Child Labor Laws - History Child Labor Laws

Throughout our history Child Labor Laws have impacted our economy going way back to the beginning of the United States. Other countries around the world rely on children making money to support families. Nearly 70% of child labor occurs in agriculture, fishing, hunting, and forestry. We as Americans have child labor laws to prevent physical and mental harm to our children. Question is who should make the rules.

I believe that Child Labor Laws should be set up by the state. The reason why is because there is different geographical regions in the United States and those regions have different needs. To set a standard for all the states to use is not fair and those states may need children of an earlier age to do work when the population in the area is not great for adults. Farmers this falls into this category. The city kid that wants to work at a restaurant at age 12, the situation is different due to how many adults are in that area to fill those jobs. Now New York has both urban and rural areas, this may fall into counties making amendments to the laws. But if you have federal, state and county law that may be too many laws to follow. So if there is just a state and a county regulation it would not be so hard.

Just because the federal government is not making the laws they can oversee them and make sure the laws for the states do not get out of hand and silly. We have to look at what is safe but also fair. Some families need the extra money to put food on the table and just get by. But we must make sure that the children are not the only ones supporting the family. This will put stress on their upbringing and social life. What it boils down to is having one set of Child Labor Laws setup for fifty states are a bit too broad for the variety of states and region.

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/what_is_child_labor.html