Tell Newt: “You’re Fired!”

UPDATE December 9: Like the "Tell Newt He's Fired" Facebook page.

UPDATE December 5: Newt has teamed up with The Donald (as in Trump) to set up an apprentice program for some of these “really poor children” with “nobody around them who works.” Guess The Newt and The Donald never met the working poor.

UPDATE December 1: On November 18, Newt Gingrich called child labor laws “stupid” and said he wants to fire union workers and hire kids to clean schools. Now he's gone further, saying his plan is the only way to teach poor children how to earn money in ways that are not “illegal.”

Here's more:

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods, have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday.”

Man, that Gingrich is a real big thinker. Poor kids don’t know anything about making money legally. And let's fire janitors and hire their kids instead. Let's have children as young as nine years old doing hard manual labor cleaning up after their more fortunate classmates. Why should they be playing or doing home work when they could be sanitizing toilets, handling hazardous cleaning chemicals, and scrubbing floors hunched over a mop for hours? 

Please let Newt Gingrich know that his "ideas" are outrageous — tell him "You're Fired," and then let your family and others know exactly what kind of hogwash Gingrich is proposing.

Sign the letter:

Dear Newt,

Our country outlawed child labor. Almost a hundred years later, in the middle of the worst unemployment crisis in decades, you want to bring it back. Seriously?

Doing janitorial work in a school entails sanitizing toilets, handling hazardous cleaning chemicals, and scrubbing floors hunched over a mop for hours. It's hard to imagine a nine-year old doing any of those tasks. Come on.

The US outlawed child labor because it denied children the chance at a real education and allowed employers to exploit children — and because children were often injured or killed on the job. That's why labor unions fought to pass laws outlawing child labor and protecting all workers.

And the people you want to fire and replace with kids? A lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids' heads, food on the table, and provides them with health care and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty. Firing someone's mom and hiring the kid for less money isn't exactly the "process of rising." It is, in fact, the process of falling. It is the process of exploiting and destroying working families. The fact that you don't get that makes you not only out of touch, but utterly unqualified to serve in any elected position, let alone President of the United States. Newt, "You're Fired!"

Count me in as one more person who thinks you and your ideas are vicious and wrong.
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