Unified We Are a Force

How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America's Inequalities

Joerg Rieger, Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780827238596
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

The American dream of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is no longer possible, if it ever was. Most of us live paycheck-to-paycheck, and inequality has become one of the greatest problems facing our country. Working people and people of faith have the power to change this-but only when we get unified!

In this practical and theological handbook for justice, renowned theologian Joerg Rieger and his wife, community and labor activist Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, help the working majority (the 99% of us) understand what is happening and how we can make a difference. Discover how our faith is deeply connected with our work. Find out how to organize people and build power and what our different faith traditions can contribute. Learn from case studies where these principles have been used successfully-and how we can use them. Develop "deep solidarity" as a way to forge unity while employing our differences for the common good.

Basic Issues

Work and Labor: Why Should Anybody Care?

Despite the fact that “hard work” is still officially considered the way to success and that virtually all of us have to work for a living, work and labor matter surprisingly little these days. This is true in almost all areas of life, including economics, politics, and even religion. Moreover, this is true across the ideological spectrum, with few exceptions.

In the worlds of economics and business, the focus is on portfolios and the value of stocks rather than on work and workers. Both the law and the prevalent business logic dictate that the interest of stockholders trumps the interest of workers. The value of companies is decided on the basis of profit with little regard for the treatment or the happiness of workers. The business pages of the newspapers may report economic productivity gains in broad strokes but rarely report what is happening at the workplace either. In our experience, the media often refuse to cover problems and abuses at the workplace even when these matters are brought to their attention by esteemed representatives of the community. Yet what if economics is not primarily about money and stocks but about work, who does it, how it gets done, and who benefits from it?1

In the world of politics and power the focus is on those who can finance campaigns and who belong to the networks of power that are able to determine what is to be done, rather than on those whose work and whose taxes make politics possible. Elections are won by talking about wedge issues like religion, guns, and sexuality. Campaigns rarely include the topic of work, and even the more progressive politicians are, for the most part, surprisingly silent on the topic. In addition, hundreds of thousands if not millions of working people are actively kept away from the polls by Voter ID laws and other hurdles such as long lines at the polls in minority neighborhoods, spread of misinformation, and sometimes even intimidation. As a result, many working people are deprived of a major part of their ability to participate in democratic politics. What if politics is not primarily about elected leaders but about the ones who elect them, the 99 percent who work for a living, the working majority?

Not even in the world of religion does work matter much, as the focus of religious communities is mostly on what happens during leisure time and on religious performances that take place when people are not at work.2 Those who attend worship services are not only off work but are often trying to forget about work. It should not surprise us that much of religion is more interested in what happens in the bedroom than what goes on in the boardroom and that it seems even less interested in other places where people work. Sometimes religion assumes that its task is to regenerate people on their days off work for whatever it is they need to do back at work, but even in this case there is little concern for what really happens at work let alone for transforming what happens at work. What if religion is not primarily about what happens in another dimension but about what difference the divine and people of faith are making in this world, including what happens at work?

The most fashionable positions across the ideological spectrum also seem to be at a loss when it comes to the topic of work. Conservatives of all colors emphasize the value of hard work, but when it comes to actual work they are quick to blame those who do it. Those who have trouble making ends meet financially are blamed for being lazy or are considered unworthy of adequate pay, no matter how hard they work. Even working more than one job at a time, as many low-wage workers are forced to do, does not seem to be enough. The multitude of liberals care about many injustices, paying attention to matters of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, the environment, and even poverty, but there is surprisingly little engagement of issues having to do with work and labor. Centrists, who believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle, are even less interested in the topic of work because they do not encounter it as a strong concern in the tensions between conservatives and liberals that they are trying to mediate.

The media reflect these attitudes. If someone not familiar with humanity were to watch television, they would assume that human life was about anything but work. With few exceptions, cultural production in literature, theater, music, and other venues is rarely focusing on work either. Not even the news reports are in the habit of reporting much about work: the business sections of the newspapers, for instance, do not tell us much about what is happening at work.

As a result, work is off almost everybody’s radar screen. Work is treated as a nonissue at worst, or as a matter of special interests at best. When people hear the word labor, many tend to think of factory workers in blue overalls carrying old-fashioned lunch boxes. Others may think of immigrant workers who are frequently accused of taking away the jobs of Americans. Others still might think of low-wage workers at Walmart or in the fast-food industry. Except for some younger professionals whose work still earns them some satisfaction and prestige, it seems that fewer and fewer people today like to think about work or be asked the question “What do you do?” If in polite company the topics of politics and religion should not be mentioned, today this may be true to an even greater degree for the topic of work and labor, and talking about politics, religion, and labor together seems virtually impossible.

Nothing Matters More

At the same time, nothing matters more than work and labor. This might seem like an overstatement, but we are prepared to back it up. While we do not want to romanticize work (and neither do we want to deify or essentialize it), this book is an extended argument about why work matters in all areas of life and how to reclaim the value of work. Work is a central factor not just in economics and politics but also in culture, religion, and in our communities. We will come back to the limits of work soon.

Human life as we know it would not exist without work and labor. Producing and consuming food requires work, manufacturing shelter and clothing requires work, educating the next generations requires work, and even maintaining culture, communication, and relationships requires work. More than 99 percent of the world’s population and most people who are reading this book have no choice but to work for a living. Even most of the less-than-1 percent who do not need to work for a living because of their affluence and wealth choose to work as well, and the ones who choose not to work could not exist without the work of the working majority.

Moreover, work shapes us deeply, all the way down. Work is likely the place where we experience power most intensely and in all of its shapes and forms, work is where domination and subordination is most palpably manifest in our lives, and work is where our subjectivity is formed to a large degree. Work is the place where others tell us what to do or where we have some power to tell others what to do, often with the assumption that this is the way the world works by default. Even in less top-down relationships at work, it is usually clear who is in charge and who is not. Questioning power at work is seen as mostly futile, unlike power in most other areas of life.

How we are shaped at work has implications for how we behave at home, in church, in community, in our families, and for how we think and believe. Men who experience dominance at work often embody it at home in relation to women and children. Many religious communities reflect how power is exercised at work, with people who have power at work having power in their communities. Those who sit on boards in corporations usually also sit on boards in church. And even if such leaders are absent, others fill in for them and perpetuate similar kinds of power structures. Finally, how power is exercised at work tends to influence in subtle ways how people perceive God; even for working people, God is often modeled after images that combine traits of the immediate boss and the mostly invisible CEO.

So, what is going on, why are work and labor so undervalued today? Are we merely dealing with forgetfulness, with unavoidable entropy, or perhaps with some more troublesome reality like a repression of facts and conspiracy? We do not believe that the troubles of work and labor are owed to natural causes—too many people assume steamrolling and power-blocking at work are normal and nothing can be done about it—but some of the answers might surprise you. To be sure, we do not ask this question out of sheer curiosity or sensationalism but because we are interested in learning what we can do as communities to turn the tide. The good news is that the tide may have already begun to turn and that there is support from budding social movements and even from a growing number of communities of faith that are waking up.

What we are trying to do in this book is to build on these awakenings and to take them to the next step. This is necessary, we believe, because awakenings without support and reflection will fizzle and fade quickly. For social movements this means that we need to sharpen our understanding of what energizes them and how this energy can be organized so that it can push against the system and impact it at its core. For faith communities this means that we need to reflect on what is at the roots of faith, which means radically rethinking images of God, community, and faith itself.3 We are worried, from experience, that too many well-meaning people and even leaders and organizers are afraid (or perhaps merely too busy) to ask these questions.

Throughout history, work, working people, and even religions that care about work have shaped the world deeply, even though our histories have often been written from the perspective of those who made others do the work. Contrary to the way the stories are told, Caesar did not build the Roman Empire alone, and neither did the bishops and their theologians shape the fortunes of Christianity singlehandedly, just as little as they constructed the medieval cathedrals in Europe with their own hands. There is good reason to anticipate that the world of the future will once again be built by work, working people, and religions that care about work, no matter how much the power brokers of today would like to convince us otherwise.

There is no escape from work. Businesspeople and economists who neglect the fundamental contributions of work and workers, for instance by cutting salaries and benefits, have been creating growing problems that cannot be resolved long-term. Politicians who neglect the world of work and of workers are finding it difficult to build a strong democratic basis, resulting in the inordinate dependency of politics on corporations and big money that we are experiencing at present and that will keep haunting us for a long time to come. Faith leaders who neglect the realities of work and of workers are producing fantastic religious bubbles that will eventually burst just like economic bubbles keep bursting in recession after recession. Quite a few of these bubbles have burst already as religious enterprises crumble (Robert Schuller’s famous Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, went bankrupt in 2010, for instance,) but more bubbles are in the making every day.

As we reclaim the importance of work, we are fighting pending disasters and we are reclaiming values that many of us hold in common, like the values of human productivity and creativity, the sharing of power, relationship, community, and democracy4 (political, economic, as well as religious).

In all these efforts, we find ourselves in the company of many people throughout history, including the leaders of various religious traditions like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the prophet Muhammad. The apostle Paul may serve as an example. Against the dominant logic of the Roman Empire, Paul argued that a healthy community cannot act like a body where the head says to the feet “I have no need of you” and the eyes say to the hand “I have no need of you” (1 Cor. 12:21). Here and elsewhere Paul leaves no doubt that work matters. What if religion were not primarily about pious ideas but about work, community, solidarity, alternative power that flows from the bottom up rather than the top down, and a new way of life?

It should not be too hard for us to follow Paul’s logic: a head cannot thrive without feet, and eyes need hands in order to make a difference. For people of faith, Paul adds an astonishing claim about God, who has arranged the body not from the top down but from the bottom up, so that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). It seems that perhaps no one has understood Paul better than the labor unions, when they claim that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Work, Labor, and Transformation

There is a transformative quality of work and labor that has revolutionary implications. Not surprisingly, today this quality is not merely overlooked but repressed. This is why we need to go beyond merely reclaiming the value of work and labor. If we are correct that humanity as we know it would not exist without work and labor, does it not make sense to suspect that work and labor must have had a more important role in shaping and reshaping humanity than most of us realize?

If work and labor, as we are arguing in this book, shape us all the way to the core, they are not just a matter of economics—earning and spending money—but also a matter of politics, culture, religion, and even psychology. Spending the bulk of our waking hours at work influences who we are as individuals and communities, shapes the images of our cultures and faiths, and defines us in more ways than we can count.

In hunter and gatherer societies, work was fundamentally different from work in agrarian societies, and economics, politics, and religion adapted accordingly. Trade, power, and images of the divine become more centralized and more complex in agrarian societies. Work in feudal societies, where peasants had to carry the heaviest burdens yet have some self-determination because of social bonds and some communally owned land, was once again fundamentally different from work in capitalist societies, and economics, politics, culture, and religion shaped up accordingly. Once again, trade, power, and images of the divine shifted, enabling greater mobility on the one hand but also new arrangements of power where “winners take all.”

Today, under the conditions of a capitalism that reaches into virtually every corner of the globe, people who work can no longer rely on traditional communal bonds. Since they also lack substantial wealth and savings, most have little more to sustain them than their labor power. In the United States increasing numbers of people, including members of the middle class and people with college degrees are only a few paychecks away from financial disaster. At the same time, the wealthy get wealthier, a process that has once again accelerated with the onset of the Great Recession in 2007 and its aftermath. These dynamics have implications not only for economics but also for politics and religion, which are linked in these disasters. Will economics, politics, and religion support these trends, as they often do, and further strengthen the power of the 1 percent by funneling money, power, and prestige to the top? Or will economics, politics, and religion work in support of the 99 percent?

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Unified We Are a Force
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1-Basic Issues
• Chapter 2-Work under Attack
• Chapter 3-From Advocacy to Deep Solidarity
• Chapter 4-Labor Radicalizing Religion
• Chapter 5-Religion Radicalizing Labor
• Chapter 6-Organizing and Building the Movement
• Conclusions
• Index