Teen dies in sawmill accident as US states aim to roll back child labor laws

I commented on a post in the Wisconsin magazine linked to this WPR article. What I said there stands grounds here as well.

This just really sucks and I wish it would change some recent policy that we seem to be seeing, not just here, but also nationwide. That child should not have been there in the first place.

Since moving up to northern Wisconsin, I've worked in two different mills. So I kind of wonder what they had him doing there. Per the article:

In Wisconsin, minors are prohibited from working in many occupations in logging and sawmills. According to the state Department of Workforce Development, children under 18 are prohibited from entering a sawmill building. They are also not allowed to work felling or bucking timber, collection or transporting logs, operating or assisting in operating power-driven machinery, handling or using explosives, working on trestles, working on portable sawmills, working in lumberyards used for storing green lumber or using a chainsaw.

Under the law, there would have been no way for a minor to work at the first facility I was at. The break room, office, and bathroom were all located in the sawmill.

The second mill had a work around. They had two separate buildings one was the sawmill proper and the other was the pallet department. The minors could work in the pallet department and stack pieces of pallets. Think the top and bottom boards as well as the nearly 2x4 dimensional lumber. They could stack those onto pallets. That, and sweep in downtime. And management was pretty stringent about those being the only things they could do.

So, what did Florence Hardwoods have this child doing? It's quite difficult to suffer from death, let alone lose a finger, from stacking boards alone. Depending on the task they had him on, they could be facing some serious legal woes.