Minimums and Margins

One of the most important things that is beginning to happen in our society is the honest consideration of a living wage.  There are labor movements happening before our very eyes, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century.  Near Pittsburgh, there is a place in the south hills called Homestead, which had lots of retail type businesses.  Now it's kind of a bustling shopping-mall kind of place, but Homestead also has a dark history, it's where Andrew Carnegie and his manager Henry Clay Frick hired Pinkerton detectives, basically as mercenaries, to break a strike of steel workers, they succeeded rather brutally, and the cause of labor unions was severely set back.
You can make a lot of arguments about whether unions are good or bad, but history teaches us one thing rather clearly: without organized labor, the worst impulses of greed and lust for power will roam free and crush lives and dreams, and eventually people like Carnegie and Frick will have their names on parks, universities and monuments, despite the fact that the blood of those they crushed cries out from the ground.
So now in Homestead, instead of steel mills they have box stores, and across the country retail workers are beginning to cry out for the same sorts of things that the steel workers wanted: honest and fair pay for what they do.
The problem is that working in a big store like Wal-Mart or Best Buy is generally considered to be a low value job.  You generally make minimum wage, which has not come close to keeping up with inflation over the last 50 years, you do not have what people consider a "skill," which would give you options about when and where you work.  Let me tell you, as someone who has worked in retail, it is a hard job, it's frustrating, it's boring, the hours are generally terrible and the pay is depressing, but because we are becoming more and more of a consumer society it's where millions of people make their living (or don't make their living).
Wal Mart is the poster child for modern retail.  The things they sell are cheap and disposable, they treat their workers pretty much the same way.  They are economic bullies, just like Carnegie and Frick, but without the bullets.  They don't need the bullets because big business has been slowly undermining the advances that labor made in the first half of the 20th century.  A company like Wal Mart does by sheer scale, what would have been a dream for Andrew Carnegie: they simply ignore the critics and their own disenfranchised employees.  Don't like working for Wal Mart?  Fine, quit, there are ten people waiting for your job.  Don't want to shop at Wal Mart?  Fine, don't, pay more somewhere else, there are a million people without your ethical standards and a million people who probably have no idea that we're even the modern equivalent of a robber baron.  And guess what, we lobby, threaten, and strong arm suppliers, politicians, city governments and just about anyone else that gets in our way, and it's all perfectly legal, because we don't have any rules any more, because of free market dogma.
But I don't want to just pick on Wal Mart, because they're not alone, they're just the most visible.  Listen to all the people who will tell you that people who work at McDonalds ought to be happy about their minimum wage job, but minimum wage is not a living wage, at least not if you want to live in an actual apartment with heat and running water.  Poverty is a major problem in this country.  The poverty line for a household with two adults and two children is around $22,000, but that is the absolute floor.  That assumes that you probably get some kind of government assistance, that assumes a whole lot of things.  The current Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25 per hour.  If you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, no vacations, no sick days etc. your gross pay is $15,080.  To top it off the "poverty line" is based on calculations that date back to the 1960's and, as most people will recognize, life has gotten more expensive since then in more ways than simple inflation data can reflect.  The poverty line reflects food and shelter, it does not account for vehicles, insurance, or healthcare, let alone, phones, internet access, or numerous other things that, while they would have seemed like a luxury or even a pipe dream in the 1960's, are now rather necessary to basic function in our society.
Something is broken and people are being crushed just as surely as those Homestead steelworkers, but there are Pinkertons gunning them down, there are only big corporations bloating on profits, as children go to bed hungry.
We can do better than this, we need to do better than this.  We owe it to our neighbors who we are supposed to love, and our children who will one day have to grow up and learn to make their way in the world.  Our goals and our methods need to change.  We need to carefully examine what we define as "enough" and stop striving constantly for excess.  The poverty line is not a good indicator of what it takes to live,  I mean really live, with some security and some margins to your life, with sabbath time and some basic comforts and advantages.  What I'm describing is a biblical idea, it's what the economic codes of the Old Testament are working for, it's what Jesus describes as the Kingdom of God, it's a world where people have enough, and children and families come before profits.  It's not a joke, it's not a pipe dream, it's a reality that our Creator takes rather seriously and we should too.