CHILD SAFETY

Injuries and fatalities among Amish children pose a challenge in the Amish, non-Amish relationship. Child labor is viewed from divergent perspectives. Western culture has well established laws regarding the employment of children. A prominent exemption exists in agriculture, largely on the basis, that it involves the family farm. The Amish only started working in non-farm related jobs in the last forty years. But for the first twenty years they largely worked for non-Amish employers, and so fell under the larger societies' guidelines.


It wasn't until they started to be self-employed in non-farming work that child labor laws became an issue. What bothers me most about how the Amish and their political allies have dealt with this issue, is that they want to pretend all the lessons we learned during the industrial age can be thrown out. Somehow the Amish are above it all, and they can plunge into what amounts to their, industrial age, and everything is going to be just fine and dandy. I believe it was a mistake for the Amish to seek an exemption in this situation. One of their primary concerns is to keep the government out of their affairs. If they would have just complied with the labor law requirements, their need in that respect would have been achieved. Instead they allowed a few greedy wood shop owners to entangle them with the government in a way that I believe will come back to haunt them.