So, I've been asked to publish the below on-line... Apologies if it's a little long for a 'blog, or a little rhetorical, but here goes...
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‘He does not for man what man can
do for himself’
In the name of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit; Amen
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
It’s a pleasure to be here, back
at Mansfield, and an honour for you to indulge me with the opportunity to
preach at the Wednesday evening service, that was such an institution of my
student life. In fact, my entire knowledge of nonconformism can be traced to my
experiences here; the religion I encountered and the characters (and spirits) I
met continue to influence my moral and spiritual life. And by spirits, I don’t
mean the drinks afterwards.
That said I have taken the
opportunity this evening to give our readings, prayers and my take on the
term’s theme of ‘A Thirst for Justice’ a distinctly Catholic twist. I cannot
pretend that I am a great academic, or a theologian, or by any means a saintly
visionary, and so what I offer here is a personal, rather than scholarly
reflection. It is a reflection on what has been the most powerful revelation of
my work since Mansfield, and strikes at the very heart of what we Christians
consider justice to be.
For just over four years I’ve
worked as a full time trades union official, firstly for the steelworkers’
union in Yorkshire and the Humberside, and now for Equity in London. I should
say that it was not exactly where I thought I would end up when I finished at
Mansfield almost five years ago, but there is a curious inevitability to this
journey, and a context that frames my revelation about a truly Christian nature
of justice.
I was the first person in my
family to attend university, and this was in no small part due to my father’s
socialism and trades unionism. The socialist community that gathered in the canteen
of GKN Nettlefolds axle works in Birmingham provided him with an infectious
thirst for justice through the material gains of pay deals, improvements in
working hours, speaking up against bullying and poor safety standards and
building a strong pension scheme to protect workers in the old age. But
socialism is not just another way of organising an economy, it is a human, not
mathematical system, to provide dignity, not just efficiency. The material
gains of trades unionism failed my father, he ended his working life as an
agency worker on the national minimum wage in a concrete factory, working more
hours at the age of 60 than he had at the age of 21. But the much more profound
gifts of that socialist community stayed with him; respect for workers of all
backgrounds, ages and experiences, the value of education and its importance
for his family, a knowledge of the worth of his opinions, an insatiable
appetite to better understand the world and to make it a better place. My
father read to me as a child because of what trades unionism taught him, and I
ended up at Oxford as a result.
With this behind me, it is an
honour to be a full time trades union official, and only right that the skills
and opportunities this place gave me are put to use (often not as well as they
could be!) within the labour movement.
The job is often hard, and often
it can feel like a losing battle. Almost 1,000 redundancies at Scunthorpe
steelworks in 12 months, reading letters to illiterate workers, with few
employment rights, explaining that they were sacked because they couldn’t read
health and safety instructions, sitting with dancers too terrified to hold
management to account after a serious injury – more concerned about working
again than walking again.
But at the heart of these
battles, won or lost, I have become more and more acutely aware that the material
settlement as the end result is only a small part of the importance of our work
as a movement. Much more important is working with my comrades to give working
people, individually and collectively, dignity at work. This dignity comes
through having a voice, refining that voice, and raising the volume of that
voice. We are fighting a war on inherent economic injustice through building respect
for working people, not just pay deals and terms and conditions.
As a Christian this can almost
feel an alien concept. We know that, in the words of my favourite prayer-card:
‘There is one God to love and serve,
One eternity to expect
And then Heaven – Or Hell – Forever’
The end result matters. And the
rules to get to that result are not relative.
However, to see economic justice
at work as an aim analogous to the end result of our own salvation is to
misunderstand the question at hand. We know that our own salvation is a result
of our own choices, our decisions to follow God, His Church, His commandments.
When talking about how best to organise our society as to provide, if you will,
the best economy for our material salvation, the right thing to do is look at
how God orders the economy of our salvation.
The economy of salvation in
Catholic teaching is fundamentally linked to God’s gift of free will to us all;
doing not for man what man can do for himself. God sets a framework in which it
is not only possible to do good, but to do it of our own accord and win our own
salvation through our own choices and actions. He does not for man what man
himself can accomplish. Consider Noah and the flood (a terrifyingly topical
reading!); often the most crucial part of the story is the covenant at the end
of the 40 days and nights, and its part in the economy of salvation. This
covenant groups men into nations and begins the path to God’s most powerful act
in our salvation, the sacrifice of Himself in the Christ – rather than the
sacrifice of us sinners as he did in the flood. However, as potent as these
elements, is the start of the story that we heard this evening. God could have
chosen to save Noah of his own accord, to build him an Ark, to make his death
by water impossible – but he does not.
Instead, God gives the
instructions to Noah. Noah, as he built protection for his soul against the
wrath of the Lord through his good life, protects his life through building his
own ark. Like the path to salvation, the framework is given by God, like the
path to salvation, the choice is Noah’s. Noah is free to choose to comply or
ignore, to swap gopher wood for mahogany, to simply not trust in the Lord. But
he does trust Him, even though it isn’t easy.
And so here are set the
mechanisms for our salvation. Paramount to this is mankind’s free will, his
ability to think and choose and believe – or not. When we as Christians look at
the fundaments of building a better economy of social and material justice,
this thought should be paramount in our minds: how do we build a system that
gives both sides, capital and labour, an equal ability to choose and influence
the material settlement. Both sides need to be free to choose a fair settlement
through the exercising of their individual, and collective freewill.
Take this as a case study, based
on an experience I had with a management. They’re friendly and liberal, the
rates of pay are good, and often above the union’s minimum pay rates. They
support a largely friendly workplace environment, and rarely are there
complaints. However, on this occasion, they decided to work outside the terms
of the union agreement, by choosing to employ fewer people and breach our
minimum staffing levels. Their defence was that the workers were not needed –
and that the rates of pay were higher for those in employment as a result.
But this is not the agreement.
Our agreement is the result of workers bargaining together, and a stronger
group of workers demanding minimum staffing levels for a weaker group, forgoing
via negotiation higher rates of pay for themselves, and accepting, via
negotiation, limitations on the work that the employer can offer them.
These workers have not made these
difficult decisions lightly, and they have made sacrifices in solidarity with
others. This was their material salvation, achieved via an economy of dialogue
and respect. Why should a management, simply because they fancy it, be able to craft
a new settlement in opposition to this economy? No matter how much higher the
rate of pay, no matter how reasonable the terms, why should the management –
one side of the bargain- be the sole and total arbiter of the material outcome?
Surely simply the possession of capital does not make the management the final
arbiter of fairness.
But what would be the solution to
this outrage? More money or fewer hours cannot heal the wounds, and it’s not to
say that the proposed solution was not a reasonable one as a final settlement.
The solution is collective bargaining – returning to the workforce and negotiating
a settlement that, outside the normal terms of the collective agreement, is
endorsed and supported by the working people it affects.
This is not a question about
outcomes, nor is it a question purely about this natural world. This is a
question about dignity, about the soul, and about justice – not fairness.
Let us consider the most
important example of God’s endorsement of such a settlement in history – the
annunciation.
Here again the Lord provides a
perfect framework for the salvation of all of humanity. He provides the tools
for the job: He sends an angel with a clear message and clear instruction. Our
Lady has been chosen before all ages for this task – she has not only lived a
life free from sin, but was conceived immaculately. But she is still free, she
still has a choice, she is still human.
She could have chosen a sinful
life, to tarnish the perfection God gave her. She could, perhaps even without
reproach, have rejected the Angel. Once again, she must operate freely within
the economy of salvation, given the dignity in life to have her decision have
equal weight with the will of God Himself. Mary could have said ‘no’.
It is Mary’s labour, both in the
sense of giving birth to the Christ, and in the sense of home-making for the
holy family, that affects and influences the person of Jesus. She is the mother
who stands at the foot of the Cross and weeps for the whole of humanity. As a
result of her labours, she is rewarded with a seat next to her son, assumed
into Heaven, she becomes not only the mother of God, but the mother of us all.
The outcome for Our Lady is the most perfect result of her agreement with the
Lord, and the outcome is made possible through her choice to be obedient to the
will of God. Because of the perfect nature of the economy of our salvation, the
outcome if we stay the course and live a Godly life is perfect too.
The final piece of the bargain in
the economy of our salvation is the death and resurrection of Christ, only made
possible because of Mary’s freedom to say ‘yes’. The economy of our salvation
is complete and obvious for us because of the bold, but free, choice of Our
Lady.
If the completeness of the economy
of our salvation hangs on the decision of a mere mortal, the choice of a mere
child in years, then how can imperfect humans with material capital justify
making decisions without consultation with the working people who produce it?
Our Lord humbled himself through his trust in Mary, as well as his incarnation
as a human being, knowing that a dialogue would produce the most perfect
possible outcome. Trusting that working people have an interest in the success
and stability of the material economy, trusting that work on the shop-floor is
as important as that in the boardroom, and that empathy and solidarity build a
more just and bountiful economic settlement is what God urges us to do, through
the framework he builds to administer his perfect justice. Indeed, it is easy
for us in the material economy, as opposed to God in the divine – we are not
burdened with infallibility, with omnipotence, we cannot be assured of our
right-ness on our own account. Compared with God’s incarnation and the
annunciation, the humility needed by powerful capitalists to accept that
working people, by virtue of their connexion with their labour and the products
of it, deserve to have a say over the course of their working lives is
infinitesimally small.
In a very real way, Christians
are trying to build a better material economy, protecting and enhancing the
dignity of the most vulnerable in our society. The Holy Father Francis has made
quite a splash by re-stating in charismatic fashion the Catholic doctrine that
pure capitalism does not create a context for good or a fair outcome for all.
Anglican bishops are the most articulate defenders in the public square of a
benefits system that provides a framework for justice – standing in staunch
opposition to the idea that the charity of ‘pennies for the poor’ should be the
safety net for our society. Non-conformist churches have long been hosts and
defenders of workers’ movements, and their defence of the rights of often
migrant agricultural workers, has kept the plight of vulnerable, voiceless
people in the public eye. At the heart of these compelling and radical interventions
is not a statement about the most effective economic outcome, but a moral
statement about the manner in which economic redistribution should occur.
But we’ve got it wrong too. The
communities built by Cadbury and Rowntree were focussed on providing a ‘fair’
economic settlement on a plate, enforcing a class system and order designed in
the belief that workers who were economically comfortable were productive
workers. This Big Brother attitude – prescribing how leisure-time could be
spent, removing alcohol from shops, educating the children of workers, does not
trust working people to use their God given free will as well as their social
betters. As well-intended as many of these efforts were, they set owners of
capital as all-seeing gods over and above the economy of salvation, as they set
to limit and frame free-will, and the inherent hostility towards workers’
associations in these industries betray a patronising contempt for the ability
of working people to act for the common good and have the dignity of a say in
their working lives.
This attitude is not one confined
to the past, either. Last year, the government began the process of compelling
employers to automatically enrol workers into company pension schemes, with
minimum burdens of contribution from both parties. This action has overridden
collective bargaining, and been used as an opportunity to shut non-contributory
pensions, whose terms do not fit with the rigid statutory criteria, leaving
workers with a pension scheme that they did not, and would not, choose.
More worryingly, there is the
Living Wage Foundation, and their campaigns. These are campaigns in which many
churches have involved themselves, seeking to improve the terms and conditions
for workers in their communities. Again, these efforts are well intentioned,
but stories grow of employers who reduce holidays, maternity leave or other
terms and conditions in order to get their shiny certificate accrediting
themselves as a ‘living wage employer’. Living wage employers can use zero
hours contracts, offer statutory minima on all other terms, actively break
union organisations, but stand in the glorious company of responsible employers
who do not, and appear as equals.
The Living Wage Foundation views
work as a simple economic exchange – work is about your rate of pay, and
nothing else. It’s certainly not about workers having the dignity of being part
of setting their terms and conditions through bargaining. Indeed, the rate of
pay is set by academics who determine, in a slightly sinister way, what a
‘living wage’ is; how much a worker should be spending on accommodation, travel
and leisure. Working people don’t get a look in.
It is of course scandalous that
employers do not pay a wage that’s good enough to live on, and those who can’t or
won’t, shouldn’t be in business. But a living wage is very different from
equitable terms and conditions, a wholesome working life and a fair wage. A
fair wage is very different from a living wage – why should a massive
corporation be considered in the same breath as a small charity when both are
paying their most vulnerable staff the same rate of pay? Surely a multinational
can afford a bit more than just a wage to live on? Every workplace is
different, so needs its own settlement. The only way these economies can be
brought into order is via negotiation, and the accordant respect between the
parties who make it up – the parties of capital and labour.
For these reasons and more I
believe that we, as Christians, should not be thirsting for justice in the
outcomes at work, but justice in the economy of these places. Of course, the
word ‘economy’ derives from the Greek for ‘household’, and God’s household of
salvation treats us with the dignity, respect and love that any good parent
provides. Viewing workplaces like families, where all have their place, but an
equal stake, and an equal dignity is perhaps the simplest way to understand why
God’s paternal love gives us the freedom to be good and the freedom to make
mistakes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered talking for the past twenty minutes
and instead simply said that workplaces should be like households, and
industrial relations like familial relations.
I’ll put one caveat on it all,
however. God’s economy of salvation is only a step on the way to sharing in the
feast of heaven, alongside all the angels and saints. It is the path toward a
share of his heavenly kingdom, apportioned according to our goodness and our
obedience to Him, His Church and His laws. In the same way, the material
economy I outlined above is only a step along the way to the fair sharing of
the fruits of labour, only following the inevitable revolution where all
material things are held in common will this be a reality…
To give thanks for our free will,
and the choices of all the saints, as well as to fan the flames of our desire
for social justice, I invite you all to join me in the responses of the
Angelus, printed on your service-sheets.
