinn. Chinn said her two children work on their family farm daily and also work on their grandparents’ farm—and have never been injured. “We don’t need anyone in Washington, D.C., to tell us what our children can and can’t do on our farm,” she said.

The proposed regulation would have barred kids from performing many tasks on farms, including driving tractors or painting a barn if they'd need to be higher than 6 feet.