Column on Labor Day

Last Sunday the church readings moved from Genesis to Exodus. There the Hebrew people are oppressed in their labor. Pharaoh orders-more bricks-more produce.

My maternal grandfather immigrated and became a coal miner. He and his family were kicked out of the company town during the coal strike of 1922. My uncles were attacked in trying to work with the United Mine Workers in the 1930s as young men. My uncles and almost every middle-aged man I knew who worked in the mines suffered from black lung.

I remember when labor union officials were national figures and were guests on Meet the Press. When I was young, old men would be delighted to find out that I liked history and show where John L. Lewis gave a speech.

All of my life, unions have been criticized. Years ago, people my age saw them as sclerotic examples of the establishment. Labor unions seemed helpless as industry declined or was shipped overseas. They are no longer a counterweight to global mobile capitalism.  Private sector workers are represented by unions at a 6.4% level.

When unions were at their height in industrial America, wages and working conditions improved. As we shifted or were forced to shift to a service-sector economy, we have seen the opposite happened. Since the oil shock of the early seventies, the American economy has not served the American Dream of doing better than one’s parents. The Economic Policy Institute shows that productivity gains have been good, but it does not reflect a stagnant wage base. Indeed for my entire adult life, wages have basically been stagnant for the middle class and have decreased for the lower income groups. Young college education workers are faring worse than they did in the 1990s. Most salaried workers do not receive overtime pay.

Walter Brueggemann is a distinguished Biblical scholar who graduated from  Eden Seminary across the river and taught there for a quarter century. His angle of vision continues to be Scripture. He looks at the story of Israel in Egypt as paradigmatic.  Labor Day closes the summer and its promise of abundance and freedom. It is no accident that the school year traditionally started after Labor Day. One of education’s latent goals is to make not only citizens but producers and consumers.

Here is a synopsis of his thought. Pharaoh’s kingdom of anxiety is alive and well today. People who live in anxiety and fear have no time or energy for the common good. It takes an immense act of generosity to break the grip of anxiety. Those who receive generosity can care about their neighbors. To those wrapped up in the ideology of anxiety, they must be able to receive generosity. Second, there is an alternative to the kingdom of scarcity, an awareness of abundance. The journey to being good neighbors to one another is entrusted to the church and its allies. Brueggemann refers to both manna and the feedings of the 5000 and 4000. With these signs, Jesus says that wherever he is, the world of scarcity is transformed into the world of overwhelming abundance. In Mark 8:14-21, the disciples didn’t understand because their hearts were hardened – just like Pharaoh. But those who receive the bread of abundance, Brueggemann says, have energy beyond themselves for the sake of the world.

It is good that we take some time off on Labor Day. It is secular Sabbath. Brueggemann again: “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.” We our creatures of labor, but we are not only our labor.