Consider this news item from not long ago:

The Labor Department found that Packers employed at least 31 children, ranging in age from 13 to 17, who cleaned dangerous equipment with corrosive cleaners during overnight shifts at three slaughtering and meatpacking facilities: a Turkey Valley Farms plant in Marshall, Minn., and JBS USA plants in Grand Island, Neb., and Worthington, Minn.

Their jobs included cleaning kill floors, meat- and bone-cutting saws, grinding machines and electric knives, according to court documents. The mix of boys and girls were not fluent English speakers and were interviewed mostly in Spanish, investigators said.

The Labor Department found that several minors employed by the company, including one 13-year-old, suffered caustic chemical burns and other injuries. One14-year-old boy, who worked from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. five to six days a week, suffered injuries from chemical burns for cleaning machines used to cut meat. School records showed that the student fell asleep in class or missed class because of the job at the plant (Remy Tumin, “Labor Dept. Finds 31 Minors Employed in Meat Plants,” The New York Times, November 12, 2022, B6).

In Minnesota and Nebraska, for God’s sake!

By happenstance I read two books back-to-back that seemed to have no connection to each other. To my surprise the two books converged around the issue of the exploitation of labor. The first of these books is Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth, by Clyde Ford (2022). The thesis and argument of the book is that Black labor (as slaves, tenant farmers, share-croppers, or later low-wage workers) constitute the source of White wealth:

From slavery in the seventeenth century to the designation of “essential workers” in the time of the pandemic in the twenty-first century, the essential elements of racial interaction in America have not changed: Black lives are a means to an end for all too many White Americans. That end? Greater wealth. To protect the acquisition of greater wealth? Greater power (p. 6).

Ford sees and voices clearly the dialectic of White freedom and Black bondage:

Freedom from slavery threatened the freedom of White planters. Said another way: white planters and slave owners realized their freedom was tied to the bondage of their slaves (p. 81).

This combination of benefit and exploitation was written into US law. Beyond that, Ford judges that much of the US Constitution is preoccupied with the preservation of White domination and assurance of Black subservience:

The total number of clauses within the Constitution varies somewhere between 75 and 85, depending upon what is, or is not, considered a clause. That means a staggering amount of the Constitution, between 20 to 25 percent, is devoted directly or indirectly to supporting slavery, and excluding Black Americans from the benefits conferred to “We the People” (p. 155).

As the news item cited above indicates, the exploitation of labor is not confined to Black people. But of course the practice of such exploitation and its long-standing institutionalization are devoted primarily to Black labor.
The other book I read is The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles (2022). The book is a detailed account of the work and career of Jack Welch, the long time CEO of General Electric. The phrase in the title, “Broke Capitalism,” refers to the way in which Welch quite intentionally departed from the conventional, respectful interaction of management and labor, in order to reduce labor to an inconvenient business expense with workers reduced to the status of the least secure and the most readily dispensable. In the end, Welch had very little interest in product development or in the flourishing of the industry, but was singularly committed to producing profit income for investors.

Welch’s ruthless strategy of demeaning and dismissing workers led to massive lay-offs, rigorous downsizing, and outsourcing, so that he developed,

A whole infrastructure [which] had been created to support this liminal state of employment, normalizing economic insecurity. Even at some of the country’s largest employers, there is a concerted effort to keep workers as close to temps as they can possibly be, with the aspiration of making people as interchangeable as the parts of a machine (169-170).

Specifically Welch developed a “Vitality Curve” (171) that led managers to “rate” workers, with the intent of firing the lowest 10% of the work force each year. He does so in order to bring in new workers, dispose of the least productive, and create a work environment of anxiety, in which workers had to compete with each other, thus developing a work culture of unwillingness to help one another at all.

Before he finishes Gelles adds a report on work policy at Amazon under Jeff Bezos who finds coercive ways to replicate and advance the policies of Welch. At Amazon, workers are taken to be “fundamentally expendable” (171-172) and must always live with the threat of dismissal. Thus workers at Amazon,

Are subjected to ever more dystopian forms of management, where people are treated like machines, workplace injuries are common, and any vestige of sentimentality is snuffed out (172).

The matter is not different, Gelles insists, at Starbucks, for example:

Companies like Starbucks have put workers on call for shifts that could be canceled at the last minute. Hourly employees have been scheduled to work the late shift, then open the same restaurant the next morning on just a few hours of sleep, a practice known as “clopening” (p. 170).

This pattern of exploitation is reiterated whenever a large corporation has an interest only in the bottom line of profitability for shareholders to the neglect of everything and everyone else.

Happily, Gelles is able to report, at the end of his book that in more recent time there are more “enlightened” corporate managers who have rejected the Welch-Bezos-Schultz model of exploitation, and have returned to a more humane recognition of workers as essential to the wellbeing and long-term wealth of a company.

When we juxtapose Ford’s review of Black labor and Gelles’s articulation of recent corporate practice, it is easy enough to see defining continuities between the two. In both cases the aim is immediate and immense profit for owners-managers. In both cases the requirement for such profit-making is that workers are dispensable and can be treated on the cheap, with no right or claim of their own. It is obvious that the news cited above from the meat-packing industry is in continuity with Jack Welch’s vision of dispensable labor, and with the older, long-running violence and exploitation of slavery and Jim Crow culture.

It cannot be unimportant to the church, as to the synagogue, that the long-running story of God’s engagement with the human economy begins in the narrative of a labor dispute. That labor dispute is articulated in the narrative of Exodus 5 that sounds like a harbinger of the US slave economy, and the belated US corporate economy via Welch or Bezos.

In the Exodus narrative Pharaoh’s work policy is simply to increase the production schedule and force his slave workers to greater effort:

You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, “Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God”…He said, “You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say, “Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.” Go now, and work; for no straw shall be given you, but you shall deliver the same number of bricks” (Exodus 5:7-8, 17-18).

So at Amazon:

Workers who just clocked fifty-five-hour weeks can suddenly be assigned mandatory overtime, with no one to appeal to. Sometimes, the algorithm accidentally fires workers, who, despite begging to remain employed with the company, are out of a job. Cameras and computers are watching Amazon employees every minute of the day. Workers on the warehouse floor are tracked constantly, with sensors recording how fast they pack boxes and how long they linger, perhaps catching their breath. Time spent using the bathroom can result in lower performance reviews. Any lag in productivity is assumed to be the fault of a lazy worker. Drivers have resorted to peeing in bottles, and factory workers who walk too slowly have been disciplined (The Man Who Broke Capitalism, 172-173).

Where the ancient Hebrew slaves wanted time off to worship (that is, to rendezvous with the emancipatory God), workers at Amazon might want a time break for rest.

We are human beings. We are not tools used to make their daily/weekly goals and rates (The Man Who Broke Capitalism, 173).

It goes without saying that such ruthless exploitative policies help to produce great wealth for management and shareholders. Thus we see on exhibit the economic wealth of Bezos, Elon Musk, and their ilk, as well as the major shareholders who support and insist upon cheap labor. It is the rule here as it was in ancient Egypt or under Jim Crow: cheap labor begets great wealth.

It is clear in the Old Testament that the fantastic wealth of King Solomon derived from the cheap labor of slaves. We have one direct and immediate prophetic charge against the royal house for its systemic exploitation of labor, though many other prophetic utterances tilt with the same awareness. In his condemnation of King Jehoiakim (Shallum), the prophet Jeremiah addresses the issue directly:

Woe…[big trouble to come!--]

to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,

and his upper rooms by injustice;

who makes his neighbors work for nothing,

and does not give them their wages (Jeremiah 22:13).

The king specializes in “not-righteousness” and in “not-justice.” He requires his “neighbors” to work for nothing. He withholds their wages. The use of the term “neighbor” is surely intended in an ironic, puckish way, in order to remind the king and his company that his exploited workers are his “neighbors,” members of the fabric of the neighborhood, and not intruders from outside or strangers to the common enterprise of living together. The use of the term “neighbor” suggests a vulnerability that bespeaks mutual obligation. But exploitative management always seeks to banish the notion of social solidarity with labor, all the way from Pharaoh, to Judean kings, to Jim Crow, to current corporate policy. Once “neighboring” is eliminated, every means of exploitation becomes available.

It is amazing that in his compilation of Torah commandments in the book of Deuteronomy Moses takes the trouble to think of exploited neighbors. All the while preoccupied with holy sites and holy foods and holy festivals, Moses pauses long enough to think about the economy. Among the “miscellaneous” commandments concerning the economy, Moses commands this:

You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt (Deuteronomy 24:14-15).

Moses understood, as does every number-crunching manager, that profits depend on the minute control of cash flow. Thus it is profitable to withhold payment for a day or for a week, and so to put the money to other gainful use. But “no,” says Moses! The worker is entitled to his or her pay. The worker, whether an Israelite or an outsider (immigrant), whether a kinsman or an outsider, has entitlement. It is recognized in the commandment that vulnerable daily workers are poor; they always are. Our translation speaks of their “livelihood” that depends on such prompt payment. The Hebrew term is “nephesh,” thus their life, their self-hood, their existence depends on prompt payment. If not paid promptly, such a worker might “cry to the Lord”; the phrase would have evoked in Israel an Exodus memory. It was the cry of the slaves in Egypt (Exodus 2:23-25) that evoked the emancipatory God to action that undid the Pharonic system. Thus in the Torah-horizon of Moses, such a small economic transaction between owner and worker becomes a cosmic issue that concerns the creator of heaven and earth. The outcome cannot be good for such a parsimonious owner. The matter is reflected in the wise saying of Israel:

Those who mock the poor insult their Maker (Proverbs 17:5).

There is no more effective or dangerous way to mock the poor than to withhold payment. Such a mocking evokes the creator God, just as the mocking of the poor Hebrew slaves by Pharaoh evoked that emancipatory God to act.

We may take this single commandment from Moses as a signal that Israel’s Torah is exactly and explicitly “invested” in the wellbeing of the workers. This single rule of prompt payment may be construed as a hint of a host of rights of workers that are not to be disregarded by owners and managers.

Thus it is all of a piece:

• the slavery of Pharaoh;

• the exploitation by Israelite and Judean kings;

• the ruthless habits of US slavery and Jim Crow;

• the contemporary ruthlessness of corporations that reduces workers to dispensable cogs in a profit-making machine; and

• the sweatshops of meatpacking companies in Nebraska and Minnesota.

We in the church might take a deep breath in order to reflect on the long-running, systemic ways in which we have screened out what matters as theological issues. We have, over a long period of time, opted for safer theological issues more remote from life, to the neglect of these issues deeply rooted in the Torah. We have indeed chosen badly where our energy might best be directed:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the Torah; justice, and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others (Matthew 23:23).

What is needed is not charity for workers. What is required are good laws and regulations that concern the wellbeing and welfare of workers who are, at the outset, without social power. Thus we may usefully spend some energy on this question: What is possible by way of policy and practice for the sake of workers in Marshall, Grand Island, and Worthington, and everywhere that workers are exploited and maltreated? It is, moreover, evident that this matter of justice for workers is further skewed by racism, as the divide between owners/managers and workers is further skewed along racial lines. In the long run it is a question of whether the sovereignty of God pertains to our common life in the world. If it does, much follows for public policy and public practice. If it does not, then it matters not at all.

There is a fairly straight line from the commandment of Moses (Deuteronomy 24:15-16) to the oracle of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 22:13), to the parable of Jesus concerning pay for workers (Matthew 20:1-10). It is noticeable and disconcerting that the parable of Jesus ends with the unnerving assurance:

So the last will be first, and the first will be last (Matthew 20:16).

The Gospel is uncompromising in its insistence on the good future of “the least”!

Walter Brueggemann

December 23, 2022