VisionLand manager found guilty of breaking child labour laws

Posted | Contributed by supermandl34

VisionLand's general manager Terry Lee Mackey was found guilty of violating child labour laws and was fined $250 for each offense. Including court costs, the total fine came to $1,350. State inspectors says the kids worked past 9 p.m. and more than eight hours in a day, which are limits imposed by the state. They also say the park had been warned.

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Alabama Adventure

Well that isn't going to break the bank but it is an obvious sign of poor management.*** This post was edited by wahoo skipper 8/13/2003 11:24:20 AM ***

After having been there last weekend, I can't see why they would have needed them- the park was virtually deserted! Everyone says the park ius doing okay, but on a Friday night, there weren't very many people there.

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-Rob
A.C.E. member since 1990
Posting @ Coasterbuzz since 2000
E.C.C. member since 2002

Considering they had already BEEN warned once, seems to me the fines should have been a little stiffer. That's like getting a $5 speeding ticket, it's just not enough of a punishment to change the (bad) behavior on the part of park management.
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"The robot mafia is running numbers?"
"Well, nothing fancy, mostly just ones and zeroes"...;)

I wonder if the general manager even knew that it was going on. The kids could have been begging a lesser power(whoever is in charge of their employment) to give them extra hours. Either way, the GM took the fall and the $1,350 fine sent the message to them not to let these kids over work in the future.

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As Mitch always said, "If you had a freind who was a tightrope walker and he fell down just walking down the street, that would be completely unacceptable."
-Tomas

If you employ minors, you have to have systems in place to make sure you don't violate child labor laws. It is the manager's responsiblity to make sure that these things don't happen and to have systems in place to pervent them. It sounds like they didn't. That's pretty negligent. Considering that management didn't have systems in place even after multiple warnings, it sounds like they got off pretty light.

$250 per incident isn't really light. What if they had over worked 100 kids, that's much different. We're talking 4 or 5 kids, depending on court costs.

This sounds more like an exception rather than the rule.

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". . . don't you know baby that life is a scream!" - Gordon Gano

It was more an exception. First of all there are not and there never were any 14 year olds at the park. There were quite a few 15 year olds and usually the same few people had any violations. It wasnt like the park was forcing them into any sweatshop labor.

There goes the parks only customers...The employees

It looks like a nice park too, with what seems to be an intense woodie, hopefully iy does better in the future.

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