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| Detail from a window at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Ferguson. |
Earlier this week, a judge
in the city of St. Louis, the heart of the metropolitan area where I live,
ruled that the recently-passed law which sought to gradually raise the minimum
wage to eleven dollars an hour by 2018 was unconstitutional under state law,
since it contradicted the state minimum wage. There is a lot of push-back in
some quarters against raising the minimum wage. Some people claim that such a
raise will cost jobs and raise prices. It would be refreshing to actually look
at, rationally, the costs and benefits, as well as the history of the minimum
wage in this country, free of ideology. I am not so foolish to think that will
happen anytime soon.
But one of the arguments against
raising the minimum wage troubles me greatly. There is a narrative out there
that states that those who work in what are called “menial” jobs do not deserve
to earn what would be termed a living wage. This would be a wage that, if one
is working 40 hours a week, would enable that person to be able to attain food,
shelter, health care, transportation of some sort. There is a disdain inherent
in this attitude that overlooks our interdependence on all sectors of workers
in order to build a unified economy and a unified society.
Essayist and poet Kathleen
Norris, in her book The Quotidian
Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work,” spoke of a moment of in-breaking
clarity once when she attended a wedding in a Catholic Church. Being relatively
unchurched, she was sitting at the back after the communion had been
distributed, watching the proceedings, when she suddenly tugged on her fiance’s
sleeve: “Look at that! The priest is cleaning up! He’s doing the dishes!” She
goes on to explain her sense of wonder: “I found it remarkable—and still find
in remarkable—that in that big fancy church, after all of the dress-up and the
formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that
we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink. The chalice, which
had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception.” Those of us who have
served on the altar guild, or as acolytes, deacons, or priests, can affirm:
even at the Lord’s Supper, someone’s got to do the dishes. And sweep, and
polish, and press linen.
How easy it is to take for
granted the holiness of simple, plain work in making our lives together! It is
a common conceit that if one wants something to seem fancy, one must attach a
fancy name for it. A good example is in Ms. Norris’s use of the word
“quotidian” rather than its synonym, “everyday.” We downgrade the menial,
repetitious, yet necessary labor upon which we are all dependent, and take it
for granted that this kind of labor requires no skill and therefore deserves
marginal compensation and no honor. Let’s also note that Ms. Norris’s title
also places “women’s work” in quotations, as an acknowledgement that this label
has been used traditionally to denigrate and marginalize said work—the cooking,
cleaning, mending, and caring for the needs of the family-- that traditionally
was performed by those within the household whose work was vital, yet
unhonored.
Minimum wage workers are
often engaged in the service sector of the economy, with making and providing
access to food, cleaning, and caring for the needs of others. In other words,
work that has ties very often to that same “menial” work once centered in the
home. Work that also, traditionally, was unpaid. Work that is still not seen as
“noble,” in and of itself--regardless of the alleged fascination with the
so-called “self-made man or woman” that runs through American civic mythology. P.
J. O’Rourke once remarked, “Everyone wants to save the planet; nobody wants to
help Mom do the dishes.” Unpaid and low-pay work is often invisible work, but
it is still work that matters. And it’s not just fast-food workers who have
seen their work devalued over the last many years: masons, carpenters,
mechanics, and other trades have seen their standards of living, and their
ability to pay their bills, plummet.
In our gospel reading for
this Sunday, Jesus asks us to reexamine the issue of status and privilege. James
and John ask Jesus to give them positions of honor when he comes into his glory.
As the other
disciples catch wind of it and begin arguing among themselves, one imagines how
patient Jesus must have been to see once again that his message has gotten
completely lost.
Then
as well as now.
Sometimes the
greatest among us are those who are the lowliest- the ones whose labor in the most
modest corners of the economy make it possible for others in more “esteemed,
positions to do their own work more effectively. It is in the most self-effacing
activity that we often show the most love for each other, or support our own
disparate vocations. As the gospels show us again and again and again, it is in
feeding each other, healing each other, tending to each other, comforting each
other, that we are most united as community. The humblest work is that which
Jesus commends to us as the greatest work, because it tends to basic needs. It
is in the prosaic that self-giving is often found. Might we recognize the
dignity inherent in such work, and in those who perform such labor, and honor
that work not just with platitudes but just compensation?
(This was first posted at The Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul for October 16, 2015.)
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