In the classic book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, John Cobb's
afterward describes the following scenario:
In a letter to a friend, Madame de Sevigne writes about a
hanging she witnessed one morning. It was striking, she records, to see the
condemned man trembling during the preliminaries of the execution, when he was
a common peasant. He groaned and wailed incessantly, causing some amusement
among the ladies and gentlemen come to see the spectacle; once hoisted up, his
body wriggling in the noose, he presented, Madame de Sevigne remarked, a most
remarkable site.
We recoil at the callousness of that scene. Individuals coming
to watch a man's hanging is difficult to imagine by itself. But that phrase,
uttered by a member of the aristocracy, "It was striking to see the
condemned man trembling when he was a common peasant," puts us squarely
into another potentially troubling spot: class.
What was it that enabled this woman to watch this scene unfold
with disinterested fascination--and occasional amusement? What part of her
humanity had to be turned off to enable her to get through he initial groans,
trembles and wails and watch the final twitches of that man's life being
extinguished, focusing not on the nature of the punishment but rather on his
position in life?
Cobb suggests that the answer to that question lies in the fact
that the person being killed was a creature whose inner nature had little
relation to her own. As a good Christian, of course, this member of the
aristocracy had to believe that all were created equal in the site of God. But
fortunately God had not gone to the extreme of demanding that they look at
things among themselves in quite the same way.
When the word caste is applied to long ago societies in Europe,
it refers, beyond all barriers of custom and hereditary right to the notion
that people of different social stations belong to different species, that the
humanity or worthiness of a duchess has little to do with the kind of humanity
accessible to the common peasant. The foundation of this system is something
that Madame S refers to explicitly in another of her letters and that is the
humbling of inferiors to the maintenance of the social order.
I hear this story and I am tempted to shake my head and say,
"Pitiful them." They didn't get it. We've moved well beyond that. And
certainly we have made some progress.
But this idea that the kind of humanity of a wealthy person has
little to do with the kind of humanity accessible to a common peasant seems
potentially to have endured. I glimpsed the reality and pressures of a
low-income, minimum wage reality as a result of reading Nickel and Dimed: On
Not Getting By in America .
I want to step back for a moment and describe how I came to read
this book. It should be noted that the sermon title in the newsletter was
related to class and the Quad Cities. That sermon, a part of this year's series
on class, will come later. I need additional time to conduct more interviews.
Betty Gorsche told me that one of the long ago ministers that served this
congregation loved to give book reports and today's sermon is kind of like
that.
I came to read this book because last Spring I went to the
Prairie Star District's Minister's Retreat up in Minnesota and my colleague the
Rev. Lynn Strauss of River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda conducted a
workshop on class and Unitarian Universalism. She described growing up on the
hard streets of the South Side of Chicago. She grew up in a scenario that few
associate with Unitarian Universalism. Most look at Unitarian Universalism and
see a relatively privileged lot. For two days, she walked us through exercises
that put us in touch with how we viewed our growing up, how we viewed other
classes, the sometimes pain and shame that was associated with our social
location. I started to consider how my growing up in modest means in Galesburg
, IL impacted my understanding of theology, of church, of ministry.
It was not just the workshop that inspired me to read this book.
I have talked already this year about my growing desire to speak out in favor
of dissent and to celebrate the dissenters. Part of that desire is related to
the reaction that I recently read about to this book Nickel and Dimed by a
group of college students at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .
I have to read part of this article from the progressive
magazine, written by the author of Nickel and Dimed. It is called the
Antichrist of North Carolina. (excerpt read aloud but not transcribed)
I may be wrong, but what I take this to be about is not a group of hard headed
conservative young people, and trust me, having worked for a US Senator who
happened to be a North Carolina Democrat, I know how tough young North Carolina
conservatives can be. Rather, I believe that this reaction is related to
our discomfort with seeing what kind of humanity the working poor can access.
It is one thing to hear the figures: The wealthiest one percent
of households, those with 2.4 million or more, now own 40 percent of all
private wealth, more than the bottom 95 percent combined. This is double the
national wealth they owned in 1970. The inflation adjusted net worth of the
middle fifth of Americans went down 11 percent between 1983 and 1995. In that
time, the bottom 40 percent have seen their net worth decline by 80 percent.
But figures don't mean much to me. Stories mean a lot to me.
I had to read the book.
Barbara Ehrenreich had lunch with the editor of Harper's
magazine one day. They talked about possible articles. Eventually, the topic
drifted to one of her favorite subjects. How does anyone live on the wages
available to the unskilled? How were the folks about to be kicked off welfare
going to survive on jobs paying 6 to 7 dollars an hour? Then she uttered the
magical words: Someone ought to do the old fashioned kind of journalism, you
know, go out there and try it for themselves.
She decided that she would do just that. She picked three spots:
Key West Florida, Portland Maine and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. She would
spend one month in each setting. Find a job and see whether she could earn the
money in that time to pay a second month's rent.
Now I have to tell you that part of my seminary's orientation is
to take the incoming class to a rough and tumble neighborhood in Washington DC,
and make us survive on a day with only a dollar in our hand. The real purpose
was to show us some of the neighborhood outreach programs coming from
congregations in the community, but we were also supposed to, presumably,
experience hunger and so on. A ridiculous proposition. Barbara Ehrenreich
acknowledges the same thing: I was only visiting a world that others inhabit
full time, often for most of their lives. With all that I've built up, she
writes, there was no way I was going to experience poverty. My aim was more
straightforward: to see if I could match income and expenses. Besides, I've had
enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place
you would want to visit for touristic purposes: it just smells too much like
fear.
She reports being afraid, at first, that she would be outed as
being severely overqualified for these jobs. She soon became offended that no
one seemed in the least bit interested in what made her overqualified! From the
first day on, she writes, I find that of all the things that I have left
behind, such as home and identity, what I miss the most is competence!
Along the way there were indignities, some slight, some fairly
significant. While in Key West , she applied at a grocery store called Winn
Dixie. She was interviewed by a computer, which asked innocently enough, how
much money she had stolen in the last year. The job she eventually takes is in
a low wage restaurant called The Hearthside. One day, during a dead afternoon,
while glancing at a USA Today left behind by a customer, her supervisor catches
her. Her punishment was to vacuum the entire floor with a broken vacuum
cleaner, with a handle only two feet long, a job that required going from spot
to spot on your knees.
The first Friday she was working at the Hearthside a mandatory
staff meeting was called. (by the way, she worked from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. and
made $2.43 plus tips). After letting the staff know that a break room is a
right and not an entitlement, meaning that it could be taken away at any point,
Stu the manager, moves on to the purpose of the meeting. Apparently, there has
been gossip. Gossip (which apparently means employees talking amongst
themselves) must stop. Off duty employees are henceforth barred from eating at
the restaurant, because other servers gather around them and gossip."
Barbara thought that surely there was a kind of system in place
that helped nourish the poor, a secret that she might discover. She learned one
day, talking with Gail, another waitress, that such a system does not really
exist. Gail lived in a rented room in a downtown flophouse for 250 dollars a
week. She shared that room with a man, who has recently begun hitting on her.
She dreams of escaping. But there is no savings for her to enable her to pay
one month's rent AND the deposit needed on an apartment.
The author reflects on this insight. There are no secret
economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special
costs. If you can't put up the two month's rent you need to secure an apartment,
you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a
room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking up huge lentil stews
that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and
Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. If you
have no money for health insurance--and the plan at Hearthside's kicks in only
after 3 months--you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up
paying the price. She failed miserably in Florida , partially because she
needed to take a second job, as a housekeeper in the hotel attached to the
restaurant, in order to have any hope of having her income match her expenses.
She thought she could do the two job bit, as a waitress and a housekeeper, but
the pressure was too great. One day she walked out, left it behind, crying.
Later, with a thousand dollars in her pockets, she arrives in
Portland Maine . She rents a wrecked car and checks in to a Motel 6, which at a
rate of 59 dollars a night has her worried. She needs a job and an address
quick. In order to get a job, she needs an address, and in order to get an
address she needs a job. She fills out many applications, which means many
personality tests and many corporate messages sent to her via the process. One
particularly interesting question was Is there any room in the workplace for a
non-conformist (the answer is NO). She finds a job at The Maids, at 6.65
an hour, though as a punishment this will drop to 6 dollars for two weeks if I
fail to show up for a day. In order to make enough money to support her rent,
she works on the weekends as a dietary aide in a residential facility for those
with Alzheimer's. What is becoming clear, halfway through the book, is that one
of the real dangers of being among the working poor is that leisure time, down
time, family time is on the brink of extinction. So much energy and time is
spent scrapping that there is no time left for other ventures.
If witnessing brought on a series of indignities, house cleaning
brought on a world of hurt. The life of a house keeper is a life of deep pain.
At one especially affluent house, the kitchen floor is a stone like substance
and there are no knee pads. At another spot, it is hotter inside than out,
unairconditioned for the sake of the owner's baby. Barbara does fine until she
encounters a bank of glass doors that line the side and back of the ground
floor. Each has to be wiped and buffed unitil is is as streak less and
invisible as a can be. Outside, she sees some construction workers drinking
Gatorade, but the life of the maid is such that no fluid or food item can touch
a maid's lips when she is inside a client's house. Almost all of the workers
experience back pain, arthritis, chronic headaches. At one point, Barbara
Ehrenreich breaks out in a very painful rash, at which point she breaks out of
her experiment, calls her doctor in Florida and demands a prescription sight
unseen. Not an option for every one.
In this context, little things begin to take on much larger
proportions. One day she is outraged when looking at her routing sheet, telling
her what houses her team will cover. On the sheet the supervisor has put the
owner's hot button issues. She writes: Typical hot buttons are baseboards,
windowsills and ceiling fans, never of course poverty, racism or global
warming.
She wants to know, after a few weeks of working both as a maid
and as a dietary aide at the nursing home, what implications there are for the
spirit. If you hump away at menial jobs 360 days a year, does some kind of
repetitive injury of the spirit set in? She guesses that a bad case of tunnel
vision is inevitable. Work fills the landscape, coworkers swell to the size of
family members or serious foes. Slights loom large. When in the Twin Cities, she
works at a Wal Mart, she becomes territorial about her area, and mean-spirited
to a coworker that dares to cross into her clothing section.
While in Minnesota, Ehrenreich nearly goes to work for Menard's,
but a misunderstanding about wages dooms that possibility. It is more than a
misunderstanding; it appears to be a systemic attempt to mislead the employee,
who is moved immediately from applicant to orientee without a formal agreement
or contract. Barbara is told that she will make 10 dollars an hour in plumbing.
When the time comes to report for work, she is told that the 10 dollars an hour
statement is a mistake. More damming, she is told that her first shift will be
11 hours long without the possibility of time and a half.
I commend this book to you. I cannot capture the pressure felt
by the folks who worked in the six companies she joined as part of her
investigation. I cannot capture the difficulties of finding affordable housing.
But in this book, there are glimpses into the impact of our economy on our
people that are well worth seeing. There are insights here about the vicious
cycle that makes our economy one of extreme inequality and our culture too.
There are examples of the mistrust of employers against the underpaid people
whose labor they depend on and examples made operational, in the forms of
personality tests, drug tests, locked storerooms and hidden cameras.
And this atmosphere of repression takes its toll. The spirit of
our people, perhaps as much as 1/3 of our workers could qualify as severely
underpaid, is at stake. And when the spirit is at stake, a religion of life is
called to respond. I was at a wedding reception last night in Galesburg, and an
elderly woman and I were talking. I asked her about the community she grew up
in in rural Illinois. It nearly died, she said, but then we got a prison. How
do we ethically evaluate an economy where two of the biggest growth industries
are prison construction and the building of gated residential communities, one
religious writer asks?
Al religions include diverse social teachings. These teachings
can prop up brutal, life-denying dictatorships. These teachings can quietly
support the status quo. These teachings can become forces for change and
liberation.
We will take up a discussion of class, in three sermons this
year, in order that we might check in on the social teachings of our faith and
how they impact our real lives. We will take up a discussion of class, in order
to glimpse the possibility of a common man on his gallows trembling, in our day
and time, that we might walk away from our detached fascination and jump in and
see what response in the direction of liberation might be possible.
Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Rev. Roger Butts