In the last week and a half, Newt Gingrich called one thing
“dumb” and another thing “stupid.” The “dumb” thing, he said, was the very idea
of having a super committee, and he may have had a point—although forcing the
United States government into default would have been a good deal dumber.
And the “stupid” thing? That would be child-labor laws.
Gingrich, in a speech at the Kennedy School, called such restrictions “tragic,”
and rhapsodized about the beneficial effects of taking a paid job, with regular
hours, beginning at the age of nine. He also had an idea of what sort of jobs
might be suited for children:
"You
say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, fourteen, sixteen
years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing
with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple
model…. 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."
In a way, these sentiments are not really surprising. In
their estrangement from objective reality and subjective sympathy, they fit the
patterns of this election season’s Republican rhetoric in general and
Gingrich’s world view in particular. Indeed, looking at his own undisciplined
habits, one wonders if he’s clear about where childhood begins and where it
ends. He also calls things dumb at a rate that would cause the average
kindergarten teacher to take action: after “socialist,” “stupid” may be his
favorite term of contempt. (He also likes “smart,” to describe his own ideas,
along with “frankly” and “fundamentally.”) It also fits with his
faux-futurologist outlandishness, as when he suggested that “brain science” would
solve the health-care crisis. So perhaps the proper response, rather than
rushing to quote Jacob Riis or conjure up images of barefoot children in the
Lowell mills, is amused exasperation. Does even Newt take Newt seriously?
Someone does. The punch line of this story is that the
latest polls show Gingrich in front in the Republican field. That may explain
the most jarring aspect of the bring-back-child-labor episode: Gingrich’s
complacent pride in his words. The transcript alone doesn’t quite convey how pleased
with himself Newt clearly is for having thought the thought. (“This is
something that no liberal wants to deal with.”) Is it because he thinks he is
wise—that he’s figured this poverty thing out—or that he thinks he is brave?
More than that, does he think that a country that solves the problem of income
inequality by using child labor to increase the number of wage earners per
family would be both wise and brave?
If you follow Gingrich’s model, you might get the gross
household income number up, but you will have created a more yawning divide:
between people who have a childhood, and those who don’t. Gingrich likes to
call himself a historian, because he likes dinosaurs and battlefields. Those
are the obsessions of a child with time and space to be a child, not one who
has to earn his keep. Just because the toilets you scrub are in a school
doesn’t make the work educational.
That is the moral argument: children are children, and
deserve to be treated that way. There are also practical and ethical arguments
against child labor—it feels ludicrous to even have to write that—having to do
with children’s health, their different vulnerability to danger in a workplace,
their inability to meaningfully consent to a contract, their possible
exploitation by adults, the opportunity costs to them and to society in terms
of education and social development. There are, of course, certain kinds of
work that can be managed, as with child actors. (Between takes, a tutor waits
in the trailer.) But Gingrich was talking about nine-year-old janitors. (On
Monday, he told the Washington Post
that he didn’t mean they’d work full time.) This is not just about arcane
regulations keeping a seventeen-year-old from helping out his mother, or
helping the teacher erase the blackboard. Child labor, unregulated, is a bad
thing, and laws that limit it are helpful. Haven’t we known that since Roosevelt—Theodore,
the Republican, not Franklin, the Democrat—was President?
Maybe we’ve forgotten. When, in debates, the Republican
candidates talk about how government should be kept as far away from the
workplace as possible, they are drawing a circle that excludes burdensome laws
of this kind. And the impulse is not abstract: as the Washington Post’s Rachel Weiner
noted in a follow-up to the Gingrich piece, there actually has been
an effort to roll back child-labor laws at a state level, even if “Gingrich’s
suggestion that children start working as early as age nine goes far beyond
what most other Republicans are proposing.” There are other areas, too, such as
criminal justice, in which there has been a rejection of the idea that children
deserve special protection. If the Republican electorate doesn’t recoil at
Gingrich for suggesting that American children be put to work, what influence
are we left with in persuading American companies, or our trading partners, not
to use child labor in cotton fields or chocolate plantations?
Interestingly, Weiner notes that Ron Paul, who approves of
almost nothing the federal government does, doesn’t like putting children to
work, either. Paul counts it as one of the wonders of capitalism that we have
done away with such things in this country; Gingrich looks at a landscape in
which children aren’t earners, and sees socialism. That is a telling
distinction and, again, why Gingrich’s comments speak to something truly
troubling. When did the consensus we have on the progress our country has made,
step by hard-earned step since its beginning, break down so thoroughly?
Gingrich’s comments made less news this weekend than the
super committee’s predestined failure to come up with a budget plan. For all
the talk of poor children not working, it turned out that the super-senators
and super-congressmen had barely even met. We have come to the point, somehow,
when grown men and women can’t do the jobs they were sent to Washington to do,
yet our candidates dream of sending children—other people’s children,
naturally—to school only to keep the halls clean.- Amy Davidson
1 comment:
he is stupid, i mean dumb, no i mean stupid , MOM!!!!
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