Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 14, 1996

Work is about daily meaning as well as daily bread. For recognition as well as cash; for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. . . . We have a right to ask of work that it include meaning, recognition, astonishment, and life.
--Studs Terkel

Several months ago I had the pleasure of hearing Garrison Keillor interview Studs Terkel--live, right here in Portland. Studs is in his late eighties now, and irrepressible as always, only more so. Early on in the interview, Keillor looked at the audience in dismay and said, "How can I get control?"

Studs has been and still is the friend of the working man and woman. His most influential book, simply called Working, is a collection of interviews from a wide range of workers. First published in 1972, it is a testament to their lives and to the lives of all who work for a living. I'd like to begin this morning by reading an excerpt from it. These are the words of Mike Lefevre. Mike works in a steel mill; his wife Carol works as a waitress and when she is at home, cares for their two small children.

"I'm a dying breed. A laborer. Strictly muscle work . . . pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down. We handle between forty and fiften thousand pounds of steel a day. I know this is hard to believe-- It's dying.
"You can't take pride any more. You remember when a guy could point to a house he built, how many logs he stacked. He built it and he was proud of it. . . . .
"It's hard to take pride in a bridge you're never gonna cross, in a door you're never gonna open. You're mass-producing things and you never see the end result of it. I worked for a trucker one time. And I got this tiny satisfaction when I loaded a truck. At least I could see the truck depart loaded. In a steel mill, forget it. You don't see where nothing goes.
"I got chewed out by my foreman once. He said, 'Mike, you're a good worker but you have a bad attitude.' My attitude is that I don't get excited about my job. I do my work but I don't say whoopee-doo. The day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a head shrinker. How are you gonna get excited about pullin' steel? How are you gonna get excited when you're tired and want to sit down?
"It's not just the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody's going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building--these things just don't happen. There's hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, 'See, that's me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.' Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to."

You might ask, why does Mike Lefevre continue this work, year after year? He tells us at the end of the interview: "This is gonna sound square, but my kid is my imprint. He's my freedom. There's a line in one of Hemingway's books. I think it's from For Whom the Bell Tolls . They're behind the enemy lines, somewhere in Spain, and she's pregnant. She wants to stay with him. He tells her no. He says, "if you die, I die," knowing he's gonna die. But if you go, I go. Know what I mean? The mystics call it the brass bowl. Continuum. You know what I mean? This is why I work. Every time I see a young guy walk by with a shirt and tie and dressed up real sharp, I'm lookin' at my kid, you know? That's it."

Mike calls himself "a dying breed." He is, of course, right. The steel industry has eliminated more than 220,000 jobs, or half its work force, since 1980. Of those who lost their jobs to automation, only 1/3 were able to find new jobs in the service sector, and even those experienced a significant drop in pay. The nature of the workplace is profoundly changing. We are quickly moving into what some have called a third industrial revolution, the Information Age. Blue collar workers are being displaced by machines and robots. The new computer and communications technologies are already eliminating entire employment categories, such as secretaries and receptionists, sales clerks, bank tellers, telephone operators, wholesalers, and middle managers. We all experience these changes in our everyday encounters. Rarely does a real human answer the telephone, for example. We can bank without ever seeing a teller. Although recent government reports state that unemployment has actually declined slightly, these statistics cover over an ominous reality: new technologies and corporate restructuring have pushed millions of American workers into low-wage, dead-end service jobs, in which they work with little hope of advancement. Many of them are temporary workers with no benefits.

Believe it or not, there are still defenders of the "trickle down" theory of economics who say that the expansion of markets and global trading will keep people employed. But companies all over the world are competing for these same markets, and virtually every industrialized nation is developing a two-tier society. The top tier is composed of the "knowledge workers," those engineers, technicians, computer programmers, consultants, and professionals, who make up about 20% of the work force. The bottom tier--the bottom 80%--is made up of manufacturing and service sector jobs. The question that governments will have to face is what to do about the millions of workers displaced by the new technology.

Meanwhile back at the corporate ranch, during the midst of these changes, productivity has risen sharply. And the gains have been used to fatten the checks received by stock holders and to pay for corporate salaries that are forty or fifty times as great as the average worker's salary. Meanwhile, Americans who have held onto their jobs are working longer hours, not shorter, because fewer workers at longer hours means that companies will not have to pay out as much in benefits.

The contract between business and employees is changing. The traditional expectation is that if the company does well, so will the employees. Not any more. Business profits rose 64% since 1989, while real earnings for workers have steadily declined--12%, since 1979. Look at what happened at IBM last May. After the company enjoyed its best quarter ever, they decided that 120 of their executive secretaries were overpaid by regional standards and gave them cuts up to 36%. At the same time, IBM's top five executives split bonus money of $5.8 million, including a $2.6 million boost for CEO Louis Gerstner, which allowed him to take home more than $12 million annually. I think of the Quaker term "right relationship": many companies are not in right relationship with their workers.

This is not the first time in history, of course, that technology changed the course of individual lives. During the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, upper middle class women found they had no work, save supervising the servants, and factory labor became the lot of working class women. In England children as young as 7 worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. In the garment industry, women worked grueling hours without relief, and some even died of exhaustion. Reforms were made, gradually, but not chiefly by the people controlling the capital. Citizens had to defy, to protest, to reform, and government had to make new laws.

It seems to me that neither major political party has thought very clearly or deeply about our current economic and social dilemma. Most of the public discourse has focused on "welfare reform." Both parties agree that people should work and not be on welfare. But neither has given a viable alternative. The Republican leadership often characterizes the poor as simply lazy and immoral, so their solution is "get them off the dole," it's bad for their character. The GOP leadership has descended to scapegoating immigrants, working women, and the poor, and has brought up red herring issues like school prayer and flag burning and censorship of art in order to exploit the fears and frustrations of a people who sense that the world is irrevocably changing--and this approach certainly worked in the last Congressional election. The Democrats, on the other hand, talk about job training and child care--but nobody has said what jobs people are being trained for, and at what wage. The Democrats have been content to promote their party by speaking of falling unemployment figures and low inflation. We need to move beyond politics and talk about people. We need to talk about the pain people are feeling, and why. As a society, we have to have a more comprehensive, a more sophisticated, analysis of the economic changes which are wrenching our lives apart--and a more just, a more ethical response. We need a radical, new vision.

Jeremy Rifkin, in his book entitled The End of Work , has put forth just such a vision. Technology could free us, says Rifkin, to pursue a different way of being in the world, could free us to rest, to create, to serve others. Kind of a New Deal for the '90's. He believes that state and local governments could provide employment for workers who have been displaced by retraining them and giving them opportunities to serve others in community-building jobs in the nonprofit sector, jobs such as preventive health programs, adult education, community gardens, organizing neighborhood sports teams. As Rifkin points out, the kinds of nurturing tasks which call for intimate relationships are those which are the least vulnerable to displacement by a computer. Preparing men and women for careers in public service and then paying them would be expensive, but Rifkin says that the revenue could come from replacing current welfare programs, from discontinuing costly subsidies to transnational corporations, by cutting military expenditures, and by placing a value added tax on all high-tech goods and services.

Rifkin also believes that we should take seriously the possibility of a shorter work week, an idea which is spreading rapidly through Europe. If we had a 30-hour work week, more people could work, and fewer would be stressed by overwork. There would be longer vacations, six weeks perhaps, which is common in Europe now. The government could relieve business of workers' compensation in return for the shorter time at work, and the loss of government revenue would be made up by the taxes workers would pay. The government might consider additional tax credits to employers willing to introduce profit-sharing plans, so that workers could share in the prosperity of the company.

Interesting thinking. I'm not sure I buy all of Rifkin's ideas, but we do need alternatives in a society in which there is a growing underclass of permanently unemployable people. We may soon have more people in jail than in college--and, incidentally, keeping somebody in jail for a year costs $30,000. Will we have increasing social unrest, drug use, violence? Or will we understand that people need the dignity of work, and make a way for them to have it.

Let's go back to Mike Lefevre, the steel worker whose words you heard at the beginning of the sermon. In 1970, he had two small children. He wanted them to go to college, to avoid the hard life that he led. And maybe they did go to college--and now they are Generation-Xers, facing a whole new world from their father's. Whereas Mike worked hard, his children don't want to work the way they saw their father and mother work. They resent the fact that their father was old before his time, and he came home each night too bushed to really be present for them. Mike's children simply cannot trust relationships with companies, and so they can't imagine the kind of blind commitment to a job that their father gave. Mike's son is a whiz on the computer, and he hopes his skills will transfer to many different job settings. He wants to work smart, not work long. Mike's daughter is not willing to put up with a job culture that is not changing fast enough for her, and so she is starting her own small company. They want to do their own work in their own way at their own speed. Mike doesn't understand his kids, and he's sometimes critical, but he's beginning to see that they're working their lives out in a new way. The kids haven't developed much of a political conscience yet, but they're beginning to realize that a few can't be successful at the expense of others. They're thinking about children of their own in the not-too-distant future, and they want for those children a kinder world than the one they inherited, a world less given over to the powers that be, a world more open to the human spirit and less driven by material need.

Capital enterprise has drawn us headlong into the "work and consume" cycle, and our souls are bankrupt. The final insult is that we're being told, well, there's no work, or no work worthy of you, but please, still consume. Please buy the Barbie dolls and the $100 tennis shoes. Keep the economic machine going. There must be a better way. We know that, intuitively. Myself, I keep going back to Freud. He said human beings need two things: love and work. He's right, you know. We need to know we are cherished, for no other reason than just that we exist. And we need to give the gifts that are in us to give.

In fact, if we fail to use those gifts, I believe the natural result is frustration, leading to deep anger, leading to illness. Let me tell you about my long-lost second cousin. I was living in Berkeley, going to school, and out of the blue one day, this young woman called and identified herself as my kin, and suggested that we get together. Would I care to join her and her family one evening for dinner? I agreed, and found myself a few weeks later driving out to a plush suburb in the Bay Area. She had it all--the huge home, the swimming pool, the up and coming corporate husband, and three children. She was beautiful. The children were beautiful. The husband and house were beautiful. But her life was not beautiful--she was one of the most miserable people I have ever met. She was full of vague complaints and ill-defined medical problems. She had fallen in with a health food cult and was eating exclusively plates of nasty-looking grain, to try and restore her well-being. She began to tell me her story. You see, she never wanted to be married at all. She wanted to be a nun. But when she told her mother that, the mother wouldn't hear of it. Though the family were good Catholics, it's one thing to go to Mass on Sunday and quite another to actually take your religion seriously. No, it was out of the question for her to become a nun. And being the good girl that she was, she obeyed. What a sadness, to see what she had become!

We need to work, and not just at any old job. And not just for money. We need to make work a form of worship: we need to see work as an act of praise. We need to honor our inclinations and aptitudes and desires. For if we deny our own true nature, which has been given us from the beginning, then we will inevitably feel a fragmentation of body and spirit. We need always, every day, to ask ourselves what is the ultimate authority in our lives, and surely the answer must come back that there is something higher we answer to than our boss. If we give ourselves in service to the Holy, our work will be "dedicated work" and will bless others and will make our own lives good. We work in order to live, but not just physically. We work so that the life of the spirit might thrive, as well. It is not just words that praise God, but the feeding of the baby at the mother's breast, and the careful preparation of a legal document, the crafting of a piece of pottery, the building of a fence and, yes, the cleaning of the toilet. All of this praises God.

I have two Gen-X sons who are trying to find their way, and they talk to me about their confusion and their longings. Work and love. It's always the same. I'd like to say to them, and I know I can't use this language, because they would just say, "Oh, Mom--" but I would like to say, praise God with your body, care for it and honor it. Do no less with your mind. Give your gifts, and do what brings you joy, deep joy. Forget about making money just now--that will come. First find what you love and give yourself to it. Do work that will sustain you through the times when love is gone, and the night is long. Do work that you will not be ashamed to tell your children about. And do work that, when you come to finish this life, you can look back and smile and say, "I enjoyed that, yes, I did, and I made the way a little easier for others."
So be it. Amen.


PRAYER

O Spirit of Life, wake us up to possibility. Help us not to sleep through the main feature! We have been given so much--each one of us. May we cherish our gifts and inclinations as letters from the Divine, instructions from the Holy. May we give ourselves to those endeavors that would lift us up and bless others. And may we help to create a nation in which everyone may find good work to do and where everyone may live in plenty from their labor.
Amen.



READING

I've been a hard worker all my life, . . . but 'most all my work has been the kind that 'perishes with the usin',' as the Bible says. That's the discouragin' thing about a woman's work. Milly Amos used to say that if a woman was to see all the dishes that she had to wash before she died, piled up before her in one pile, she'd lie down and die right then and there. . . . But when one o' my grandchildren or great-grangchildren sees one o' these quilts, they'll think about Aunt Jane, and, wherever I am then, I'll know I ain't forgotten.

"I reckon everybody wants to leave somethin' behind that'll last after they're dead and gone. It don't look like it's worth while to live unless you can do that. . . . Now, some solks has money to build monuments with--great, tall, marble pillars, with angels on top of 'em, like you see in Cave Hill and them big city buryin'-grounds. And some folks can build churches and schools and hospitals to keep folks in mind of 'em, but all the work I've got to leave behind me is jest these quilts, and sometimes, when I'm settin' here, workin' with my caliker and gingham pieces, I'll finish off a block, and I laugh and say to myself, "Well, here's another stone for the monument.'"
Aunt Jane of Kentucky
Eliza Calvert Hall

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.