An Associated Press story on Switzerland's 150-year practice of forced child labor in the name of overcoming poverty has underscored the evil reality behind Newt Gingrich's recent comments on child labor. Gingirch declared that it’s not failing schools that trap kids in a cycle of poverty — it’s child labor laws,which are "truly stupid." Switzerland's program that forced impoverished children into obscene jobs and grisly working conditions, a program that, according to the AP article, ran from the early 1800s into the 1960s, is coming under new scrutiny and demands for compensation for the some 30,000 program participants still alive.
Foster families, and in some cases orphanages, were meant to provide the children with food and schooling in return for a small sum from the authorities. But in rural Switzerland, where machines didn't displace manual work until well into the 20th century, the children were just seen as cheap labor. Some authorities would hold public auctions where the bidder who asked the lowest fee for taking the children would win.
The program took children from families that could not afford them and put them to work on farms and in homes where they were often poorly cared for and abused. Their labor is seen as a part of the effort that sustained the Swiss agrarian economy even as banking and trade drew it into the 20th century.
No doubt Gingrich would embrace the use of the program to advance a social agenda:
Officially, children were only taken away from parents who were too poor to properly care for them. In practice, historians say, authorities also targeted the children of single mothers and others whom they considered to have fallen into "moral destitution."
One Swiss lawmaker describes the prevailing attitude of the time in a way that mirrors some of today's political thinking in the U.S.:
Authorities at the time regarded the children as an economic problem, not individuals in need of protection, said Jacqueline Fehr, a lawmaker with the Social Democratic Party who has campaigned on behalf of victims.
With child poverty at an all-time high, with politicians cynically calling for austerity measures while demanding economic solutions for problems requiring compassion and care, the lessons of history, as any true historian will tell you, should not be forgotten.
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