Gingrich Blames Child Labor Laws for America's Economic Woes

There seems to be no end to the stupidity coming out of the conservative candidates' mouths.

Here's what a guy who wants to be president said recently:

"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” Gingrich said. “Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.” [...]

“Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

Child labor laws are truly stupid. 

Let's go back to the good old days of allowing corporations to exploit children and work them to death. 

CHILD LABOR IN U.S. HISTORY

Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history. As industrialization moved workers from farms and home workshops into urban areas and factory work, children were often preferred, because factory owners viewed them as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike. Growing opposition to child labor in the North caused many factories to move to the South. By 1900, states varied considerably in whether they had child labor standards and in their content and degree of enforcement. By then, American children worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks, and peddlers.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the numbers of child laborers in the U.S. peaked. Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor. Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined, and common initiatives were conducted by organizations led by working women and middle class consumers, such as state Consumers’ Leagues and Working Women’s Societies. These organizations generated the National Consumers’ League in 1899 and the National Child Labor Committee in 1904, which shared goals of challenging child labor, including through anti-sweatshop campaigns and labeling programs. The National Child Labor Committee’s work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor.
U.S. Federal Child Labor Laws.  Link here.

Child labor involves at least one of the following characteristics:

• Violates a nation’s minimum age laws
• Threatens children’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being
• Involves intolerable abuse, such as child slavery, child trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, or illicit activities
• Prevents children from going to school
• Uses children to undermine labor standards

Where does most child labor occur?

Of an estimated 215 million child laborers around the globe: approximately 114 million (53%) are in Asia and the Pacific; 14 million (7%) live in Latin America; and 65 million (30%) live in sub-Saharan Africa.

And Gingrich would like to add American children to those statistics.

More here.

There's nothing wrong with teens having part time jobs.  The problem with Gingrich's "unconventional" suggestion to get rid of child labor laws that protect those teens who work is that that idea opens the door for corporations to abuse children who need to earn money. 

Gingrich trusts corporations to do the right thing while wanting the bottom line to grow?

This miserable idea combined with Michele Bachmann's  
proposition to get rid of the minimum wage would make way for a conservative paradise:  Poor children working for corporations for little money, so that those corporations will continue to fill the pockets of politicians like Newt Gingrich who would work tirelessly to represent the interests of the very wealthiest in America.


Source: Raw Story
By David Edwards
"New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that Newt Gingrich is just the latest of the 'fools and clowns' in the Republican presidential race to become a frontrunner.

'I have a structural hypothesis here,' Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour Sunday. 'You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn’t believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that’s just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can believe in. And that’s the Republican problem.'

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan spoke up in Gingrich’s defense.

'We need a little on the pro-Newt side balance,' she remarked. 'The base of the Republican Party knows that the establishment of the Republican Party doesn’t like Newt. That’s a big plus.' "



"Newt Gingrich Is 'The Classic Rental Politician,' "--George Will         

Newt Gingrich:  "A stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like." --P.Krugman