Roll Down Like Waters

Some thoughts for meeting with FedEx workers and Teamsters – Tuesday, August 26, 2008 – El Segundo

Tom Eggebeen, Interim Pastor
Covenant Presbyterian Church
80th & Sepulveda – Los Angeles 90045

Religious communities generally respond to the language of justice …

“Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24).

The heart and soul of the Bible is the creation of a just society … and what, we might ask, is just?

Where folks are safe … where a social safety net covers the extremes of life … not a regulated society as we saw with the Soviet Union, but a free society in which all of us are committed to the wellbeing of everyone … and through good government, good unions, the various forces of the economy are guarded and regulated to provide safety for everyone – children with health-care and safe education; workers protected from the whims of Wall Street, which in a moment, with a flash of the pen, can strip away or greatly reduce health benefits and do a vanishing act with pensions.

The issue for CLUE is justice.

Safety.

And though CLUE has primarily been focused on the working poor, the effort now directed to assist FedEx employees is an expansion of concern, recognizing that in the current environment of corporate greed and unregulated financial systems, those who are middle-class and fully employed today, could be quickly reduced to barely getting by, or even descending into poverty.

The heart of America’s greatness has been the Middle Class.

The Middle Class is a social construct created by a strong and regulatory partnership between government and industry. Left to itself, industry become increasingly profit-centered, and in our day, we see the disappearance of family-owned business replaced by corporations held hostage by speculators and Wall Street.

Offering good wages as an incentive to discourage unions has been a part of the strategy, and for a time, it’s worked, but the globalization of America’s economy, the depletion of our surplus and the growth of deficit spending has weakened the American dollar, driving up prices at home, reducing our standard of living, and leading many companies to downsize – taking it out of the pockets of those who put their backs into it, while often rewarding those in charge. The various boardrooms of America’s giant corporations are filled with those looking our for their own interests, and look after themselves, they do.

Without regulation, economies all go the same route – the rich get richer, the middle class shrinks, and the poor are driven into the deepest of trenches. Until just a few hold most of the dollars; beneath them, a very small middle class, and beneath them, what was called, in other times, serfs. 

Who’s to look after you?

Can your parents do it?
Your friends across the street?
Our children? (That’s my strategy … just kidding).

America’s relationship to the working person has been a simple one. Without government regulation or unions, people are worked and discarded. Pensions and other benefits come and go.

We are soon to celebrate Labor Day.

Labor Day grew in the late 1800s when Americans shifted from farm to factory, and millions of immigrants came to our shores in search of work.

Wise and thoughtful people soon recognized the terrible working conditions in our factories, coalmines and oil fields, with children often bearing the brunt of it. Who would protect the children?

Read “Oil,” Upton Sinclair’s book about the California oil fields, on which the film, “There Will be Blood” was based.

Who would protect the children?
Who would protect the man in the Pennsylvania coalmine?
Who would build the schools?
Who would keep big business from draining away the social capital of the nation by unrelenting hours of hard work, low wages, dangerous environments and no social security whatsoever?

Things changed.
No longer were we an agrarian society with the children growing up and living on gramma and grampa’s farm. We became an urban society, where the need to look after one another on a larger scale became paramount.

CLUE and other similar organizations remind us – to be human is to be humane. To be humane, is to look after one another, to practice the Golden Rule, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

The great faith traditions of our world have always seen justice as the ethical heart and soul of believing in God.

To love one another … is to care for one another … and in a complicated society of 310 million people, care is best enacted through corporate structures to help everyone remember the Golden Rule and to protect everyone.

Structures: like good government working in partnership with industry – good government passing and enforcing safe food laws, protections for pensions and health care for every citizen.

Structures: like unions – like the Teamsters, who help business remember the higher principles of life – unions, who go to bat for their members, to protect them, to keep them and their families, so that a man and woman can go home at night feeling safe!

I was a Teamster for 5 years – during school, I loaded trailers at Spartan Warehouse in Grand Rapids, MI – a large grocery store chain.

We were paid $3.65 an hour – that was a great wage then, with plenty of overtime (all my school buds were envious), allowing these hardworking men (and it was just men then) to be middle class – to buy a 17 foot fishing boat, maybe even a small cottage up north – TVs and cars – they were a part of the Middle Class,

And it’s the Middle Class that made this country great.

And right now, it’s the Middle Class threatened with serious decline.

CLUE understands this and is working with you to protect your interests and help this nation rebuild the safety net for all of its good citizens.