O Workers, Can You Stand It?

O Workers,  Can You Stand It?

Rev. Robin Landerman Zucker

First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh

September 2, 2012

Seen any political ads lately? I would assume the answer is “Yes,”  unless you never ever ever watch  TV,  or you have been under a rock for the past couple months.

In one series of anti-Romney ads that have run fairly consistently, a former paper mill worker from Indiana tells the story of building a platform for visiting executives from Bain Capital who proceed to fire the entire workforce and shutter the mill that very day. He recalls, “I looked around and realized we had built our own gallows, and well, it made me sick.”

In another version, a woman fired from a Bain-owned company two years prior to retirement and receiving her pension, laments how her health insurance was cancelled, and as she remembers, Well, it broke my heart.”

There may or many not be a third ad in this series in which the former employee confides that the wholesale obliteration of his livelihood, “crushed his spirit.” If not, it would be a fitting finale to the other two. 

These ads are effective for several reasons:

1. They spotlight the priorities of venture capital firms like Bain- chop up companies, sell the profitable pieces, close down the unprofitable (or expendable) ones, and make big buckets of money, regardless of the human cost.

2. They lift up the physical, emotional and spiritual effects that collude when a person loses their job, their livelihood, and their vocation. Or, when the prospect of even having a livelihood or vocation is crushed and seems unattainable.

3. They ask us to consider the cost of consuming cheap foreign made goods in America, and how we consume and consume on the backs of a diminished human workforce who used to actually make things, right here in America.

4. They remind us that labor unions have been weakened by political and social forces to the point where companies like Bain can actually get away with such wanton disregard for decent Americans who work in paper mills and shoe factories and aluminum plants.

We cannot deny the tendency of human nature towards greed. Many of Mohandas Gandhi’s sayings are famous, but one that is appropriate for Labor Day is, “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.” O workers, how can you stand it?

I have always admired people who can make things – not just fancy things or artsy things, but make things like 2 ton steel pipes, motherboards, and gigantic, perfectly sliced redwood lumber planks I saw stacked up in lumber yards in Northern California.

And I admire countries that value people who make things, whether in factories, or cottages, or blacksmithing huts. I admire the America that once valued its factory workers and its craftspeople enough to safeguard their jobs and wages.

Statistically, we are either #1 or  #2 behind China in global manufacturing production. Although this may shock you (it certainly surprised me), the truth is that we manufacture goods in America more than ever before, but technology has replaced human beings on the factory floor.

We still “do the work,” yet, in the past decade, six million manufacturing jobs disappeared and about as many people work in manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even though the American population is more than twice as large today.

Some would say this is inevitable progress, and it is. Yet, as the Rev. Martin Luther King so astutely noted: “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

For instance, one problem that arises here is that the workers who have been replaced by machines still have a human and social need to be of use, to submerge in a task, to derive a sense of self worth and identity from their labor.

And this dimension cannot be quantified through cost analysis (at least not financial cost analysis). On the balance sheet of emotional, social or spiritual cost analysis? Well, there the expense is high and the revenue quite low. Neither bread nor roses in the bottom line.

In an article for the Atlantic Magazine (Jan/Feb 2012) entitled, Making It In America, journalist Adam Davidson visits the Standard Motor Parts plant in Greensville, SC, to profile the state of manufacturing in the US through the lens of two employees, an unskilled worker named Maggie and a skilled worker named Luke.

Maggie, who has no higher education, completes an assembly process for fuel injectors. The only reason Maggie has a job at all, according to the owner Larry Sills (who seems like a decent person),  is because the part she assembles is too fragile to ship overseas to be completed by lower wage workers in their facilities in Poland, Mexico and China.

Luke fares better. He is one of a new class of factory workers who possess the advanced math skills and machine tool technology training to operate a complex (and obscenely expensive) machine called the Gildemeister. In the past, three –four people (and their own single machines) would have been needed to perform the functions of this one astounding apparatus.

South Carolina has been particularly hard hit by this shift. After NAFTA and later the opening of China to global trade, mills in Far East and Mexico were able to produce and ship textiles more cheaply, shuttering one mill after another. The ones that continued to operate replaced workers with autonomous computer run machines.

There’s a joke in cotton country (one of those not-really-so-funny jokes) that a modern factory employs only a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machine.

Politicians give us faux facts and what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” about job creation, but the reality of manufacturing costs in the US underscores why the job crisis will be so difficult to solve.

If you grew up in one of the blue collar towns in the Mon Valley (and maybe some of you did), then there were often only two very distinct choices – stay in town and work in the mill or another blue-collar vocation, or go off to college and step up to a white-collar profession.

One choice was not necessarily better than the other. Unions guaranteed very good wages and benefits for steel workers and in some cases, their jobs were more secure.

How the people of Pittsburgh know the myriad ways this way of life has been shattered. In the town of Duquesne alone, virtually every child under 18 receives food assistance.

Not all factory workers are cut out to retrain as computer programmers. The decimation of manufacturing jobs has blown a hole into a culture of work that has always been and will always be a source of pride for Pittsburgh and other so- called rust belt cities in America.

But now, our society consumes more than we make. We are the world’s consumers, purchasing cheap foreign made goods like crack heads.  And the workers who once made our shirts and our cars and our TV sets and our steel – they’re at the dollar store, consuming what they can afford.  O workers, how can you stand it?

One of my newer Boomer-era friends here in Pittsburgh is one such Mon Valley native. He grew up in Monessen. His immigrant grandfather and his father worked in the Mill. So did most of his uncles and cousins. He worked factory jobs in the summer and was smart and clever and ambitious enough to earn scholarships, first to a New England boarding school and then to CMU.

He set out on a promising career in economics, but circumstances brought that to an end, and now, he works in Warehouse Logistics; a blue collar job in a warehouse on the site of the old Homestead Steel Works. Ironic, isn’t it? As he quipped, “Well at least I have a job…and (with a shrug) it’s familiar. Some of my former colleagues would not be able to handle the move from corner office to warehouse.” So, the dilemma exists in reverse, too.

Labor unions were meant to ensure job security, safe conditions and a living wage. Yet, even unions can do only so much to counterbalance rising production costs and the pressure on companies to produce goods at price points palatable to the American pocketbook. What role have we played, with our consumer cravings and our insistence on bargains, in this conundrum?

The undeniable hard facts about the extinction of thousands of blue collar jobs in the wake of technological advances casts a skeptical eye on both parties fiery rhetoric about job creation in the future.  Create jobs where? There are only so many small business to create a job or two, here and there. And how? Roll back production systems to an all-human workforce?

This is not tenable, and we’ve already learned during the recent financial meltdown and through the municipal challenges in Allegheny County and elsewhere, that our population cannot shift en masse over to finance or high tech or even education and health care and expect guaranteed lifelong, satisfying, sufficiently wage-earning livelihoods.

If you are invested in a mutual fund or own stocks, you undoubtedly want your investments to grow, to perform, right?  If the companies you own shares in do well, it is partially because they have balanced the needs of workers with the needs of consumers and the needs of investors. It’s a tricky economic and moral puzzle. If your mutual fund is performing again, great! But this, too, comes at a cost.

In my sphere, I tend to encounter people who like to work and who want to work; people who “submerge in the task.” Our attitudes towards work, towards the work ethic so vaunted in our culture, evolved from many social and religious sources including the Hebrew Scriptures, where we find in Leviticus the laws of righteousness regarding the wages of hired servants. And let’s not forget that the Bible also gives us the Sabbath  and sabbaticals– a time of rest from work.

Within the Buddhist eight fold path, we find the fifth precept or path of right livelihood. Buddhists interpret this as employment or business that is beneficial to the community as well as the individual. In Buddhism, all human activities must ultimately benefit the community. In Hinduism, Sangha or community is often paired with Seva, or service. Karma yoga is the yoga of work.

This led me to look at our own Seven Principles. I am heartened that only the first principle, dealing with the inherent worth and dignity of every person, is concerned with the individual. All others are oriented towards community. 

Our second principle – justice equity and compassion in human relations - represents the very bedrock of organized labor.

My colleague, the Rev. Ann Fox who has traveled extensively in India and the Near East reminds us that small enclaves of people have organized labor by engaging their religion’s teachings on right relations. One such organization is called Sarvodaya that has involved people in 5,000 villages in Sri Lanka. “ Sarva” is a Sanskrit word that means “all” or “everyone.” And “ udaya” connotes “awakening.” Put together, it means, “Everyone wakes up.” That’s a wake up call we could use here in the USA. 

The Sarvodaya communities have based their work philosophy on the Right Livelihood precept. They have added to this other teachings of the Buddha: metta, which means loving-kindness; karuna, which means compassion; and mudita, which means benefiting others. At their village meetings, these words are used constantly to make decisions about work and profits and the maximum benefit to the whole.

Our work, including our volunteer work gives us the greatest opportunity to put our beliefs into action to benefit the whole. Paul of Tarsus, the apostle, thought that work was a very important part of life. He was a tent-maker himself, even though he was a wealthy man and did not have to work. He was adamant that everyone should work and contribute to the community. The Dalai Lama counsels us all to learn a useful skill; did you know that he is an expert at fixing clocks and watches? (of course, his watch just says, “Now.” :)

Skilled or unskilled, workers like Luke and Maggie want their work to be fulfilling, too, to mean something, to be a right livelihood. When Thomas Jefferson alluded to “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, what he had in mind was the inalienable right of individual citizens to choose their own religion, political affiliation, and their vocations.

And through these vocations, the individual finds a purpose, a grounding. Without it, work becomes drudgery, regardless of how grateful one is for the paycheck. As we read earlier, "The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real."

What happens to a society, then, that can no longer promote or sustain the pursuit of vocation? What becomes of a citizenry that can no longer see the point of aspiring because the values of their society are so upside down and, as a result, the job prospects or even the path towards professional fulfillment, towards right livelihood, have become so murky? Well, it makes them sick; it breaks their hearts; it crushes their spirits. O Workers, how can you stand it?

Here at First Unitarian, more of us than not are in the position to ponder these questions of fulfillment in our vocations. We can choose and we can act. Even so, plugging into passion and purpose in our current work or finding work that deeply satisfies us requires opportunity.

Although our current labor statistics are grim, I believe we can strive to be optimistic and do our best to preserve and nurture the soul of work, the ideal of right livelihood and the value of right relations that labor unions have sought to provide and safeguard for our citizenry. And we must do some soul searching on where we fit in to this fragile dynamic as consumers and investors.

In his book The Prophet, Khalil Gibran tells this story:

“Then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.
 And he answered, saying: You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.



For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, 

And to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.



When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,



And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth, loving life.”

So may it be for us.

Amen.

© 2012 Rev. Robin Landerman Zucker. All rights reserved. Material may be quoted with proper attribution.