It’s the Economy, Stupid
Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash
In 1992 James Carville fashioned this trope as the leading slogan for the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. The phrase was in response to the recent economic recession under George. H. W. Bush’s presidency that inevitably resulted in great unemployment. To many people the “economy” meant and means good paying jobs that produce greater purchasing power. But of course, in presidential elections, it is always “the economy.”
In any case, I had Carville’s mantra at hand as I thought about jobs and their cruciality for a sound economy in a functioning society. This is so even though we regularly support a leisure class among us; the reality of a good job is the defining economic reality for most of us. As I thought about jobs and the economy, I have been alerted to a reality that is all too common among us. Earl Fields, who worked at the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Plant for forty years, said,
See, they had two jobs down there, white jobs and black jobs…the worst jobs, the dirtiest jobs, the nastiest jobs, you name it. In other words, they were black jobs (Motoko Rich et. al., “Money, Race, and Success: How Your School District Compares,” New York Times April 29, 2016).
Thus the subject of “jobs” calls attention to all matters of race and injustice that pervade all of our social relationships.
As I considered “two jobs” as a biblical theme, I am able to focus on a remarkable text in the Book of Joshua concerning the Gibeonites. They were drawn toward Israel because they had heard of the Exodus emancipation. But they arrived before Israel bereft, needy, and vulnerable.
Come now, make a treaty with us. Here is our bread; it was still warm when we took it from our houses as our food for the journey, on the day we set out to come to you, but now, see, it is dry and moldy; these wineskins were new when we filled them, and see, they are burst; and these garments and sandals of ours are worn out from the very long journey (Joshua 9:11-13).
As a result, Joshua on behalf of Israel made peace with the Gibeonites, guaranteeing their lives by a treaty (v. 15). Because of that guarantee the leaders of Israel’s congregation decided the future status of the Gibeonites:
“Let them live.” So they became hewers of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation, as the leaders had decided concerning them (v. 21).
Thus the Gibeonites survived because of the treaty but were assigned to the most menial work in Israel. Their tasks were to draw water from wells and cut wood for Israelite heat. Thus already in ancient Israel, there were “two jobs,” as the Israelites did other work that was not so menial. In ancient Israel the “two jobs” were Israelite and Gibeonite, an anticipation of more recent division of white and black jobs.
That division of labor was taken for granted when Moses, in the new land of promise, renewed the covenant of Sinai. Moses characterized the covenant community its most inclusive:
You stand assembled today, all of you, before the Lord your God—the leaders of your tribes, your elders, and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your women, and the aliens who are in your camp, both those who cut your wood and those who draw your water—to enter into the covenant of the Lord your God, sworn by an oath (Deuteronomy 29:10-12).
The “camp” included not only women, children, and sojourners, but also those who cut wood and those who drew water, that is, the Gibeonites. Israel is about to enter the new land of promise and will bring along to the new land its workers who do the work Israelites don’t do. Cheap labor is part of the enterprise of the covenant community, just as every population of privilege retains its corps of cheap labor. It is cheap labor that sustains the life of the community that costs very little to maintain. Thus the Gibeonites come to represent, in ancient memory, all those who do cheap labor that makes possible a viable and even comfortable life for the moneyed class. That body of cheap labor, moreover, is rendered helpless, cannot make demands, and must accept the role to which it is assigned.
That socioeconomic arrangement seems settled and accepted in Israel. Except that we may notice in particular two texts that evidence a more alert attentiveness to the labor force of the community. First, a commandment of Moses provides for prompt, reliable payment to the poor and needy laborers (Deuteronomy 24: 14-15). The text does not mention the Gibeonites and likely comes from a very different strand of tradition. It clearly pertains, nonetheless, to workers who had jobs not unlike those of the Gibeonites:
You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other 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).
We may, as always with a law, ask what condition does this law, of necessity, seek to address. In this case the condition that required correction is that payment was being withheld from vulnerable workers. Perhaps it was a delay only long enough to say, “The check is in the mail.” The condition may pertain more widely to “wage theft” in which vulnerable workers were cheated of their fair wage. The “poor and needy” laborers depended, day by day, on payment, as they lived from payday to payday. The “sanction” for this provision is that God might punish the guilty in response to the petition of laborer. Thus fair wages for vulnerable workers are drawn into the orbit of YHWH’s covenantal governance. This commandment raises no question about whether the pay is adequate, but such a question cannot be far from the horizon of this law. YHWH intends that “poor and needy” workers must have economic viability for life. It is easy enough to connect this commandment more broadly to the governance of YHWH when we remember that the Exodus event was the overthrow of an arrangement of slave labor, the cheapest kind of work force there can be. No other imperative is so clearly at the core of YHWH’s governance as is fair pay for work.
The other text that directly concerns worker compensation is a prophetic oracle from Jeremiah. The prophet anticipates a vexed future for Shallum (King Jehoiakim) who can have no good end:
Woe 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;
who says, “I will build myself a spacious house with large upper rooms,”
and who cuts out windows for it,
paneling it with cedar,
and painting it with vermilion (Jeremiah 22:13-14).
The policy and practice of the king in Jerusalem is one of injustice and unrighteousness, wherein laborers “work for nothing” and receive no wages. Such cheap labor made it possible for the king to enjoy the exotic luxuries of “a spacious house with large upper rooms,”
windows,
cedar paneling, and
paint with vermilion.
This is clearly a case, among many other cases, wherein cheap (free!) labor made luxury possible.
The prophet pauses in order to contrast this exploitative king with his father, Josiah the good king, who “judged” (cared for) the poor and needy (vv. 15-16). It was his attentiveness to the vulnerable, says the prophet, that made prosperity possible for Josiah. Indeed, his care for the poor and the needy was his way of “knowing” YHWH. The contrast is complete. Unlike his justice-practicing father, King Jehoiakim pursued “dishonest gain” and “shed innocent blood,” through oppression and violence. His royal policies readily victimized his vulnerable labor force (v. 17). It is inescapable that the prophetic oracle must come to a strong consequential “therefore”:
Therefore thus says the Lord concerning King Jehoiakim, son of Josiah of Judah:
They shall not lament for him, saying,
“Alas, my brother!” or “Alas, sister!”
They shall not lament for him, saying,
“Alas, lord!” or “Alas, his majesty!”
With the burial of a donkey he shall be buried—
dragged off and thrown out beyond the gates of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 22:18-19).
In prophetic horizon exploitative labor policy leads to a sorry end for the governing, ownership class that is indifferent to the needs of vulnerable people. This cause/consequence reasoning is direct and unqualified.
These two texts from the Torah and the prophets together constitute an insistence that a covenantal community must take responsibility for the wellbeing of its workers, to assure fair income for labor rendered. The Torah recognizes that workers can easily be cheated out of the income by delay that may provide time for exploitative chicanery. The prophetic oracle sees that the powerful and moneyed (the king!) can damage workers so that their income is limited or truncated, or eventually nonexistent. Thus King Jehoiakim followed in the path of the Pharaoh who enslaved the peasants who became Israel. It is likely that King Solomon is the connecting link between the memory of Pharaoh and the later oppressive king in Jerusalem (see I Kings 3:1, 7:8, 9:24, 11:1). This sequence from Pharaoh to Solomon to Jehoiakim tells the tale of ruthless exploitative money and power exercised at the expense of vulnerable workers.
It is a far reach from this biblical exposé to our present circumstance, but that connection between old pages and contemporary life is always something of a far reach to be accomplished by faithful imaginative freedom. That connection has been made recently with great force at New International Financial and Economic Architecture Consultation on Labour that was convened in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia on August 21-23, 2023 (See Reformed Communiqué, December 2023). The consultation brought together theologians, church leaders, activists, and members of the Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management. The consultation took “labor” as essential to Gospel faith, because labor is crucial to the life of the world. The consultation recognized that labor is “not only a site of exploitation,” but is also “a site of resistance and the location from where alternatives could emerge.” It acknowledged that labor is an arena for wondrous diversity and solidarity. The consultation called on the church, the wider ecumenical movement, and all.
to the task of conscientization that empowers people to identify unjust sociopolitical structures that prevent everyone from achieving their full humanity” (p. 6).
Beyond that, the consultation urged all such players to assist in organizing work, to encourage worker solidarity, and to build alternatives including “worker cooperatives, community-based projects, and other projects of the solidarity economy.”
That is a mouthful as pertains to the life and work of a local congregation. We may nonetheless accent one particular point in the statement, namely, the work of conscientization. This usage is likely with an allusion to The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire who explored practical learning done in community that empowers vulnerable people to act in their own interest against structures of oppression. It is the mobilization of social power in the interest of the common good. Surely the church has no more important work to do than that of conscientization, the engagement of its members in the kind of learning that can let the church be knowingly involved in the wellbeing of those “left behind” by a predatory economy.
As derivative concerns that arise from this good work of education, the church can in more direct ways contribute to civic justice and wellbeing by being advocates for the following:
A livable minimum wage for those who work in the so-called service industry. For too long the ownership class has benefitted from low wages for such workers, our contemporary equivalent to King Jehoiakim’s workers who labored “for nothing.” The church may insist that every worker is entitled to a fair, livable wage.
Strong Unions. The organization of the labor force into strong unions is urgently required in the face of the power of concentrated wealth. It is imperative that workers have effective bargaining power in order that their interaction with “capital” should be a fair and legitimate exchange. Strong labor unions are essential to a functioning humane economy.
A guaranteed annual income. It becomes clear that a healthy economy can and must provide a floor of income for the disadvantaged and the left-behind. This is known to be economically viable. All that is required is the recognition that the common good is not well served by predatory greed and private concentrations of wealth but is well served by the common sharing of resources essential to life.
It seems clear enough to me that these two texts of necessity eventuate in such an accent on labor justice in the church. In the meantime we may wonder why it is that neither of these texts is ever heard in the church. They are never heard in the church because the church has been all too ready to sign on with status quo economics that has favored moneyed interests. The text tells otherwise!
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 448-449, reflects in his own time on the policies that caused surplus food to rot rather than to feed the hungry poor:
Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow…Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter pigs and bury them and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success…And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped potatoes, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listening to the screaming pigs in a ditch and covered with quicklime…In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage (448-449).
Steinbeck ends his paragraph with “grapes of wrath.” He took the phrase from Revelation 14:17-20, a reference to the harsh judgment of God that is sure to come. Steinbeck understood that a monopoly of life-sustaining food organized against the hungry would indeed evoke powerful wrath. The texts I have cited anticipate Steinbeck. There is, however, a way that life-sustaining resources can be shared. That way is support for the common good. Support for the common good against life-killing monopoly and concentration of wealth and power is the good work of the church. It happens through law and regulation that make life possible for the vulnerable. What is required is courage, even in the face of the misjudged self-interest of many of us. It is the work of the church to tell the truth in the face of our falsely constructed fake worlds.
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
