|
For months, our Governor and other governors and political leaders have been attacking organized labor and specifically unionized public sector workers. If labor unions have made missteps in the course of their history, it is nevertheless undeniable that they have been a great force for good in our society, playing an indispensable part in insuring that the benefits of our nation’s prosperity were widely shared, bringing a large percentage of what might have been thought of as America’s proletariat into the middle class. In the nineteen sixties, one in four workers had the protection of a union. By the early eighties after President Reagan destroyed the air-traffic controllers’ union, the proportion had dropped to one in five. Today it is one in eight.
Follow the decline of union membership and you will see a dramatic rise of economic inequality. In the 1980’s the wealthiest tenth of American households possessed about a third of the nation’s income. Today these have close to half. The wealth of the top one-thousandth of one percent of the wealthiest in our land has since 1980 quadrupled even as the wages of middle-class workers have stagnated, remained flat. Today more union members are government employees than are working in the private sector, where just one worker in fifteen is part of a union.
Union-busting has always been a goal of private business and the forces of capital in this country. If the worker is weak and isolated, owners can have their way with workers, keeping wages low, the workplace unpleasant or even dangerous, benefits nonexistent. Labor unions arose so that workers could protect themselves from the whims of owners and their managers, and the unions were quite effective, if imperfect, in doing this. Today wealth and those who serve the interests of wealth in this nation are laboring to break unions in the public sector and eliminate the right of workers to engage in collective bargaining. This is being done on the pretext of closing State budget gaps, but it is really what all anti-union activity has been about: the increase of the power of capital, organized money, by diminishing the power of workers to be organized labor. This is the precariousness of unorganized labor, plain to see in the course of history and even to this very day.
What do we understand to be the judgment of Jesus about workers’ unions? The question is, of course, anachronistic. There was no such thing as trade unionism in Jesus day. But ask the question with respect to the purpose of the union movement, which at its best is to promote and improve the quality of life for workers, and it is difficult to imagine Jesus as anything but a supporter of organized labor. The question is simply, “Is Jesus the partisan of the powerless?” Do you see any evidence in the Gospel stories of Jesus, that Jesus is ever on the side of wealth and privilege or ever not on the side of the poor and the disenfranchised? Is Jesus ever not on the side of human solidarity, this teacher who makes love of neighbor central not only for our relationship to one another but to God as well?
His followers are people who have come to see that the basis for all human judgments is how the least and the lesser are being treated. And because this is the case, I don’t see how we cannot be offended by the assault on workers who have united to promote and insure a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. If there are people in the labor movement who behave more like owners than workers, they condemn themselves and should be exposed. But this has nothing to do with the value of labor unions for workers and for our society, or the solidarity of Jesus with such movements for human dignity over the course of history and onward.
Blessings in your quest.
Jeffrey Eaton, Pastor
|