A Race to the Bottom

I am not referring to the GOP presidential race, though the description is apt, but instead I am referring to the current push to legalize child labor. This despite the fact there are so many adults who are out of work.

Well, the neoliberal ideal is to have all countries compete with one another in order to get jobs, and the secret to this is to lower the standards to the point that the entire twentieth and even nineteenth centuries are repealed.

Slavery is the ultimate goal of the neolibs, but they haven't thought about the fact that if nobody has any money to buy, their beloved rich won't have anything, either.

The slippery slope on child labor has intersected with the presidential campaign trail, too. Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government last November, Newt Gingrich promoted quasi-vocational programs for poor school children, to offer “work experience in the cafeteria, in the school library, in the front office.” Besides, he said, “middle-class kids do it routinely. We should give poor kids the same chance to pursue happiness.”

This bootstraps ideology is neither novel nor limited to the Republican Party. The meme of the shiftless, dependency-prone poor shaped the fictive image of Reagan’s “welfare queen.” It also formed a pillar of the Clinton administration’s welfare reforms, which downplayed structural social barriers and aimed to “train” poor people of color through “welfare-to-work” labor programs.

Gingrich’s philosophy on child labor complements Dickensian statements about child welfare during his tenure as House Speaker; he suggested placing children of dysfunctional parents in orphanages, removing them from their parents’ negative influences.