"The Real Economy"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Justice Sunday: March 28, 2010

Reading: Economic Justice from Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC)
While there has been significant progress in securing recognition of workers’ rights as human rights, these efforts are up against bigger challenges in the context of the global economic crisis. As employers seek to protect their bottom lines, it is often the workers who pay the price — since the turmoil that began on Wall Street mushroomed into economic decline around the world, millions of people have seen their livelihoods disappear. And although the recession has been tough on everyone, workers in the informal economy experience even greater strain.

The term “informal economy” refers to workers and workplaces that are not recognized or protected under legal and regulatory frameworks, and are characterized by a high degree of vulnerability. Around the world, the informal economy has exploded in size, indicated not only by the vast numbers of new workers drawn into these unprotected jobs, but also by the growing contributions of informal workers to their national economies. Under today’s global economic conditions, these figures will likely keep growing.

With the economic downturn as a backdrop, employers have claimed that raising wages, offering benefits, and keeping workers’ hours within reasonable limits would prevent them from remaining competitive. Instead, these employers opt for massive layoffs without severance, uncompensated overtime, cuts to benefits like health care, and increased informalization of employment contracts – all in the name of sustaining a business model driven by profit.

Unfortunately, these are conditions that many informal workers have faced for years. Their jobs have rarely, if ever, afforded them reliable income and long-term security. What is more, the informal sector expands during economically hard times, and informal workers experience greater deterioration of their livelihoods and working conditions, since they lack access to social safety nets to protect them.

In this context, UUSC’s Economic Justice partners continue their work of organizing informal workers to ensure the enforcement of labor laws that regulate wages and health and safety conditions, expand protections for informal workers, and form networks that build solidarity and strengthen the labor movement.

Sermon: The Real Economy by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
We don’t talk to each other about our pay.  You all can know my salary if you want to because you pay me and it’s public knowledge, but I don’t know yours.  The church doesn’t ask for or try to collect that information. It is considered impolite to talk about wages; in fact there is a strong “wage taboo” in our society. Because I don’t know, I assume most, if not all of us are middle class-you all look moderately prosperous, but I could be wrong. Thanx to Wal-Mart, we can all shop in the same place and “look”-at least-middle class in public. So those of us who are not doing well financially aren’t very visible to those who are. The poor don’t eat at fancy restaurants or shop in the same stores or go to church with the affluent, and the more invisible they are, the less the affluent know or care about them.

I just heard on the radio the US economy grew by 5.6% last quarter - Hurray!  That news coupled with the recent sustained rise in the Stock Market are good signs that this Great Recession may soon bottom out, and we will see a reduction in the hardship it is causing people.  But today, I want us all to take our focus off the Dow Jones and the politics of the Wall Street Bailout and to think about the real economy, the one we live in every day.  The recession has affected us all, but the poor have felt it in ways we who aren’t poor can barely imagine.  The poor, under good economic conditions, are only just surviving, but lately their plights are nothing less than an emergency situation. I hope the terrible economic news during this Great Recession has at least make us more more aware of the suffering of the poor, and the more visible poverty is the more likely we are to do what it will take to end it.  I’m glad the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee chose Economic Justice as the topic for this year’s Justice Sunday.  

While those of us who have been able to make enough money to save some for retirement worry about how hard investments were hit by the market collapse, those who have no savings have been hit even harder.  The debacle that began on Wall Street snowballed around the world as millions of workers lost their livelihoods in the avalanche.  There has been a rapid increase in workers in so-called “informal economy,” workers who are highly vulnerable to exploitation, and workers in the informal economy have experienced the greatest strain of all from the Great Recession.

In Kenya the informal sector accounts for three quarters of all jobs and women operate half of the small enterprises.  I’ll share the story of “a fruit seller in Kenya named Francis” as told by Jeremy Nickel in the UUSC Justice Sunday worship materials.  “Francis had to work to feed not only himself, but all the members of his family. Francis spent his days in the orchard and his evenings pushing his modest wooden wheelbarrow from market to market, calling to any with ears that he had the most wonderful mangoes, the freshest pineapples, the sweetest oranges and the ripest bananas.

The Kenyan government has been unstable since January 2008, after an election that ended with both sides feeling wronged and plenty of violence.  Literally overnight there was more competition for the fruit that Francis harvested to sell in the markets. As a result, he was able to get less fruit to market every day. And the sellers with stalls in the market, who were also feeling the strain, had begun to look at him and the other cart sellers with anger and even to turn a blind eye to the harassment Francis received from the local police.  Then the authorities took his wheelbarrow away, with no reason given. And when Francis got a new wheelbarrow some crooked authorities threw him in jail, on trumped-up charges.  When Francis was brought in front of a judge, he was not allowed to defend himself, and the judge came down very hard on him.

 Over the past several years informal vendors like Francis had been organizing, building alliances with other traders, hawkers, and vendors and getting trained by the Kenya National Alliance of Street Vendors and Informal Traders, called KENASVIT.  And it was exactly this training that Francis’s fellow vendors used to get him released, get his fine cut in half, and, most importantly, get his wheelbarrow and fruit returned. His life had been severely interrupted, but thanks to the quick thinking and action of his fellow vendors, Francis was led back to wholeness by regular people who had learned how to take a complicated and broken moment and calm it down and heal it.  And it is with pride that I tell you that KENASVIT is strongly supported by the UU Service Committee.”

Recently we sent money to Haiti through the UUSC to help earthquake victims.  I was reading in The Nation magazine last week about Haitians’ increasing frustration at the inability of foreign agencies to actually distribute aid.  One veteran Haitian social worker, who served two years with a large Washington D.C. non-profit organization with a multi-million dollar budget, says “Of all the money they send here, only 10 percent actually makes it to the ground.”  The well-meaning experts spend most of their efforts ineffectively trying to create new systems instead of reaching out to the community organizations already in place.    “The UUSC doesn’t work like this. Rather than taking western ideas and solutions and forcing them upon people deemed in need, UUSC partners with local groups like KENASVIT in order to empower people to free themselves from the oppressive systems that keep them from liberation.”

The UUSC has long been active globally and in the US in coalitions that recognize the valuable contributions of workers in the informal sector and which work to help them create reliable income and long-term security.  The economic downturn has only made conditions worse for minimum and low wage workers.  During economically hard times the informal sector expands, and low-wage workers experience greater deterioration of their livelihoods and working conditions,” and since the Clinton cuts to welfare and public housing, there is little left of American social safety nets.

In her bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed, a report on the living conditions of low-wage workers in America,  Barbara Ehrenreich tells how she tried and failed to make ends meet on, the prevailing rate for low-wage jobs tens years ago, which was between $6 and $7 per hour.  Today the Federal Minimum Wage is still only $7.25, and it is

worth less than when Eisenhower was President.  She tells that in all of her so-called “unskilled” jobs as a waitress, a motel housekeeper, a housecleaning maid, a nursing home aide and a Wal Mart “Associate,” in addition to being physically drained by the long hours of demanding work, she was required to concentrate and master new terms, tools and skills as well as to learn the human system of hierarchy, customs and standards - which she says, by the way, is harder to do from the bottom up.   her success in learning the ins and outs of each job, she was never able to afford a decent place to live, to have enough for a phone, TV, entertainment, or medical care, and certainly never had any money left over to save.  Most all the people with whom she worked displayed the traits essential to holding a job - punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, and obedience, and they wanted to do a good job. In spite of this, they could not get ahead.  Her experience put the lie to the claim that getting off welfare and getting a job was the ticket out of poverty.

I’ll tell you about just one of the many indignities she suffered during her sojourn into the world of low-wage workers.  One day her assignment as a member of a four woman team of Merry Maids was to dust.  Now this is no easy task when it involves shining every surface including windows and baseboards in a fifteen room mansion.  By the time she finished dusting, she was sweating profusely, but they were not allowed to drink anything while in a customer’s house.  Then her team leader assigned her to scrub the kitchen floor to help out another team member who was having back pain due to an injury she sustained as a child laborer picking blueberries.   Drops of sweat mixed in with the wash water as she scrubbed the floor with a sponge on their hands and knees - the Merry Maids were not allowed to use a mop.  All the while she labored the owner woman stood over her in the kitchen and never once offered her a drink of water, which she would have taken despite the rule.  As she completed the kitchen floor, the owner cleared her throat and said, “Let me show you a problem I’m having in the shower, the Marble is bleeding onto the fixtures.  Can you give the grout an extra scouring?”

Here’s what she thought: “That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the world-wide working class--the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this [McMansion], and now bend and squat to clean it.”

Ehrenreich says what surprised and offended her most about the low-wage workplaces was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and self respect.  As a waitress, her purse could be searched by management.  Drug testing, which civil libertarians see as an unreasonable search is often done with a technician watching as you urinate.  Rules against taking a break to urinate for as long as 6 hours, rules against gossip or even just talking, are illegal but put into force by employers who assume they won’t be caught.  How can we take pride in our democracy when half our population works in what amounts to authoritarian rule?

Now that the vast majority of the poor are working in low-wage Wal Mart or McDonald’s jobs and fall into an economic class far below those of us who can afford to pay for their services, what do we think of them?  Do we hold prejudices, ill-informed ideas about who they are and their potential as human beings?  I hope not.  We should not condescend to them.  In fact, recognizing our dependency on their underpaid labor for our own more affluent lifestyles, it is most appropriate for us to show our gratitude.  Ehrenreich says, “When someone works for less pay than she can live on--when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently--then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.  The “working poor,” as they are termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.”

The UUSC and its partner Let Justice Roll, a coalition of more than 90 faith, community, labor, and business organizations, are continuing the movement for a living wage by promoting “$10 by 2010” as an important, reasonable step toward making up lost ground in the value of the minimum wage and recognizing the valuable contributions of all workers in this economy.  A living wage, one that would provide not only for food and housing, but transportation, child care, health insurance and a chance to save a little for a rainy day, would be at least double the current minimum wage.   Employers of low wage workers are not likely to raise pay to anything like that level.  Countries that value their workers, in order to compensate for low wages, provide relatively generous public

services, such as subsidized housing, child care, health care and adequate public transportation. Call me a socialist if you want to, but this is what I’d like to see in America.

We need to replace the “structures and systems that prevent people from reaping the rewards of their hard work and sweat, that tell them they are of less value and insults their dignity, that keep them out of right relation with all of creation.”  Our Unitarian Universalist Principles tell us that all people deserve better.  “Thus, our call as a liberal religious community” is to work to help create a society in which people can meet their needs, strive toward their highest goals and know their best selves.
Go, and make economic justice.