COMMENTARY | Former House Speaker and current GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich created quite a stir Monday with his comment that child labor laws in the United States are "truly stupid."
Gingrich claimed that current child labor laws are restricting low-income families from tapping all potential sources of income and proposed a radical revamping of the current system. While most of the public outrage will be toward his proposal to allow children as young as 9 to work 20 hours a week, the most alarming part of his statement is its thinly continuation of the current GOP poll leader's support of anti-union policies.
Gingrich characterized the removal of laws restricting the hours minors can work and the age at which they can start working the start of a "process of rising" that he claims will end the "culture of poverty in America." His claim that school children will be a cheaper labor source is true, but the creation of a new work force to displace another does not seem to be a sound starting position for economic development.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, minors younger than 16 can only work 18 hours a week. So aside from the 9- to 14-year-old work force Gingrich wants to create, adding two work hours to older teenagers' schedules wouldn't be a major change. But his plan to have them replace unionized janitors unveiled a shocking new potential stratagem for combating unions.
Gingrich proposed that public schools save money by firing union affiliated janitors and replacing them with school children under the supervision of a non-unionized "master janitor." The idea seems to rely on voters believing that janitors, whose mean income is below the poverty line for a family of four, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Health and Human Services, are overpaid and a burden on taxpayers; and that by extension, the unions who negotiate their contracts are a standing in the way of economic growth.
Gingrich, like much of the current Republican party, has been supportive of anti-union measures such as the recently overturned controversial Ohio anti-union law along with his statements in favor of the "union busting" efforts of the airline manufacturer Boeing Co. They ignore all that unions do to facilitate economic empowerment for teachers, policemen, firefighters, airplane factory workers, and even school janitors.
It remains to be seen if Newt Gingrich will call for children to take over other highly hazardous union-backed jobs that will funnel dollars away from Social Security and into private retirement investment firms, but making such an outlandish suggestion puts it firmly within the realm of possibility. Gingrich didn't misspeak when he said it would be a "process of rising," but the beneficiaries of this rise appear to be those who stand to gain from unions being disbanded-even if it means putting young children to work.
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