Newt Gingrich, who says child labor laws are “truly stupid” and wants to put low-income children in poor neighborhoods to work cleaning schools after he fires “all the unionized janitors,” has found an acolyte—Donald Trump.
Billionaire Trump—who most Republican presidential candidates are genuflecting before in hopes of a laying on of hands—endorsed Gingrich’s call to put poor kids to work. He told reporters, “I thought it was a good idea” and suggested they also work for him—as “apprenti.”
Gingrich apparently thinks all poor kids are lazy and says his plan will “get them into the habit of showing up and realizing that effort gets rewarded and that America is all about the work ethic.”
Last week he also inferred that low-income kids are crooks. He said, “They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”
It wasn’t enough for presidential wannabee Newt Gingrich to push child labor by proposing that poor kids clean schools. Now he says children from low-income families only work when the “job” is illegal. This from CBS NEWS:
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” the former House speaker said at a campaign event at the Nationwide Insurance offices. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”
As talk show host Stephanie Miller said last night on the Ed Schultz Show, the corporate media has focused a lot on Gingrich’s odious personal behavior. But what hasn’t been given enough attention–and what clearly needs to be–is Gingrich’s extremist policy agenda, one that includes child labor.
Last week we learned that Newt Gingrich has a plan to fire union janitors in schools, and replace them with low income students. As Laura Clawsonwrote about a speech he made in Iowa yesterday where he’s still beating that same drum. Poor kids don’t have any work ethic. Rich kids, apparently, have worked darned hard to get everything handed to them.
In that same speech in Iowa, Newt made some bizarre assertions about food stamps, including the statement one could use food stamps to fly to Hawaii. The folks at Politifact decided to investigate his claims:
Gingrich said:
“Remember, this is the best food stamp president in history. So more Americans today get food stamps than before. And we now give it away as cash — you don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything. We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. They give food stamps now to millionaires because, after all, don’t you want to be compassionate? You know, the Obama model: isn’t there somebody you’d like to give money to this week. That’s why we’re now going to help bailout Italy because we haven’t bailed out enough people this week, the president thought let’s write another check. After all, we have so much extra money.”
Politifact’s investigation:
Can food stamps “be used for anything”?
No. The food stamp program — which, we should point out, has officially been known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, since October 2008 — has very precise rules about what can and cannot be paid for.
and
Gingrich is partly right when he says that today, “you don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card.” The old system of using coupons is past; recipients now receive what’s called an electronic benefits transfer card, or EBT card. This looks like a credit card, but it doesn’t allow for purchases on credit. It’s really more like a debit card, with the government periodically uploading the proper amount of cash.
The cards cut way down on administrative costs, and streamline the process. The card also helps to cut back on the stigma of using food stamps in the checkout line at the supermarket.
“We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii.”
If the food stamp system bars beneficiaries from buying decorative gourds rather than pumpkins, you can be sure it also bars the purchase of airline tickets. (Our guess: The benefit amount would be less than the tickets anyway.)
and his final outrageous claim:
“They give food stamps now to millionaires.”
Food stamps have always been a means-tested program. Benefits vary by household size — the full details are here — but the national rule is that you can’t earn more than 130 percent of the poverty line. That would clearly rule out millionaires.
Politifact finds each of his claims to be utterly ridiculous.
A quick online search for a round trip flight to Hawaii from NH found the cheapest flight was $1035. According to CNN Money:
The average food stamp benefit was $133.80 per person and $283.65 per household in May.
That’s May 2011. In order to save up for that trip to Hawaii, I’d have to go hungry for seven months. And even then, I still wouldn’t be able to use my SNAP card to pay for the flight.
It’s nice of Newt to leave Planet 1% to visit the rest of us, but he certainly lacks even a basic sense of reality of what life is like for those of us who don’t have revolving charge accounts at Tiffany’s. Perhaps we can buy breakfast there with food stamps.
We noted yesterday that Newt Gingrich wants “get rid of unionized janitors” and hire poor kids to clean the in schools low-income neighborhoods. Today AFSCME says it’s time to tell Gingrich that his ”model” to lift kids out of poverty is outrageous dangerous and downright hogwash.
Click here to sign a letter that reminds Gingrich that
“doing janitorial work in a school entails sanitizing toilets, handling hazardous cleaning chemicals, and scrubbing floors hunched over a mop for hours. It’s hard to imagine a nine-year old doing any of those tasks. Come on.”
You can also tell the oh-so- brilliant Gingrich—at least in his mind—that when he fires all those janitors,
a lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with health care and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty. Firing someone’s mom and hiring the kid for less money isn’t exactly the “process of rising.”
Click here to tell Newt he’s out of his mind and click here for a video look at his plan.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage reiterates his support for rolling back child labor laws:
LePage doesn’t see the problem:
I went to work at 11 years old. I became governor. It’s not a big deal. Work doesn’t hurt anybody.
First of all, I’d question that he went to work in the way this law allows for—going from school to a job at McDonald’s or WalMart for several hours every single day—at age 11. And as to whether it hurts anybody, Amanda Terkel quotes the director of public policy for the Maine Women’s Lobby:
“Just look at the studies linking increases in substance abuse, delinquency, on the job injury and teen pregnancy with teens working long hours — I think it is a big deal, and yes it does hurt somebody.”
Second, I’d go back to what Doug said on this issue a few weeks back:
Maine has 7 percent unemployment and a 20 percent high school dropout rate. The last thing Maine needs to do is educate kids less on their way to receiving less wages for more work.
I’ll say again: Nothing about this will put a single person back to work, nor will it reduce the deficit by a penny. It’s about politicians doing the bidding of wealthy donors and hoping the Middle Class is too exhausted, undereducated, and overworked to notice us going back to the labor laws of the 19th century.
And finally, Gov. LePage mischaracterizes the provisions of the law he’s advocating for. Whether that was done with intention to mislead his audience or because he simply doesn’t know what the bill says, Maine blogger Dirigo Blue notes that:
this is important, as many in the audience have never heard of LD1346, and will leave the auditorium believing what the Governor has told them.
Seriously. These are kids who’ve been removed from their families because of abuse or neglect, and his idea is that to make their lives just that little bit easier, they shouldn’t be able to just go to the store and get new clothes that fit them. They should go to the Salvation Army, and if there’s nothing that fits them there, they better hope there’s a Goodwill nearby that has better options.
Because being removed from your family isn’t hard enough, having a family that requires removal isn’t hard enough, going to a new school isn’t hard enough, having your entire life be temporary isn’t hard enough. Nope, under Casswell’s proposal these kids would have to go to school hoping their classmates don’t decide to take aim at their secondhand clothes.
Whatever you think of punitive measures (I’m opposed, in case you were wondering) against adults for the crime of poverty, or even of just not being rich enough, usually children get at least partially exempted from that. But in this year that has already seen proposals to weaken child labor laws in Maine and Missouri, have Republican state legislators decided it’s open season on kids, too?
The bill, LD 1346, also eliminates the maximum number of hours a minor 16 years of age or older can work on a school day and allows a minor under the age of 16 to work up to four hours on a school day during hours when school is not in session.
With Maine’s unemployment above 7 percent, state Rep. Paul Gilbert (D) wonders why Republicans are pushing to create a pool of cheap labor when so many people are begging for jobs.
“If we had a shortage of job applicants or potential workers, then you could look at other populations to ease that strain on the workforce,” Gilbert told The Huffington Post. “But we don’t have that right now. We have an excess of job applicants here in Maine, as well across the country.”
Not only does this have nothing to do with creating jobs or bringing unemployment down – it’s a dangerous repeat of history. See what co-sponsor Rep. Bruce Bickford (R) had to say about it:
The sponsor of LD 1346, Rep. David Burns (R), did not return a request for comment. But co-sponsor Rep. Bruce Bickford (R) said that the government should stop standing in the way on child labor issues.
“This is in no way an attempt to abuse child labor, which some may look at and say, ‘We’ve fought hard for kids and we’ve done this or that,’” he said. “Kids have parents. Let the parents be responsible for the kids. It’s not up to the government to regulate everybody’s life and lifestyle. Take the government away. Let the parents take care of their kids.”
Thing is, Bruce, these laws were put in place in 1847 – that’s 164 years ago – to keep young children from being exploited. And you know what? They’ve worked pretty well since then.
The bill isn’t being pushed by parents, it’s being pushed by industry groups like the Maine Restaurant Association – who have every incentive to be able to pay kids less for more work.
Maine has 7 percent unemployment and a 20 percent high school dropout rate. The last thing Maine needs to do is educate kids less on their way to receiving less wages for more work.
I’ll say again: Nothing about this will put a single person back to work, nor will it reduce the deficit by a penny. It’s about politicians doing the bidding of wealthy donors and hoping the Middle Class is too exhausted, undereducated, and overworked to notice us going back to the labor laws of the 19th century.
I’ve been covering issues related to the production of chocolate through the use of child slave labor for a few years now. In all of that time, I didn’t really have a moment to really feel like anyone was listening inside the walls of Congress. Today, however, Congress doesn’t have to act on this, the Department of Labor has and the tone is set in the opening paragraph to their List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor report:
As a nation and as members of the global community, we reject the proposition that it is acceptable to pursue economic gain through the forced labor of other human beings or the exploitation of children in the workplace. However, we are aware that these problems remain widespread in today’s global economy. Indeed, we face these problems in our own country. The International Labor Organization estimates that over 12 million persons worldwide are working in some form of forced labor or bondage and that more than 200 million children are at work, many in hazardous forms of labor. The most vulnerable persons – including women, indigenous groups, and migrants – are the most likely to fall into these exploitive situations and the current global economic crisis has only exacerbated their vulnerability.
What’s hardest to conceive of in the issues surrounding child slave labor in chocolate production is really how easy it could be to fix. Let’s start with the world’s major producer, Côte d’Ivoire. Did you know that Cote d’Ivoire produces about 40% of the world supply of cocoa, and this cocoa comes from about 600,000 total farms in this very small West African country.
The 600,000 producers are often very small farms where children are forced to work to help their families or are sold to larger farms. From the New Internationalist
The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has made many visits to Côte d’Ivoire and it has never met a single parent who would not have preferred their child to go to school, get an education, and have a better future. The problem is that many parents have no choice: there are simply no schools, no teachers and no books. Their children have to work because these cocoa farmers do not receive a fair price for their beans and as a result, live in poverty. And a recent study by the Payson Centre at Tulane University has shown that, despite millions of dollars and many years, the chocolate companies’ charitable efforts are not having a broad impact on improving the lives of children on cocoa farms.
The problem of child slavery in chocolate production comes from control of revenues, revenues which were used to fund a civil war. I’m sure everyone knows the “Golden Rule”, He who has the Gold makes the Rules?
