I’ll be away this week driving to Spokane, Washington to participate in the installation of my friend and mentor, Dr. Richard Erhardt, at his new congregation there. Richard once wrote down a number of interesting comments he heard while guest preaching in Unitarian Universalist congregations one summer. He shared these in his column in First Days Record, a journal by and for UU ministers.[1]

One person told him, “Well my friend wanted to know about Unitarian Universalism so I sent her a pamphlet that was totally incomprehensible. I didn’t understand a word of it.” “Why would you want to do that?” Richard replied. “I wanted her to know that we are intellectuals.”

Another person said, “Reverend, that sermon of yours was so thought provoking, so intellectually stimulating, I’m sure the theists hated it. They’re so brainwashed.” To which Richard, who has spoken powerfully with me about his belief in God, replied, “I am a theist.” There was a pause, after which the person said, “That’s an interesting color suit you’re wearing.”

Speaking of suits, another person approached Richard and said, “Just a bit of advice dear, don’t wear a dark suit in the pulpit. It makes you look so Presbyterian.”

The last quotation Richard recorded was of someone who declared, “Well of course we’re small! We are the elite among the religions!”

People have a tendency to group each other into classes. UU’s are no exception. Intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Theists and Humanists. And heaven forbid any of us should be confused for dark-suit-wearing Presbyterians! At best, such classification might suggest clues about where someone in the classified group is coming from. At worst, we can merely see a person’s perceived group and not the person him or herself.

Most often, we use the word “class” to describe someone’s wealth, income, or occupation. We speak of “the underclass,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper class,” “the ruling class.” Class can be difficult for us Americans to discuss. We tend to see ourselves as a society where, through hard work and dedication, anyone can fulfill their material dreams.

And there’s much to be said for this idea. Just this week, I was talking with a man from Albania. He’s been in this country for eight years and is building a carpentry business with his brother that employs five workers. He contrasted the opportunity in America with the lack of it in his homeland and is happy to live here.

But there are millions for whom “the American dream” remains painfully elusive. For these there is not only the deprivation of poverty but its shame as well. Consider that our negatively-connoted English words “villain,” “clown,” and “vulgar” all once referred to peasants or common people—that is, to the poor. If the poor are poor, many of us tell ourselves, it must be their own fault, for being lazy, or spendthrift.

A few years ago, bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich decided to explore poverty in America firsthand. In her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Ehrenreich describes how she took a series of low wage, so-called “unskilled” jobs (waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart employee) and lived as well as she could on the meager pay.

One thing she discovered was that there’s really no such thing as an “unskilled” job. Each position demanded she acquire any number of skills, often under great pressure from managers and coworkers. Much of the work was extremely physically demanding and socially demeaning. She met many people who worked hard and took a pride in what they did that bore no relationship to the insulting financial compensation.

Toward the end of the book, Ehrenreich reflects, “My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being “reamed out” by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is actually what you’re worth.”

She points out that The Economic Policy Institute did a meta-study of what constitutes a “living wage” for a family of one adult and two kids. They came up with a figure of $30,000 a year or $14 an hour. What does $14 an hour buy? Ehrenreich tells us that such a family “budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed center…. But it does not include restaurant meals, video rentals, Internet access, wine and liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets, or even very much meat.” Unfortunately, 60% of American workers make less than $14 an hour. In fact, the typical entry-level wage is less than half that. Some people get by with pooling their incomes or with the limited government help that exists. Some just suffer.

In a memorable passage, Barbara Ehrenreich tells us, “It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition—austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are “always with us.” What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The “home” that is also a car or van. The illness or injury that must be “worked through,” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans—as a state of emergency.”[2]

I have some experience with being “nickel and dimed” myself. Back in ’92, I had just graduated college and moved to New York’s East Village to volunteer with homeless young adults. The organization I volunteered with provided a small apartment I shared with three or four other guys and meals when we were staying with the program’s “residents.” For food the rest of the time and for all other needs, we had to find work. The country, you’ll recall, was then going through tough economic times and New York City’s unemployment rate was (as usual) about double the national rate. It was a sad day when, after searching for work for some time without success, I was turned down by McDonald’s. Not even they were hiring.

I did work for a few hours as a bike messenger. The pay was based on the number of deliveries we made, instead of an hourly rate. It didn’t take me long to realize I would have to just about kill myself to even make the equivalent of minimum wage—with the added benefit of being bellowed at over payphones by a dispatcher named “Wolf.” So I quit by noon, but not before I had a humiliating but enlightening experience. I went to make a delivery at a certain office building. As I passed through the door, I was stopped by a security guard and told I had to use the “delivery” door. I heard the message loud and clear. I was now a second-class citizen. I did some temporary office work and eventually was hired by a “mom and pop” record and video store. For a couple weeks, I was on a sub-minimum wage “training” rate. I knew that wasn’t right, but didn’t feel like I could do anything about it. I had to eat.

As anyone who has worked retail knows, there are always some people who see someone behind a counter as a convenient target for verbal abuse. Sometimes, I found myself resentful of people casually buying concert tickets or stacks of CD’s and videos I knew I had no way of affording. I’m still paying off the debts I ran up on my credit cards through the early years of my adulthood just to live a rather low-key lifestyle. I was male, white, from a middle class background, with a college degree. I can only imagine the despair that must grip people without such advantages.

My story pales to many others. Everywhere I look, I see capable, hard-working people search endlessly for a job that pays them what their work deserves. The middle class in America is a sinking ship. The working class and the underclass of chronically unemployed people are beneath the waves and struggling to occasionally come up for air. Real wages have largely remained stagnant from the 1970s to the present. By contrast, the US Gross Domestic Product, the total value of all goods and services rendered has increased (when adjusted for inflation) from one trillion dollars in 1970 to ten trillion dollars today. Why haven’t the salary and wages of the people that do the work in our ten trillion dollar economy increased tenfold as well? Why haven’t they even so much as doubled?

To bring the picture into sharper focus, I turn to some statistics from James Dang at Tulane University: According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, from 1979 to 1997, the after-tax income of the top one percent of households increased 157 percent but the average American only saw a 10 percent gain, and the bottom 10 percent of families actually became poorer. Even with both parents working, the rising costs of child care, education and health care have eroded the discretionary income of middle class Americans so they actually have less money left to spend….[3]

In recent years, the wealthiest one percent of Americans have received 90% of all gains in personal income.[4]

According to Business Week, in 1980, CEO’s were paid 42 times the wage of the average blue-collar worker. By 1990, the disparity between “the shop floor and the executive suite” had reached 85 times. And, by the beginning of this decade, the man on top (and it’s usually a man) made an astounding 531 times as much as the men and women doing the hands-on work.[5] According to Plato, the ratio in a just society between the incomes of the richest and poorest should be no more than four to one. Five-hundred thirty-one to one is long, long way from that.

This victory of the rich at the expense of the poor is explained by Hagbard Celine, a character in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s three-part novel of ideas, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Hagbard Celine is the captain of his own submarine full of free spirits who have stopped playing by the normal rules of “civilization.” In one scene, Celine has slipped into a black tie dinner at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations. He begins to lecture a table of bankers, industrialists, and an idealistic Harvard professor on the nature of privilege.

“Privilege,” says the captain, “is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special favors or benefits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster,” he goes on, “is ‘not subject to the usual rules or penalties.’ The invaluable thesaurus gives such synonyms as power, authority, birthright, franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I’m sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in this club, don’t we, gentlemen?” Celine challenges. “Do I have to remind you,” he goes on, “of the Latin roots, privi, private, and lege, law, and point out in detail how we have created our Private Law …?”

Later on, Celine talks about how privilege plays out in the marketplace, “Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage…. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses.”[6]

What are some of the ways class privilege, “Private Law,” skews how wealth and opportunity are distributed in our country? There’s access to education. Some kids have computers, swimming pools, international travel. Others have crumbling schools, unsafe classrooms, unqualified teachers. When time comes for college, the children of the rich can count on “legacy” preferment when they send in their applications, even as minority kids are having modest affirmative action plans abolished. It goes without saying that those who ride family coattails into prestigious universities are not always the smartest or most qualified applicants.

Then there’s access to elected officials. The simple fact of our campaign finance system is that our leaders, from local mayors to the President, are expected to pay more attention to the interests and ideas of large contributors than to the rest of us. At the founding of this country, generally only white males who owned a certain amount of property were entitled to vote. Our voting laws have changed but one might question if the basic equation about who has a say is much different now than then. To a large extent, dollars have replaced votes in deciding who will govern, even in who will be considered a “viable” candidate.

And then there’s access to the basic necessities of life. Did you ever consider how there’s a minimum wage but no maximum wage? The Federal minimum wage is $5.15. That, you might recall from The Economic Policy Institute’s estimates, is about one third the wage a mom or dad and two kids need to live a humane existence. I guess $5.15 is plenty if you have the kind of family that only wants to eat one out of three meals or have the kind of landlord that’s satisfied with only receiving rent one month out of three…

On the maximum wage end, we have Bill Gates, who, last I saw,[7] was making $3 billion a year. Let’s just assume for a moment that Mr. Gates worked 40 hours a week. I don’t know if that’s the case—let’s face it, when you’re net worth is $46 billion, “work” is pretty much an optional activity—but if he worked a typical 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, how much would his annual income work out to as an hourly wage? One and a half million dollars an hour. These are rough economic times? You could have fooled Bill Gates.

I see similar class conditions playing out in our own backyard. At Stamford Hospital and the Tandet Center, both owned by the nonprofit Stamford Health System, many of the lower-paid workers have been fighting the loss of health benefits and layoffs and have been working without a contract for months. At the same that the workers are being asked to give up their jobs or their heath coverage, the top executives of the Health System have gotten raises that give them a significantly higher income than their counterparts at other area hospitals. In 2002, the top 10 execs at the supposedly nonprofit Stamford Health System had an average income of over half a million dollars. Many of the workers being asked to sacrifice make the sub-living wage of $11 an hour.

Though the Health System couldn’t find the money to pay its workers decently, they did somehow find the money (they won’t say how much) to pay the notorious anti-union law firm, Jackson Lewis.

I got a taste of the “hardball” tactics being used in this battle to keep Stamford’s working poor in their place when I went with other local clergy to present a petition to the management. The petition contained 1400 signatures of local people, some of them from this congregation, in support of a fair deal for the workers. The signatures were stapled together into a scroll 31 feet long!

We were told that the CEO, Brian Grissler, who we hoped to deliver the petitions to, was out. So a lesser personage, the HR director, was the one who was dispatched to bear the workers’ grievances. Before we left, the office suite had filled with the hospital’s security guards, who formed a human chain guarding the president’s office from a completely peaceful group of clergy and hospital workers.

When we withdrew to the hospital cafeteria for a brief meeting afterwards, the sound system there blared music, by order of the management, to drown our words. Our requests to turn down the music were rejected and security insisted with all leave the premises.

But apparently we weren’t the only ones who left. Someone told us the president of the hospital was spotted slipping out a back door! It’s something when a highly paid executive, with all his credentials, and starched, white shirt feels the need to slip away like a thief in the night…. On a grander scale, we recently saw the overthrow of the elected President of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide. What can we learn about class from this incident? Well, the first thing we notice is that it involves the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, and the richest country in the world, the US.

Jeffrey Sachs, who had visited Haiti in 2001 and met Aristide himself, published a gripping article[8 shortly before the President left the country. Here’s how he describes the situation of the people there:

“[Haiti had] a standard of living comparable to sub-Saharan Africa despite being only a few hours by air from Miami. Life expectancy was 52 years. Children were chronically hungry. Of every 1,000 children born, more than 100 died before their fifth birthday. An AIDS epidemic, the worst in the Caribbean, was running unchecked. The health system had collapsed. Fearing unrest, tourists and foreign investors were staying away, so there were no jobs to be had. Nevertheless, the common people he met had great hope that President Aristide, whom they had reelected in a landslide, would be successful in lessening poverty in the country. Then he talked with “senior officials in the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Organization of American States.”

I expected to hear that these international organizations would be rushing to help Haiti. Instead, I was shocked to learn that they would all be suspending aid, under vague "instructions" from the US. Washington, it seemed, was unwilling to release aid to Haiti because of irregularities in the 2000 legislative elections, and was insisting that Aristide make peace with the political opposition before releasing any aid.

Sachs took great offence at this revelation, writing,

“The US position was a travesty. Aristide had been elected president in an indisputable landslide. He was, without doubt, the popularly elected leader of the country -- a claim that President George W. Bush cannot make about himself.”

Aristide, now in exile in Africa, is suing the US for allegedly forcing him out of the country. One thing is certainly clear: Our government, supposedly dedicated to promoting democracy, did nothing to save another democracy in crisis.

It was not the first time Aristide had been deposed. In 1991, he was overthrown by rebels tied to the old Duvalier family dictatorships the US had supported for decades. That was shortly after he planned to have the minimum wage in Haiti raised from 14 to 50 cents an hour. He was then returned to Haiti by the US three years later, after pledging to scrap plans for economic reforms as a condition of his return.[9] There are over 60 US companies that do business in Haiti and benefit from the obscenely low wages there. Their stockholders can now rest assured that the man who tried to help the workers is safely gone.

Is this too cynical an interpretation? Consider another scene from the interaction of these two countries, the hemisphere’s richest and poorest. In 1915, the US sent Marines to Haiti to suppress a popular rebellion and install its own hand-picked President sympathetic to its own business interests. Fifty-thousand Haitians died, including men women, and children Marines shot dead from airplanes for sport.[10] US Marines stood in the aisles of the National Assembly with bayonets until the man chosen by the American Minister was “elected.”

The man who’d led those Marines, General Smedley Butler, after he’d left the military, devoted his life to exposing the class conflicts that underlie so much of what our country has done around the world. Butler started with a speech at an American Legion convention here in Connecticut in 1931, in which he said,

“I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”[11]

Then or now, “democracy” has too often been just a euphemism for the interests US industrialists. In a similar way, the use of the term “the economy” is often a euphemism for the interests of corporate managers and big stockholders rather than the average person. Too often the poor and middle class have accepted the very policies that grind them down.

It’s not inevitable that it has to be like this, with the US lording it over the world and our own billionaires lording it over the rest of us. The US is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is designed to guarantee basic political and economic rights of every person. It’s time that we demand the enforcement of the Universal Declaration.

Our own Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes call us to affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Can we say that people’s worth and dignity is being honored if they don’t have a roof over their head, food in their stomachs, a responsible person to watch their kids, healthcare when they’re sick? Governments and corporations can live in the illusion that a person’s worth is his or her net worth. We, as people of faith, cannot live by that lie. The great teachers of the world’s religions have taught us the way of love and justice and warned us against the dehumanizing seductions of greed.

What can we do?

The first thing we can do is start here at UUSIS. I challenge this congregation to bring our sexton, Glenn Brown’s pay up to a living wage, bringing it up to at least $14 an hour. Yes, I know he’s part-time. Part-time status is often used as an excuse for substandard pay. But, I’ve asked myself the last few days, “Should a person’s necessity of holding two or three jobs be held against him or her as a penalty? Because someone is part time, does that mean they work less hard than a full time person? Or that he or she lives in a world where the cost of living is less?” I feel confident that this congregation will pass a budget for the next fiscal year that will include this raise in pay as a matter of principle.

Also, we can learn to recognize our own prejudices about people richer or poorer than ourselves, welcoming all equally.

We can give generously for the benefit of those less fortunate. We can vote for leaders who will stand up for the rights of everyone. We can educate ourselves about how class systems work, domestically and internationally. We can live more simply as we learn to separate needs from wants. We can speak out for those whom our society renders “invisible.” We can refuse the luxury of despair. We can set our sights on a world where, as Judy Chicago says, “all will share equally in the Earth's abundance…. And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.”

Notes:

[1]	First Days Record, October 1997
[2]	Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 211-14.
[3]	“The eroding middle class: An independent perspective” by James Dang. Tulane Hullabaloo Online, 2004 (http://hullabaloo.tulane.org).
[4]	Published on Friday, March 12, 2004 by CommonDreams.org “Creating a Genuine 'Opportunity Society'" by Senator Edward M. Kennedy A Speech Delivered at the City University of New York Graduate Center Center for the Humanities’ “Re-imagining the Welfare State” Conference on March 1, 2004.
[5]	“CEO Pay is Outrageous and It’s Undemocratic” by Douglas Mattern. Commondreams.org, June 30, 2001 (http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0630-04.htm)
[6]	The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. (New York: MJF Books, 1975) 553-54.
[7]	Super rich getting richer Economy shines on Fortune 400 By Theresa Agovino THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/6807166.htm)
[8]	Published on Monday, March 1, 2004 by the Taipei Times / Taiwan The Fire This Time in Haiti was US-Fueled The Bush Administration Appears to have Succeeded in its Long-Time Goal of Toppling Aristide Through Years of Blocking International Aid to his impoverished Nation by Jeffrey Sachs
[9]	Published on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org Occupational Hazards The First US Takeover of Haiti set the Stage for Later Interventions by Greg Guma
[10]	Addicted to War: Why the US Can’t Kick Militarism by Joel Andreas, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002).
[11]	Published on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org Occupational Hazards The First US Takeover of Haiti set the Stage for Later Interventions by Greg Guma