UUSC JUSTICE SUNDAY: DIGNITY AND THE LIVING WAGE

March 26, 2006

A Sermon By

The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale

I had to go to Alphagraphics on Oracle Road Friday morning, so I happened to catch the demonstration which was taking place on the west side of Oracle just north of Ina. People were shouting and waving signs and honking horns. I could make out the words “Derechos Humanos” on several of the signs. I asked the employee behind the counter what was going on. He thought it was something to do with migrant rights, and that they were waiting for Senator Jon Kyl to show up – he was due along there any time, he said. As I returned to my car, I tried to make out the other signs, but I couldn’t.

Curtiss and I got up very early to go hiking yesterday morning, so I hoped to look in the newspaper when we got back to see if there were any articles on the demonstration, but Curtiss accidentally threw the paper on the roof, so I was relegated to searching the internet. I put in “Derechos Humanos,” and voila! There was an article from KVOA in Phoenix which said the demonstration there had drawn 20,000 people and was probably the largest ever in that city. And, by the way, rallies had also taken place in Tucson, LA and Atlanta. The Border Action Network had called these rallies to protest the bill the US House passed in December which, if passed by the Senate, would make it a felony to be illegally in the US, would impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and would erect those notorious fences along a third of our border with Mexico.

According to the internet article, the rallies were billed with the statement, “We are not the enemy, we are part of the solution.” The activities that have taken place here in Arizona lately certainly have been targeting immigrants from Mexico as the enemy: the patrols of the Minutemen near Douglas, the usual deaths of those who get lost or are abandoned or are run over by agents chasing them recklessly, the increase in Border Patrol agents, and on and on. The image of the fence calls to mind the Berlin Wall and the walls they’re putting up in Israel now to keep the Palestinians out. The situation is out of hand, but the solutions are as well—at least, the solutions being tried.

It’s important to consider why so many people are trying to get into the United States from Mexico: they come to try to make a better living. The realities of Mexico’s depressed economy and its injustice toward the campesinos, as well as the economies and injustices of the countries of Central America, drive people to our country in hopes of survival and betterment. And these people are willing to work for whatever they can get, which is usually a lot more than what they could make in their own countries, if that was anything at all.

This is the major tension: people come into our country, willing to work for very little, and businesses want or need to hire them to make ends meet, or so we are told. I read an interesting editorial in Thursday’s Arizona Daily Star. They were the opinions of Todd Rothrock, the CEO of a Tucson company called Steel Dor. He pointed out that we Americans need to bring our expectations of a certain level of living into alignment with what we’re willing to pay for goods and services, expectations which are at odds at the moment. We want cheap goods and also want to be paid for our labor at a decent wage. In today’s global economy, those two don’t jive. As Rothrock put it, “We as Americans have become greedy and lazy beyond a tolerable point. We constantly complain about the poor performance of our 401(k) in the stock market, yet we cry and whine about the cost of the items we buy from the same companies we expect dividends from.”

In spite of Rothrock’s caustic observation of our behavior, he does have a point. He also says that “this is where immigrant labor comes into the picture. It allows for American companies to exist in this hostile marketplace” of competition from off-shore sites like China. When immigrant workers are willing to work for 40% less than their American counterparts, companies will pursue that workforce instead, just to be competitive. (Guest Opinion: The Price for better paying jobs is proportionate to inflation, by Todd M. Rothrock, AZ Daily Star, 3-23-06)

Well, I have some questions about all this. One is to ask how come companies which slash their worker’s pay or benefits in one year then turn around and report record profits in the same year? Or here is another question: why are American CEOs paid 455 times more than their workers, on average, when European and Japanese CEOs are paid only 12 to 22 times more?

There is little trust in the corporate world right now. Witness the Delta Airlines pilot strike; they may bankrupt the company, or the company will bankrupt itself, because they can’t trust each other to deal honestly at the negotiations table. Witness the movie Syriana, the one for which George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor. In Syriana, giant oil companies with interests around the world make puppets of Presidents and Emirs alike, all in the name of their own huge profits. The corporate universe has been the bad guy since long before unions even existed, but now its reputation is so bad that trashing it is the entertainment highlight of the year.

One possible solution to this problem could come from every business being required to pay a living wage to their employees. It would help with the immigration problem because they couldn’t exploit immigrant workers, making those jobs competitive to domestic American workers. Of course, as Rothrock implied in his editorial, that would only work if Americans are willing to accept the inflation that will come with paying everyone a living wage.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, our social justice arm of our UU congregations, is working right now to support the Living Wage Movement here in our country and around the world. The Living Wage Movement began just four years ago in Santa Fe, as this Labor Fact sheet tells us, because a man named Jimmie Martinez went to work one day to discover that the store he worked at was going out of business and being bought out by Lowe’s, an anti-union firm. Almost all the union workers were not hired back, and salaries which had been in the $10 to $16-an-hour range were scaled down to $6 and benefits cut. Jimmie got so mad that he rallied activists from many organizations including religious and civic, and got a living wage ordinance passed 7 to 1 by the City Council. Since this ordinance is now under attack by the New Mexicans for Free Enterprise, our own UUSC has joined other social justice organizations in filing an amicus curiae brief (friend of the court) to support the City of Santa Fe.

UUSC is also focusing energy on Arizona, because our state is one of three where Living Wage or Minimum Wage Initiatives will be coming up for consideration on the ballot in November. Our Arizona initiative was started by a lawyer here in Tucson, Bob Schwartz. He titles his website “5.15 Isn’t Working,” referring to the federal minimum wage requirement of $5.15. His initiative proposes a graduated increase in the minimum wage here, beginning in July of 2007 with a modest increase of .80, and then another .80 increase the next year.

I say “modest” because the statistics are actually appalling. I shared some of them with those of you who were here for the Journey Toward Wholeness Service in January. The most outrageous one is this: that an employee working full-time, year-round, at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour earns only $10,700 a year, $5000 below the federally-designated poverty level for a family of three. The Federal Minimum Wage hasn’t been raised since 1997. If you compare the 1968 minimum wage to 2004’s using 1996 dollars as the constant, the 1968 minimum wage is equal to $7.21 an hour whereas the 2004 minimum wage is equal to $4.42.

The right to earn a living wage is a right listed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No one should have to live in poverty, especially if they work full-time, especially here in our country with today’s technology and money and position in the global community. And yet, the 2003 census reported 35.9 million people living below the poverty line. Of those people working at the minimum wage, 79 percent are adults and of those adults, 60 percent are women.

This is a justice issue which our faith is taking up. The UU Service Committee needs our help not only in supporting its work here in the United States, but all around the world. Emily Ricketts, our UUSC representative, will tell us more about it in a little while, and we will have two offerings, the second one to invite you to join the work of the UUSC.

But if you have questions about this Living Wage Movement, and especially the ballot initiative in November, I encourage you to go to the websites and look around. Visit the Let Justice Roll website which is the interfaith effort toward dignity and the living wage. Visit the 5.15 Isn’t Working website and read the Arizona initiative. And visit uusc.org to learn about our own organization’s efforts to bring dignity and health and hope to a significant percentage of our population.

The border situation is a justice situation as well, and there are no easy solutions, but offering a living wage to everyone who works might just help equalize the stresses, and allow for people to take better care of themselves, their families and their communities. Let us take up this justice work together.