Why are People Poor?  No Living Wage. 

“Can I challenge your homily?”

“Sure,” I replied.

She wasn’t disrespectful, but obviously not happy with what I had preached at Mass.  Masks are required, and I had had to ask her to use her American flag kerchief to protect others as she sat in a front pew.  I thought that might be the source of her dissatisfaction, but that wasn’t it.

“First, Teddy Roosevelt had no right to create National Parks and forests.  In the beginning, we were 50 sovereign states.  Read the Constitution.”

I had praised the foresight of Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot in setting aside millions of acres for parks and forests.  I noted and praised their willingness to stand up to the robber barons of their day. 

“We are the United States,” I carefully replied.  “We fought a war in the 1860s over these issues.  We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

I had been preaching on the parables of the merchant who finds a treasure in a field and goes and buys it, and of a merchant seeking a pearl of great price.  Since the parables were about business people, I quoted Pope Francis: “Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all” (Joy of the Gospel, #203).

Gospel parables are to be understood on personal and societal levels.  Parables are striking stories with surprise endings that tell us about the Reign of God, how things will be when God and all of us are in right relationship, when “Justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).  The Reign of God is a society of Peace and Prosperity, Joy and Justice, Freedom and Faith, Hope and Healing, Life and Love.

My challenger doesn’t see things that way.  Her vision of rugged individualism and dog-eat-dog crony capitalism is, in her mind, blessed by God and is not to be contradicted by some Jesuit priest.

But her vision is morally suspect.  If minimum wage had kept up with what it was worth when I was working as an orderly in a nursing home in 1975, it would be somewhere around $13.50 to $15.00.  It’s only $7.25 today.  I had also pointed out that we pay minimum wage (or less) to those who care for the most vulnerable among us, our elderly and our children.  Day care workers and those who serve in nursing homes earn so little.  I ask, “Why?”  And I get challenged.

“I run a business in Philadelphia.  I could hire more people if I didn’t have to pay minimum wage.”

I just looked at her.  I could not believe that after hearing me preach on a central idea of Catholic Social Teaching, that a living wage is a wage that can support a family, she is seriously telling me it is moral to pay less than $7.25 an hour.

Some rich Catholics often vociferously pontificate in favor of ending abortion, but have little time for Church teachings on the death penalty or social justice.  And for them a living wage is anathema, ridiculous, “socialist” insanity.  

Some wealthy people are willing to give a small portion of their wealth to help the poor, but when I ask why people are poor, and why wages cannot support a family, I’m a bad priest, a dreaded liberation theologian, and the greatest of all sinners, a “communist.”

But communism is simply a social system in which everyone gives according to their abilities and takes according to their needs.  Every normal American family is a communist society.  We don’t charge two-year-olds for their food, or make teens pay for their cell phones.

Crony capitalism and tax cuts, set up to benefit the top 1 percent, have hurt the vast majority of our fellow citizens.  Since 1980, income for the very rich has more than doubled; the bottom 90 percent’s share has barely risen.  In the 1960’s CEO’s made 20 times a worker; by 2019, they were taking 300 times more than their employees (Reich, 2020, p.15).

As an example, I noted Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, got $31 million in compensation in 2018 (Reich, 2020, p.15).  If Dimon worked 10 hours a day, 300 days that year, he was making $10,333 an hour.  Overall, he’s worth $1.6 billion.

“The market should set wages,” she told me.  (Hmmm… Is there no one who would apply to be CEO at JPMorgan for say $15.5 million a year?)

Jesus would say the market was made by and for human persons.  The market should be made for us.  We are not made for the market.

Even Mr. Dimon knows this.  In his 2018 letter to shareholders he stated, “middle class incomes have been stagnant for years.  Income inequality has gotten worse… More than 28 million Americans don’t have health insurance at all.  And, surprisingly, 25% of those eligible for various types of federal assistance programs don’t get any help. … Simply put the social needs of far too many of our citizens are not being met” (Reich, 2020, pp. 23-24).

The fact that so many share so little in our wealth should challenge us all.

Jesuit Father Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D., is the director of Mission Integration at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Baltimore, and author of Being on Fire and A Faith That Frees, both from Orbis Books.

References

Reich, Robert (2020) The System: Who Rigged it. How We Fix It (New York, Knopf).