[blockquote type=”center”]”The Solomonic achievement was in part made possible by oppressive social policy…Fundamental to social policy was the practice of forced labor, in which at least to some extent subjects existed to benefit the state or the political economy….it was unmistakably the policy of the regime to mobilize and claim the energies of people for the sake of the court and its extravagant needs.”  And in this world, “the politics of justice and compassion has completely disappeared.” (TPI 27) [/blockquote]

I want to look at one aspect of forced labor and claimed energies –  the textile industry in the late 19^th, early 20^th century. How did we claim the energies of the people and how are we now?

 

“A study of the shirtwaist worker’s budget shows that [typical] wages could not possibly cover the basic outlays for food, lodging, and medical bills.” (Woog35)

 

The workers made about 25 cents a day for 12-16 hours of work, all the while breathing in air that was “loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.” (Zinn116)

 

In the mills, the work force was made up of various immigrants “who lived in crowded, flammable wooden tenements. The average wage was $8.76 a week,” and 36 out of 100 adult mill-workers died by the time they were 25. (Zinn 335)

 

[blockquote type=”center”]“It requires no imagination to see that the exodus memory and consequently the Sinai commandments are performed in a ‘no Sabbath’ environment. In that context, all levels of social power – gods, Pharoah, supervisors, taskmasters, slaves – are uniformly caught up in and committed to the grind of endless production.” (Sabbath as Resistance 5) [/blockquote]

 

“Nowhere in the world at any time, probably, were men and women worked as they were in the sweatshop – the lowest paid, most degrading of American employment. The sweatshop employer ground all the work he could from every man, woman and child under him.” (1904 article quoted in Woog 9, emphasis mine)

 

[blockquote type=”center”]“…the poor in the Bible are the helpless, the indigent, the hungry, the oppressed, the needy, the humiliated. And it is not nature that has put them in this situation; they have been unjustly impoverished and despoiled by the powerful.” (Tamez 70) [/blockquote]

 

“As of 1910 New York had roughly thirty thousand garment sweatshops that employed half a million workers. Together, these shops produced 70 percent of all the women’s clothing and 40 percent of all the men’s clothing in America.” (Woog 10)

 

“Many workers also reported that even their most basic hygiene needs were ignored: some factories provided only one or two toilets for hundreds of workers, and even those scant facilities rarely functioned properly. Many shops had no sinks or washbasins; some had no running water at all.” (De Angelis 43)

 

“Sweatshops became so closely linked to the immigrant experience…that for these new arrivals ‘the sweatshop was America.’” (Woog 13)

 

[blockquote type=”center”]“We must always keep in mind, therefore, that poverty is an unworthy state that must be changed. I repeat: poverty is not a virtue but an evil that reflects the socioeconomic conditions of inequality in which people live.” (Tamez 74) [/blockquote]

This country has built itself on a consuming economy, but we need to know the cost. We need to know the history. We need to understand the history of wages and the fight for fairness. So that when stories about Amazon and Walmart appear in the news, we can see the pattern. We know what human nature will do if left unchecked. The desire for wealth, greed, and the underlying anxiety and scarcity will push people towards slavery.

“Walmart isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart. The company’s poor treatment of their workers has led to customers fleeing to the competition. Yesterday, a survey was released that found Walmart to be the most disliked retailer in America. Customers found Walmart so distasteful that it was ranked below discount outlets Dollar Tree and Family Dollar. Forget competing with Costco and Kohl’s, Walmart was losing the battle for consumers to your local dollar store.

Leaked internal documents recently revealed that Walmart is terrified of the movement by the group OurWalmart to raise employee wages to $15 an hour. Walmart workers have been fighting for better pay and more consistent hours. The company is trying to throw some of their employees a bone in the hopes of quieting the movement.”

 

“If a sweatshop was on a high floor, employees found it was difficult just getting to work. Most of the loft buildings had staircases so narrow that only one person could ascend or descend at a time. Workers sometimes spent a full hour just getting from the street to an upper floor.” (Woog 31)

Compare this to the case Amazon just won at the Supreme Court:

“Workers might wait in line for five minutes to go through a routine anti-theft screening or they might wait 25 minutes; regardless, the employer does not need to compensate them for that time.”

 

We assume if you don’t have it, it’s because you haven’t worked for it. But who defines work? Who says what work is good, is worth more money? The loom workers worked hard. Factory workers today have bizarre shift schedules that interfere with a normal daily life.

“Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.” (TPI 88)

Has a history of no compassion numbed us to continuing injustices? Does our own fast-paced life leave us compassionless, with no time to think about justice?

 

For some reason we base wealth on education, and if you don’t have a 4 year degree, then of course you shouldn’t get paid well. Never mind the quality of life, or that people can be working full time and still be on food stamps or that businesses cut hours so they don’t have to give benefits.

 

Our country grew on these oppressive ways of living and building an economy and no one cared because the right kind of people weren’t being oppressed.

 

We treat large-scale disasters such as Pemberton, Grover, Triangle Shirtwaist, Monarch, Imperial Foods, as tragedies. Our compassion can be moved in the face of such compelling injustice, because we think these things are anomalies. If we can fix these aberrations in our society, then we can continue right along, our conscience appeased.

 

But these tragedies are not rare, unusual events. These are a result of the system working the way it was designed to work. The system is designed to favor some and not others. For some and not others to bear the brunt of the labor and oppression. It’s designed to be relentless. (Not to mention prison labor and restaurant servers not being paid a legal wage.)

 

There are so many appalling facts past and present about wages and working conditions. Why is it so hard for us to be generous with our money? Why is it so hard for us to value equality and fairness, so hard to advocate for a more just way of living?

 

Why do we imagine that the middle-class lifestyle just appeared out of thin air? And why do we not imagine that there are systemic forces at work keeping people out of a financially healthy way of life? What keeps us from being compassionate, even empathetic to the cries of the oppressed?

 

What is our reaction to the claim that “the reason why the Bible opposes the rich is not because they are rich, but because they have acquired their riches at the expense of their neighbors.” (Tamez 73)

 

At a memorial and protest meeting after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, one speaker had this to say:

“I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk of good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting…This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city…Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred…We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars…by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.” (De Angelis 78, emphasis mine)

 

What does it say about us, about the systems we inhabit, if poverty really is this huge oppressive sin? What does it say about our spirituality if we are willfully choosing to be ignorant about the things that anger God? What if we are Pharoah and the waves are beginning to crash in on us?

 

Do we even know how the system works? If we benefit from it, why should we examine it? If it works for me, then it must work for everyone, right?

 

Our country is divided into regions and it’s convenient to act as if each area is mostly autonomous. It’s convenient to say the South had slaves, so the North bears no responsibility, or the West was where people were hostile to the Chinese, or whatever. All regions have their history of discrimination and prejudice. But simplifying it like that denies the inter-connectedness of the states. We are one country, and either we believe in liberty and justice for all or we don’t.

 

And if we do, we need to look at what ‘for all’ means. If we say all voices matter, if we want everyone to vote because all people matter, if we value workers as the backbone of our economy, then we need to pay attention to how people are treated. If everyone matters, then the systems that are built and used by people matter, and we need to look at how and why they were designed, and how they affect people today.

 

On the topic of labor, there is a clear history from the indentured servitude of colonial times (Zinn 42) to the looms of New England to the labor unions to the Memphis garbage men to the minimum wage disputes of today, that shows a continued disrespect for the people who do the necessary grunt work that enables the country to function.

 

“There are always ‘charges’ against me. If I laugh, or cry, or speak to a girl during work hours, I am fined ten cents for each ‘crime.’ Five cents is taken from my pay every week to pay for benzene which is used to clean waists that have been soiled in the making; and even if I have not soiled a waist in a year, I must pay the five cents just the same. If I lose a little piece of lining, that possibly is worth two cents, I am charged ten cents for the goods and five cents for losing it…Each of these things seems small, I know, but when you only earn ninety dimes a week, and are fined for this and fined for that, why, a lot of them are missing when pay day comes…” (De Angelis 36)

Compare that to the article about how expensive it is to be poor:

“Unbanked consumers spend approximately 2.5 to 3 percent of a government benefits check and between 4 percent and 5 percent of payroll check just to cash them. Additional dollars are spent to purchase money orders to pay routine monthly expenses. When you consider the cost for cashing a bi-weekly payroll check and buying about six money orders each month, a household with a net income of $20,000 may pay as much as $1,200 annually for alternative service fees — substantially more than the expense of a monthly checking account.”

 

[blockquote type=”center”]“Into this system of hopeless weariness erupts the God of the burning bush. That God heard the despairing fatigue of the slaves, resolved to liberate the slave company of Israel from that exploitative system, and recruited Moses for the human task of emancipation. The reason Miriam and the other women can sing and dance at the end of the exodus narrative is the emergence of new social reality in which the life of the Israelite economy is no longer determined and compelled by the insatiable production quotas of Egypt and its gods.” (Sabbath 5) [/blockquote]

 

 

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Empire: The United States and Walter Brueggemann

   1. A Systemic Greediness

   2. Nightmare Into Policy

   3. Food as a Tool of Control

   4. The Grind of Endless Production

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