I have been thinking and praying for weeks about a Labor Day post
There is so much that is broken in our current model of labor and commerce it's hard to know where to begin.
As I turn my thoughts to work and labor, what wells up in me are the too many conversations with friends struggling to provide for their families, always on the edge of financial disaster, always on the brink of homelessness.
For decades the plight of low wage workers has become increasingly grim. It was once possible to provide a reasonable life for an entire family on one low-wage income. Now, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, a minimum wage worker working full-time could not afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.
The average minimum wage worker must work nearly 97 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom rental home or 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom rental home at the average fair market rent. In no state can a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the Fair Market Rent.
There was a housing crisis before the pandemic. Now, housing experts forecast a coming housing ‘apocalypse’ as eviction bans and unemployment benefits expire.
The homelessness of the working poor is personal to me. My own family was functionally homeless repeatedly during my high school years.
Not familiar with the term "functionally homeless"?
Most of the homeless in the US are not sleeping on the streets. Rather, they’re sleeping on couches in friend’s apartments, or in extra bedrooms, or in other makeshift arrangements.
For me, that meant three months in a cold attic bedroom with my grandmother, in the household of a couple we didn’t know, from a church we’d never attended, in an unfamiliar school district.
It meant the first three months of my senior year on a cot in the bedroom of a friend and her younger sister, then two months in a half-rehabbed cottage with no heat or plumbing, in yet another school district, with my school clothes and belongings in storage.
In my home state of New York, for a kid with a gift for standardized tests, there were avenues out: grants, scholarships, access to college. I learned much about God’s grace and the kindness of strangers during those hard days. But those experiences also lit a flame of anger that flares when I hear people talk about the poor with condescension, or suggest that if only “those people” would arrange things more wisely, work a little harder, all would be well.
No.
Those people are already working harder than you might imagine, struggling to piece together lives and home with little help from a broken economic system.
I find myself tearing up as I say thank you to grocery store workers who wear masks all day, trying to follow safety protocols, trying to manage their own sense of risk and discomfort, while paid not enough to live on.
I find myself staring into space after calls from friends who are trying to juggle children, minimum wage jobs, loss of free lunches, escalating tensions and violence in urban neighborhoods.
The inequities are growing so quickly there appears no remedy.
Need some statistics?
Grapple with these from the Economic Policy Institute:
- Among S&P 500 firms nearly 80 percent now pay their CEO more than 100 times their median worker. Nearly 10 percent had median pay below the poverty line for a family of four.
- At the 50 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years to earn what their CEO makes in just one.
- Median CEO pay at these 50 off-the-charts firms last year averaged $15.9 million.
- Median worker pay at the same 50 firms averaged just $10,027.
Throw into the mix escalating wage theft: the callous refusal to pay wages when employees are let go or forced to work overtime. I wrote about this back in 2016, calling attention to then-candidate Donald Trump’s notoriety in withholding workers’ wages. Since his presidency began, the problem has grown worse:
The opening months of the Trump Administration were full of bad news for low-wage workers. Among other things, the Administration announced it would abandon rules that sought to ensure that service workers would get their tips, help workers more easily recover minimum and overtime wages from employers . . . It also put in place a hiring freeze that reduced the staff of the federal agency tasked with protecting workers’ wages.The pandemic has brought to light the plight of low-wage workers in industries where abuse and exploitation are rampant. Wage theft is part of the problem. Add lack of medical care, unsafe working conditions, retribution when they try to speak out.
Examples? The laundry industry, the meat packing industry, aqriculture, ranching, hospitality. That's just a start.
Followers of Christ should be the first and loudest in insisting any candidate for public office offer plans to address the needs of the working poor.
Yet I’ve heard from Christian friends that politicians concerned for the poor are socialists.
That ideas to address economic inequity are unbiblical.
That our current capitalist model is God-ordained and anyone who questions it is heretical.
I find myself dumbfounded, and overwhelmed by the enormity of theological error.
Here’s what I know for sure:
- The laborer is worthy of his or her pay.
- God’s preferred economic model provides regular recalibration to restore equality.
- Any system that tramples poor workers is an affront to God.
The Porter’s Gate released a new album this week; Justice Songs. One of the first, The Zaccheus Song, is a reminder that there are immediate economic implications to a decision to follow Christ.
Zaccheus, a tax collector, made his wealth defrauding the poor. After his encounter with Jesus, he immediately determined to set that right.
Would that all followers of Christ would feel that same determination. What a witness that would be to the poor, struggling workers of this world.
The early church spread quickly with just such a witness:
Justin Martyr, in one of the earliest histories of the church, wrote:
We who used to value the acquisition of wealth and possessions more than anything else now bring what we have into a common fund and share it with anyone who needs it.
Clement, describing the change visible in any person who took on the name of “Christian,” noted:
He impoverishes himself out of love, so that he is certain he may never overlook a brother in need, especially if he knows he can bear poverty better than his brother. He likewise considers the pain of another as his own pain. And if he suffers any hardship because of having given out of his own poverty, he does not complain.
Clement, like the others who chose to live the resurrection, put a high value on love: your pain is my pain. Your poverty is my poverty. Your illness is my illness.
In Philippians 2, Paul says “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Imagine that as a prescription for our public policy, for our vote in November.
We are a very long way from any hint of that.
I've written in the past about lament, or "nacham": grieve, be sorry, regret, think again, console, be comforted, have compassion.
Today, Labor Day 2020, join in me in lament of the grave injustices that confront so many workers, here in the US and around the globe.
And in prayer that God's people will rise up as agents of justice and restoration.
