Thou shalt not rob the workers of their jobs -- or their rest.
Every day, I receive at least one Email from a clergyperson or lay leader whose synagogue, church, or mosque is in serious financial trouble – because the congregants are hurting. Some have lost jobs, others are frightened. Some are working harder and longer to “protect”” their jobs, and have no time left over for community or God.
It’s not “just” anecdotes, of course; the national numbers bear this out, and the anecdotes put flesh and blood upon the numbers. The official unemployment rate is now over 10% — the worst since before World War II.
If you include those would-be workers who have been turned down for jobs so often that they have given up looking, the unemployment rate in the USA is over 17%.
One family of every four has suffered a job loss in the last year. These losses damage everything — nutritious food, adequate health care, pursuing an education, even religious life — as thousands of synagogues, churches, and mosques are finding when their congregants’ contributions of money and time dry up. And the job losses continue.
I have been using the official word for this — unemployment. But that sounds like somemebody stubbing their toe on the way to the job and ending up, by accident, “un”employed. In actuality, someone’s decisions destroyed those jobs. DISemployment is a more honest word.
But official Washington (including President Obama) and official Big Business don’t care.
They are operating according to a bitterly sarcastic teaching by the poet Carl Sandburg:
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Jobs are property?
No, nix, nah, nah.
And so they boast about the “recovery” of banks and stock prices while hundreds of thousands continue to lose their jobs.
This policy violates the most basic teachings of all religious and spiritual traditions about the profound value of decent work, decent livelihood, and decent time for community and Spirit.
America needs full employment at living wages with livable hours and free time for family, neighborhood, civic engagement, and spiritual life.
There are two ways to get there. Both make sense. Both are necessary:
A massive public-works program paying living wages to rebuild the rotting infrastructure of American life. That means not just school buildings but skilled teachers, not just subsidies for super-fast and energy-efficient railroads but subsidies for art and music and neighborhood festivals, not just Internet-wiring every city but teaching all Americans how to use it effectively.
Sharing the work and sharing free time. “High productivity” means fewer workers can produce more output. This is not “good” in itself, but only if it is used to benefit society as a whole. Higher wages and salaries, and more free time, is where most of the benefit should go.
Since the 1980s, almost all of it has gone instead into higher profits for big corporations. Wages and salaries have stagnated - and now are declining. Free time has diminished.
What we need now are laws pegging the work week at 30 or 35 hours, forbidding compulsory overtime, and limiting voluntary overtime (perhaps requiring that employers pay into a special “free time” social fund for overtime, but not entice workers into overworking with higher per-hour pay).
These “economic” issues are also, even more deeply, spiritual issues. It is spiritually crushing not to be allowed to work, thereby contributing to the social good and meeting one’s own needs as well. It is spiritually crushing to have no time to rest, to play, to visit neighbors, to shape a loving family, to pray and meditate.
The single mother trying desperately to hold three minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent and buy food shares this need for a balanced life with the $500,000-a-year lawyer who is forced to work 80 billable hours a week in order to stay in the firm.
Without this sacred balance of work for all, decent livelihood for all, and rest for all, our society becomes pathological. Drugs, disemployment, depression, despair take over — and violence, overseas with bombs and at home with guns.
With this sacred balance, we can create a society of mature and balanced human beings — God willing, inshallah, im yirtzeh hashem.
How do we make this change? The present arrangement in which almost all the benefits of increased productivity flow into the pockets of a few very large corporations is based on their political power. (For a powerful description of how this works in regard to banks and home-ownership, read the Bill Moyers Journal, “How Wall Street Controls Washington — and America,” at —
http://www.theshalomcenter.org/node/1587 )
So there needs to be another kind of power — the empowerment of the grass roots. Our religious communities could and should be at the heart of this, because that is where the value of a balanced life with free time for family, neighborhood, and the Spirit is most strongly held. Together with our labor unions, they should be initiating coalitions that include neighborhood associations, PTA’s, and citizen-volunteer groups; teachers, social workers, and similar professional groups; and wise business-people.
Just as individuals need to weave together a life in which work, income, and rest all have a part, so we need to weave together these different strands of our society into a community of sharing.
How do we begin? Below this article, add your own comment so we can have a conversation with each other. Together, let’s see what we can stir into action.
With blessings that we come to share worthy work, a decent income, and time for community and spirit —
Arthur
Comments
3 comments postedPerhaps if we use the most ancient covenant of right relationship of all, the 10 commandments, we would get somewhere.
Since God freed us from bondage to all civilizations and their philosophies of life
We shouldn’t worship any other gods or oppress ourselves with other philosophies.
We shouldn’t make for ourselves any idols to manipulate for our own purposes
We shouldn’t invoke our religions in order to oppress others
We should take a Sabbath rest!
Then we’ll have time and desire to honor our parents and our traditions, instead of turning to other philosophies
We won’t need to kill anyone in order to sustain those other philosophies
We won’t need to commit adultery or destroy other relationships in order to build up our own identity.
We won’t have to steal if we live this way.
We won’t have to bear false witness against our neighbors if we live this way, because …
… we won’t covet anything that belongs to our neighbor - their oil or anything - if we live this way.
Then there will be enough work for all, and no neighbor will be after your job, or will be looking for ways to take your resources and those things you need to sustain life. Of course, all this only works if all are allowed to live in their God-given freedom from bondage to any civilization’s philosophical or economic needs.
Of course, if God freed one people from slavery to a civilization once before, maybe he’ll do it again! But it won’t be pretty.
Rev. Steve Holton
Of course I am sympathetic and empathetic to this community. However, I would like to offer an additonal perspective. I agree that it is the role of the prophetic voices in the universe to scream “ouch,” “not fair,” “foul,” “t good enough,”even “‘m outraged.” However most heads of state , or community, or temple or mosque or church are not those prophetic voices.
THESE LEADERS ARE RESPOSIBLE, though not entirely, for the new reality which must come as a fix to these problems. Many communities, Palestinians, Tibeteans, Mexicans, have found, Kurds, Irtaquis, Afganis, ad infinitum, that because of their new world and the truely new world reality, their lifestyles can no longer support their family. And their lessons learned in the past life experience, no longer work in the new real world. It is LEADERS who are responsible to lead. To teach a new relaity that both recuces needs and makes desires lead to mainfesation. It is absolutely amazing that there are so many that beleive that work equals life support. That is a basic flaw that we have been fooled into accepting as a working hypothesis in these days. In an age where we can get medicines from our own patio, where foods, and I mean slow food, organic, high quality can be bought with enough to share, ON FOOD STAMPS, where the secret to getting help , is living in a comunity,creating communities, that help each other. Where living alone instead of community and communally, seems to be the perferred way to suffer, I propose that our dear Rabbis, who feel our pain , should be teaching the way to freedom not only bemoaning the acts of the Pharoahs. I dont want to sound too Christian Scientific, but prayer works. Music works, Sunlight works. But only if the priestly part supports this. That means that the impraetuer of blessings, the effort must support the hopeful heart, and the acts of the desirer. This is earth based religion, meets the holy ghost. And this is the keys to treasury of loving kindness. If we reject a community based on traditionnal rabinical persciption, which most of us do in fact as a lifestyle choice, then we must replace it with another balance life of work as man in the image and Godliness in the form of man.
So to summarize succintly, It is not enough for leaders to complain and to blame and to empathize, they must lead and bring hope and teach A WAY to live in health and sanctity. Then us working slobs can do our part. This is in the forlmula of Cohanim, Levi and Israel.
Dear Arthur and Shalom Centre,
I write from the UK where we have the pleasure and honour of Reb Zalman and Eve Shecheter-Shalomi visiting. This afternoon he will be talking about the Alliance of Religions and Conservation Conference this past week at Windsor Castle.
On Shabbat, we were speaking about the developing noosphere - Teilhard de Chardin’s telling of the spreading of consciousness throughout our planet and Reb Zalman saw the internet as providing the mechanism for this.
Yesterday, also, was the Presentation in London of C.G. Jung’s Red Book, the astonishing ‘private’ work in which he laid the foundations for his life’s work.
At present, Uri Avnery is writing about Obama’s betrayal of peace in the Middle East - his and Hilary Clinton’s backing of PrimeMinister Netanyahu and abandonment of the Palestinians by backing down on his demand for an end to Settlement building.
And here you are writing about the essential need for an American New Green Deal for jobs and employment -though I know that you would see the importance of this being a Global initiative.
Of course, all these issues are intertwined. www.earthcharter.org is a global Declaration of Principles for a just, sustainable and peaceful world. It is scarcely known in the UK, where I am working to introduce it and Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp in Holland is also very much involved.
The faith communities can give leadership here, also.
I do hope we can all stay in touch and develop our global links. Thanks for all that you, and the Shalom Center and the Jews in USA who support you are doing. We have to work hard, and fast, and smartly. This is a time of great opportunity.
Jeffrey Newman