Engaging Our 2nd Principle: Let Justice Roll

Martha Hodges - 2006-11-05

Yahweh, the god of the Israelites, spoke to his people through the voice of the prophet Amos, saying, “I despise your festivals and your sacrifices. Rather, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Worship, the expression of awe and love for god, was meaningless, a travesty, preached Amos, unless it was backed up by acts or righteousness, acts of justice making.

Our own Unitarian Universalist prophets agree. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say…” Former UUA president William Schulz wrote, “Spirituality is the inspiration for all politics which redeems. For once I have looked on the abundance of creation, I cannot rest while others, caught up in its flaws, are deprived of the view.” And my own former minister, Richard Gilbert, writes, “To refuse to act in life is to abdicate our role as spiritual and moral beings. There is a vacuum in religious life when we fail to act out our values. We are then incomplete people; our growth is stifled; our lives found wanting. The spiritual impulse, far from being a check on social action, should be a spur.”

In my former life, I taught a service learning course in which college undergraduates taught basic literacy skills to the dining workers and custodians and grounds workers who cooked their meals, cleaned their classrooms and kept their campus beautiful and safe for them. The students saw these workers all around them every day and yet, for the most part, they didn’t see them. One purpose of this course was to open the students’ eyes to the daily realities of these workers who earned minimum wage, or close to it. People who often began work at 6 AM, worked for eight hours, grabbed a quick bite to eat and then went to another part-time low-wage job. People who had to live twenty or thirty miles from work because they couldn’t afford to live closer to town, often in dilapidated mobile homes or poorly maintained houses they could not afford to keep heated in the New York winters. People who bought their children’s clothes at the Salvation Army, who were eligible for food stamps but were mostly too proud to apply for them, people who made use of free food pantries and stood in line for free government cheese.

This job brought with it many frustrations. One of them was that I felt constrained in that academic setting, unable to ask these students to reflect at the deepest level about why they should care… Why did it matter if these workers struggled to feed and clothe and educate their kids, to get them dental care and decent after-school care? I felt unable to ask these questions because these are fundamentally religious questions. “Justice is love operating at a distance,” said theologian Joseph Sittler. How do you talk with a classroom of privileged twenty-year-old biology or design student about an ethic of love without straying into the dangerous territory of proselytizing? So here I am, talking to you instead.

We Unitarian Universalists covenant in our second principle to “affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.” We affirm the practice of compassion because, as Unitarian Universalists, we see the unity of all beings, the bonds that relate us as members of the human family from which no one is excluded. As people of compassion, we cannot stand by while some of us suffer, while some of us go hungry while others have a surfeit of luxury. And as seekers of equity, we are called to work to establish justice in the world – justice as we are each given to understand it.

Next Tuesday, we have an opportunity to put this faith into practice. It is, of course, possible to disagree with what I am about to say and still be a compassionate person who lives his or her faith through committed actions for equity and justice. I claim no unique access to the truth. But this is how I see it:

On Tuesday, we have the opportunity to raise the state minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.85. I am going to vote yes on State Issue 2 which will amend the Ohio Constitution to establish a new minimum wage and to continue to raise it as necessary to keep pace with inflation. Polls show that a majority of Ohioans, 73%, approve of this amendment, yet I do not want to assume that there is unanimity in this congregation on this issue. I’m aware that some people believe that such a change will be inflationary and will actually increase unemployment or drive businesses out of existence, even though studies of other states with minimum wages exceeding the federal minimum of $5.15 have shown that they actually enjoy economic improvement in small business and retail job growth. Higher wages are good for the economy.

I’m aware that others, including the League of Women Voters, feel that this is an issue for our legislators to decide rather than a constitutional matter. The problem is, our legislators don’t seem inclined to act on this. More importantly to me, a living wage is a justice issue, not a political issue. It should not be subject to pressures exerted by business interests or to the vagaries of political or market influences.

Ohio’s minimum wage has not been raised in ten years. Ohio is the only state with two major cities, Cleveland and Cincinnati, that are among the ten poorest cities nationwide. Despite this, unemployment rates remain disproportionately low. This means that Ohio, as you would expect with such a low minimum wage, has more than its share of the working poor. Thousands of Ohioans are working but living in poverty.

Nationwide, the real value, that is, the purchasing power, of the minimum wage is lower than at any time in the past fifty years. To equal its purchasing power in 1968, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $9.12 an hour. That seems pretty hard to argue with.

Yet there seems to be a subtle and pervasive prejudice against the poor that encourages placing the blame for their condition directly or indirectly on the shoulders of the poor themselves. In one of its more sophisticated forms, this prejudice appears in the proposal that so-called low-skilled workers simply need training in technological skills that are more valued in our current economy. The unspoken assumption is that their supposed lack of skills can be attributed to laziness or lack of ambition on the part of workers.

There are at least two problems with this line of reasoning. First of all, to call child care workers, nurse’s aides and food preparers and servers unskilled is simply wrong. Take it from someone who has worked as both a waitress and a retail clerk – these jobs require organization and good memory and, more importantly, social skills. Dealing with the public, especially under pressure, requires special gifts to do well. Secondly, retraining low-wage workers to be computer programmers won’t help because we will always need food servers, retail clerks, daycare workers and custodians. Someone will always need to do these jobs. We need to revise our understanding of what makes a job a good job or a bad job. It’s not the content of the work, but the pay and the respect that it accrues that ultimately determine how desirable a job is.

In its less subtle form, this prejudice against the poor causes a deep sense of shame in those who are exploited. Instead of blaming a socioeconomic system that depends on oppressing minorities, women, immigrants and the undereducated, we blame its victims and they, in turn, internalize this sense of failure. To do otherwise would be to abandon a myth that is foundational to our American identity: the myth that this is a land of equal opportunity in which hard work is always and inevitably rewarded by money, promotion, status and upward mobility for our children. The reality is quite different. No one works harder and receives less reward than the working poor.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the legacy of poverty that locks generations into futures of struggle and defeat. I remember a custodian that I worked with in my previous job telling about her son’s hopes to become a veterinarian. As the child of a university employee, he would be entitled to attend college at reduced tuition, but, for this family, it would still be out of reach.

This woman, Jeanie, admitted with a breaking voice that her son’s dream would not come true. Our fate is largely determined by the socioeconomic status of our parents, like it or not. From the kind of prenatal care we receive, to the amount and quality of medical care we get as babies, the nutritional value of the food we eat, the presence of books and reading in our homes, the tacit expectations of our teachers and the size of our classrooms, the presence or absence of hope and confidence in the future and our sense of personal empowerment – these are all determinants of what we will do with our lives and what will happen to our children’s lives.

But to talk about this requires us to question the validity of the work ethic and the American Dream. For the middle class, it requires us to question the system that has rewarded us. Perhaps this is why so few politicians ever talk about economic injustice – the conditions that make up a deep form of moral corruption that pervades our society. We cannot be whole as a nation until we are willing to address these issues of class.

The minimum wage issue is a vital step toward equity, but it is no panacea. Economic justice may be approached through tax credits, health care reform, childcare subsidies, affordable housing, unions and better enforced labor laws, and fairer immigration policies, to name just a few. If our society is not to become even more divided, we have no choice. If our society is to be guided by ideals of compassion, equity and justice rather than by greed, self-interest and the will to dominate others, we have no choice.

Theodore Parker, our nineteenth century Unitarian preacher and reformer, made this claim that was quoted by and often attributed to Martin Luther King: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is a beautiful image but, despite my desire to believe it, I have always doubted its truth. Dick Gilbert adds this commentary: “The bending is not automatic, nor is it inexorable. It is dependent on people who feel compassion, equity and justice as imperatives of their faith.”

This I can and do believe. Ours is that faith; we are those people.