Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Legacy Costs

When production and service demands were high, unions strong, and wage controls inhibiting, companies added medical and pension benefits to their compensation packages in order to attract workers. Recently, many of these same companies have begun complaining that the weight of these “legacy costs” are threatening not only their profits but their very existence. The people who generate the costs by claiming the benefits long promised them now represent onerous burdens to be shed by eliminating either the benefits themselves, the employees making use of them, or both.

Many non-unionized companies, Wal-Mart perhaps the most notorious example, deal with the burdens of legacy costs another way, by creating as few of them as possible in the first place. One important result has been the voluntary servitude naively entered into by hundreds of thousands of poorly paid and benefits deprived company “Associates.” Some may remember the scathing description of their condition that Barbara Ehrenreich conveyed in her best selling book, Nickel and Dimed.

If the major and proper goal of business is the generation of profit, then it is clearly a more ethically defensible means of attaining the goal not to offer adequate benefit packages to workers at all than to promise the packages and then not make good on the promises. But neither of these means to an otherwise approvable end comes close to meeting even the most rudimentary of ethical precepts. Let’s take up the second approach first.

We read a lot these days about the hard choices that business leaders are having to make in order to secure their respective companies in the face of uncontrollable market factors, such as rising fuel costs in the airline industry. (Apparently, the hits that many airline employees have already taken are not going to be enough; the tattered remnants of their remaining, inadequate health benefits and pensions are getting sucked into still firing jet engines even as I write.) One problem with these supposed tough choices is the difficulty of determining just what cause is served by them. Golden parachutes and stockholder satisfaction? Perhaps. Survival? Naaah. Another problem is who pays the principal costs of these choices --- basically, the working stiffs, “consulted” almost always after and not before the fact.

With respect to the other means of achieving strong profits in business, there is at least a semblance of honesty in being up front about a commitment to keep employee costs as low as possible. An obvious problem, though, is that not all employee costs are held to the same standard, and that very few business leaders are willing to acknowledge this troubling detail. Executive over-compensation has been the rule and not the exception in corporate America. A not so obvious, but no less serious problem is the unwillingness to engage in honest reflection across business and industry about what a just profit is, what profits everyone involved in the creation and delivery of goods and services --- producers, consumers, workers, managers, and investors alike.

Until this kind of really serious, really honest, and really beneficial reflection gets underway, a vignette might help keep the ethical questions and issues in proper perspective. Many years ago, I had a memorable conversation with one of my parishioners, Clara, on her front porch as we watched her husband steer his tractor into their fields for a couple more hours of work following our dinner together. “Preacher,” she said to me, “Ken wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but you need to know just what kind of man he really is.”

A decade ago, she went on, just as migrant workers were arriving to harvest their 700 acres, lightning struck the barn and started a fire which the wind quickly spread across their fields, destroying their entire crop. Realizing what the loss of the harvest would do to the workers he had been hiring for so many years, Ken went to the bank the next day and with his wife’s concurrence mortgaged enough of their land to pay the workers what they would have owed them had the crops been harvested. It took the couple years to pay off the loan, even by kicking in a portion of their savings for retirement. To the fellow farmers who challenged their sense of obligation in those unexpected circumstances, Ken replied, “Well, we made a promise, and the people we made it to had needs too.”

After I told Clara that I had learned something about what kind of a woman she was as well, I took my leave. To this present generation, she and Ken would have had a lot to say about legacy costs.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Missing The Rainbow

In Mrs. Willis’ second grade Sunday School class, the story of the Flood did not sit well with any of us. It was just too scary. Admittedly, it did accomplish at least a little of what our church seemed to hope that it would. Whenever I and my buddies were tempted to hold back something from our offerings those mornings for a treat at the candy store, the divine wrath the story had revealed to us almost always proved an effective dissuader. 

Later, however, I stopped being scared by this story, and started getting angry instead. What kind of a god is this God anyway? Somehow, I and my fellow sufferers kept missing what is in fact the story’s happy ending: “…Never again will I put the earth under a curse because of humankind, however evil their inclination may be from their youth upwards…” (Genesis 8:21)

Missing this point has played a far too important role in Jewish and Christian history from at least the time of the Exile. Helpless and hopeless following their captivity in Babylon, a lot of Jews began to write off not only their own history, but everyone else’s as well. They took perverse comfort in calculating when, where, and how a thoroughly disgusted deity would bring thoroughly disgusting people (themselves excepted, of course) to their thoroughly deserved end. Their malady proved contagious, eventually spreading out to infect Christian scriptures as well. A case in point: the thousand year prelude to divinely wrought world destruction depicted so smugly at Revelation 20:2-3.

For many Christians today, this case in point is not just one case; it is the really BIG case for telling the Flood story all over again just like too many of us heard it told by other teachers who also knew no better. The imagery is different this time: after the thousand year lock-down of Satan, everybody gets judged by their deeds (Rev. 20:13) inscribed in a book of life, and those whose accounts are deficient will be flung into a lake of fire. But the message is still the same: that graceless, morally outrageous, and yes, disgusting message of a mocking deity who will jerk the rug of salvation out from under you no sooner than he seduces you to see it as your magic carpet headed straight for the throne of grace. 

Clearly, third generation Christians had a harder time with persecution than their mentors and role models did. From his cross, Jesus asked forgiveness for all his persecutors. I think that St. Paul forgave his, too --- from upside down on his own cross. But the Johannine community of 30 years later got so peeved with theirs that instead of praying for them, they consigned them to an anti-Christ of their own devising. Its deforming of the Gospel should make you want to do with The Book of Revelation what Martin Luther and John Calvin actually did do with it --- throw it out or ignore it.

Almost. For there are also those overwhelmingly beautiful verses that speak of a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, with God dwelling in it and putting an end to death, mourning, crying and pain. (21:1-6) I can almost see a rainbow spanning the sky above it, as the glorious city descends to meet us here on a glorious new earth.

Oops, though, the scene changes again, and we are back to salivating over all the bad things about to happen to all those who have done so many bad things. (vs.8) One striking ingredient in this particular dispensation is the indiscriminateness of the divine fury. For instance, cowards and liars come off just as badly as murderers do. Whatever happened to God’s sense of fairness and proportion?

The doctrine of plenary inspiration that millennialists share, to the effect that all of the words of scripture together constitute the Word of God, has the virtue of preventing us from resting content reading only those biblical passages that we like. The problem with the doctrine is that it leaves us with one contradiction after another to resolve, across both Testaments. One that millennialists of the Left Behind variety have yet to resolve is between God’s gracious promise at Genesis 8:22 and John of Patmos’ petulent vision in Revelation 20.

What makes contradictions like this one so intractible is the otherwise well-meaning notion that every text of scripture must somehow be held equally authoritative for any and all situations whatever. In the whole of the scriptures there is indeed the Word of God, but not every image in every passage within the scriptures expresses that Word equally well. For an image of our future with God, I’ll take the rainbow over the lake of fire anytime.