Editor: You can’t make stuff like this up. It’s too bizarre…

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Wednesdays with Audrey Hudson
Regulations for Goat Herder employers
08.24.11          

The Obama administration has created new workplace rules for foreign workers taking jobs in the U.S. as goat herders, including employee-paid cell phones and comfy beds. The regulations set strict rules for sleeping quarters, lighting, food storage, bathing, laundry, cooking and new rules for the counters where food is prepared. 

“A separate sleeping unit shall be provided for each person, except in a family arrangement,” says the rules signed by Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training administration at the Labor Department. 

“Such a unit shall include a comfortable bed, cot or bunk, with a clean mattress,” the rules state. 

Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, unearthed the policy in the “Federal Register,” the massive daily journal of proposed regulations that Washington bureaucrats publish every day. 

Under the Obama Administration, the nanny state has imposed 75 new major regulations with annual costs of $38 billion. 

“This captures what is wrong with government,” Katz said. “I could not have made this up.” 

With unemployment holding steady at 9% and government regulations adding more burden to small businesses, such as those run by ranching families, Katz said, bureaucrats aren’t helping. 

“Instead of remedying the problem, the regulations make it that much harder,” Katz insisted. “We may need a whole set of regulations just to define what a comfortable bed is. I imagine it’s not straw.” 

“It makes you wonder how they ever did this before the government got involved?” “Who knew we needed all of this federal help for herding goats?” Katz said. 

Read it at Daily Events