Newt Gingrich has floated the idea that Child Labor laws should be scrapped so that under-privileged school age children could get janitorial jobs at their school in order to learn a work ethic that they cannot achieve because “there are no role models in their poor housing project environments”. To some degree I agree with Newt, but he’s got it backwards. The best way for poor inner city school age kids to gain that valuable “work ethic”, so much the ethos of the “American Way of Life ,is to employ them not as $3.15 an hour janitors (minimum wage laws do not apply here), but as $30,000 per hour “Historians” and “Advisors” to huge corporations like Freddy Mac, BP oil, and Bank of America. That way they’d really get a taste of what is like to be very rich and over privileged without having to get your hands dirty or pay much in the way of taxes. They could write papers for their wages like “Why I think that knowingly selling worthless bonds to customers is a bad idea”, or “Why ignoring basic safety regulations might cause huge oil spills”, or “Why telling lies about the financial health of your company might not be such a good idea”. These jobs are well within the capabilities of a fourth or fifth grader. With a $30,000 per hour salary could, it would really give them something to aspire to let alone help get them out of poverty.
Meanwhile I would also suggest that lobbyists, politicians, and corporate executives could work as school janitors for sub-minimum wages since in their gated community housing environment they aren’t exposed to unemployed people or real working people who can’t even make poverty level wages.
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