The Hill News

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) accused Newt Gingrich of wanting to stratify people by proposing that impoverished children work as janitors at their schools.

"People who are poor are not suffering from any kind of a work ethic," Clyburn said Wednesday on MSNBC. "I grew up pretty poor but I got up at 4 o'clock in the morning and delivered milk on a milk truck before going to school at 8:30 and I don't need Newt Gingrich to tell me to have a work ethic.

"What he's talking about is stratifying people. He's saying that the poor people in their schools ought to be the janitors in their schools so that the other people in the schools who aren't so poor can see them as their servants. That is what we get from what he is saying."

In arguing for his proposal during a Republican presidential debate on Monday, Gingrich described how his daughter worked at her church as a janitor to earn some money. Clyburn said that wasn't the same as working at a schoo! l.

"And to talk about what his daughter may have done," Clyburn continued. "His daughter was never a janitor in the school that he attended, and that to me is a double standard. And I understand what he is saying, and most African Americans understand what he is saying, and we are not going to stand for it."

Gingrich has argued that his proposal would give poor children a better work ethic and, in the process, help raise them out of poverty.