Let's set aside for a moment the overt racism that brought cheers of approval for Newt Gingrich during his exchange with Juan Williams at last Monday's latest installment of the Republican Clown Show.
Yes, Newt's doubling down on his "Black children would be better served learning something more suited to their station in life... like mopping floors" moment was jaw droppingly ignorant, and racist ... but should we expect any more from a man who has characterized the President as a food stamp peddling, Kenyan anti-colonialist? Newt staked out his ground as far as race is concerned a long time ago and has firmly planted himself in the Antebellum South he so reveres.
But lying just beneath the surface of the Historian and Chief's racially charged comment was another right-wing philosophy as pernicious and persistent... a disdain and disrespect for those who earn their living with their hands, the strength of their backs, or the sweat of their brows.
While much of the focus on just how out of touch Republicans are with average working people has been aimed at Willard Romney and his numerous gaffs and missteps in attempting to relate to "regular folks," Newt has chosen to run with a familiar and frequent right-wing theme... "your job is so insignificant, a child could replace you."
The most obvious example of this theme can be seen every time the immigration debate heats up and some ridiculous and draconian legislation is passed in attempts to drive out as many Brown people as possible. Out of one side of the right-wing mouths come cries about "illegal immigrants stealing" jobs .... out of the other, come suggestions to replace every agricultural worker, landscaper, child-care provider, restaurant worker etc. with some teenager on summer break or looking for part-time work after school. Because we all know that if only the pesky immigrants would leave their meaningless dead end jobs, the youth of America would line up to pick tomatoes or mow lawns like in the good old days.
But more on that later.
First let's deconstruct Professor Newt's thesis from the debate.
WILLIAMS: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?
GINGRICH: No. I don’t see that.
(APPLAUSE)
You know, my daughter, Jackie, who’s sitting back there, Jackie Cushman, reminded me that her first job was at First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Georgia, doing janitorial work at 13. And she liked earning the money. She liked learning that if you worked, you got paid. She liked being in charge of her own money, and she thought it was a good start. I had a young man in New Hampshire who walked up to me. I’ve written two newsletters now about this topic. I’ve had over 50 people write me about the jobs they got at 11, 12, 13 years of age....
... New York City pays their janitors an absurd amount of money because of the union. You could take one janitor and hire 30-some kids to work in the school for the price of one janitor, and those 30 kids would be a lot less likely to drop out. They would actually have money in their pocket. They’d learn to show up for work. They could do light janitorial duty..
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Of course this wouldn't be Newt without the requisite amount of exaggeration, misinformation and downright lies.... he is a genius academic after all.
So lets look at some actual factual data about NY City School System maintenance workers.
Let’s set the record straight and keeping in mind the cost of living is relatively higher in New York City then the rest of the nation. For lower-level custodial positions in schools according to collective bargaining agreements, in descending order of skills required, they are:
Engineer (responsible for boilers that require special training): $23.38 per hour, equivalent to $48,630 for a full year.
Fireman (runs the boilers): $20.68 per hour, or $43,014 for a full year.
Handyman: $17.68 per hour, or $36,774 for a full year.
Cleaner: $15.77 per hour, or $32,801 for a full year. (First- and second-year employees are paid below the standard rate; in year three, it goes up to the standard rate of $18.13 an hour.)
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OK, so it's not really 30 kids who could replace one janitor, as Dr. Newton claims... but more like two, (if you paid them NY minimum wage)... Unless of course he believes that 11, 12, and 13 year olds could be running boilers, doing plant maintenance, or repair broken equipment.
Burrowing down a little deeper, the true disdain for working class people is evident. Newt honestly believes that the work done by those who maintain the NYC school system is so elemental and simple that even a child of 11 or 12 could do it.
This is the same disdain shown by Willard when he talks about the "creative destruction" of thousands of jobs for the enrichment of his wealthy clients. When he shuttered factories, machine shops, and steel mills, all with good paying blue collar jobs, to replace them with low paying sales jobs at Sports Authority or Staples, or delivery jobs at Dominos, it's all a wash in Romney's mind because any job that doesn't involve sitting at a desk, shuffling money around, is essentially the same and interchangeable
Perhaps nowhere is the "your job is so meaningless, a child could replace you" attitude more prevalent than with the Republican reaction to our broken immigration system.
Those on the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, the most vulnerable to abuse, are consistently told that their labor is essentially worthless and could easily be done by children.
The Center for Immigration Studies, a right wing think-tank dedicated to ending both legal and unauthorized immigration in fact authored a "study" to examine just how immigrants were "stealing" jobs from American youth.
Now, as even the most casual observer of American immigration politics knows, businesses have repeatedly argued that there simply are no or not enough unskilled workers available. This argument is made by the Chamber of Commerce, the Hotel and Restaurant Association, the Business Roundtable and a host of other businesses.
But it is very difficult to reconcile the decline in teen employment with the contention that simply no seasonal workers are available to fill jobs that require relatively modest levels of education. One would think that if seasonal workers were really in short supply, the share of teenagers in the labor market would actually be increasing. But that’s exactly the opposite of what’s been happening. It’s been falling and quite dramatically.
Now, perhaps the needs of seasonal employers have changed in some fundamental way that teenagers can no longer satisfy. But it’s hard to see what changes have taken place since the early 1990s or even since the 2000 in the nature of seasonal food service, cleaning, retail, construction, child care and other jobs traditionally done by teenagers.
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Of course CIS doesn't recognize that many of these jobs "traditionally done by teenagers" are now being filled with older workers trying to make ends meet after having their previous jobs "creatively destroyed" by vampire capitalists. ... but that's not the point.
The point is that these jobs, that feed families, pay bills, and are essential to our economy are viewed by the Right as nothing more than temporary employment to be done by children.
Professional child care for working families cannot be replaced with part-time teenage babysitters any more than teens can replace skilled agricultural workers, or construction workers. But in the right-wing mind, two birds can be killed with one stone. Immigrants can be denied work, and their jobs, so worthless and elemental, can be filled with unskilled children
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When anti-immigrant measures actually accomplish their goals, and immigrant workers flee, inevitable worker shortages result ... the Right-Wing answer: bring in the kids.... and if they're black and poor even better.
As a solution to the black unemployment problem, Davis suggested shipping inner-city black youth out to farms, while simultaneously deporting the illegal immigrants who are working there.
The comments were confirmed by several sources who attended a Feb. 20th endorsement interview with Davis:
"We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities. Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work."
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Of course these kind of experiments inevitably fail because no matter how unimportant, or menial, Republicans believe working peoples jobs are, in reality many take special skills and years to learn. ... as Alabama found out the hard way when it passed it's strict anti-immigrant laws.
Addressing what supporters of the law referred to as a temporary labor shortage linked to the crackdown, the Bentley administration announced a program last week to use a state labor website to let citizens sign up for jobs in agriculture and other industries affected by a loss of workers.
"There are people today who want these jobs," Bentley said in announcing the program. "I think it is almost insulting to say people in Alabama won't do a hard day's work for a decent day's pay."
That may be true, but Spencer said he hasn't been able to find unemployed people who would work quickly enough or long enough to make the decent money that Bentley talked about.
A four-person crew of immigrant workers can pick and box more than 250 crates of tomatoes in a day, Spencer said, or enough for each person on the crew to earn about $150 at the height of the harvest.
A 25-person team of citizens recently picked and processed about 200 boxes in a day, he said, earning each member only $24...
...Spencer said he is ready to give up trying to find unemployed citizens to help with the harvest.
"If I saw some workability in it I wouldn't want to stop. But I don't see any change for these unemployed to replace the Hispanics," he said.
In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal urged farmers to hire people on probation to work in the fields after a law similar to Alabama's was blamed for a shortage of agricultural workers there. An informal survey there showed a shortage of more than 11,000 farmers there during the spring and summer harvest.
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But this story is not about native workers vs undocumented workers. It's about trying to replace skilled, experienced, agricultural workers with unemployed workers from all walks of life without any prior experience. ...blue collar workers are not just interchangeable cogs in a machine that can be swapped in and out at the whim of Right Wing .
Yet that is the common thread that runs through all these stories. From Professor Gingrich's 11 year old janitor, thru Willard's Dominos delivery job is the same as a union steelworkers job, to Alabama's undocumented agricultural workers who leaders believed could be replaced by anyone.... the message is the same... your job is meaningless to us. You're dispensable ... you could be replaced by a child.
