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Labor Day and the Refusal to Labor

Labor Day and the Refusal to Labor

Last updated on: September 5, 2022 at 8:16 am by Gene Veith

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Labor Day and the Refusal to Labor 2022-09-05T08:16:14-04:00 Gene Veith

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Happy Vocation Day! (a.k.a., Labor Day, but we are in a crusade to co-opt the observance into a Christian holiday.)

Today we note two trends that work against the spirit of the holiday: Quiet Quitting & Income Equality.

Quiet Quitting refers to workers, quite consciously and purposefully, doing the bare minimum that their job requires, working enough to carry out their job description and not get fired, but doing nothing more. No “going beyond the call of duty,” no “going the extra mile,” no putting in extra time or effort or enthusiasm.

Quiet Quitting has become a theme on social media and Tik Tok videos, with countless posters proclaiming how they are adopting the “quiet quit” mentality and defending their decision. Apologists for the notion say that doing only what you have to at work is a fitting response to today’s dysfunctional workplace, is a way to avoid burnout, and is a good strategy for work-life balance.

This has become a big trend that employers are worried about it. This last quarter, productivity in the second quarter declined 2.5%, the steepest drop since 1948.

The concept has also spun off into other kinds of passive aggressive behavior: Quiet Firing, in which employers marginalize workers, refusing to promote them or give them pay raises hoping they will just quit. And, outside of the workplace, there is “Quiet Dumping” in the dating world, the practice of purposefully becoming more and more distant in a relationship as a way to precipitate a breakup.

Another problem is discussed by former senator Phil Gramm and John Early, former official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem, with the deck “Those in the middle work much harder, but don’t earn much more, than those at the bottom.” (The article is behind a paywall.)

They argue that statistics about income inequality in the United States are misleading because they don’t count state and federal transfer payments–such as food stamps, housing subsidies, Obamacare supplements, and other benefits–as income. And they don’t count tax payments as income lost. When the numbers are calculated taking those into consideration, the income inequality between the highest and the lowest 20%–which the Censur Bureau says has gone up 21% since 1967–has actually fallen by 3%.

But crunching the numbers, factoring in government benefits and the effect of taxes, reveals something else. I’ll let Gram and Early explain it (a “quintile” is 20% of the whole):

Our most significant finding from correcting the census income calculations wasn’t the overstated inequality between top and bottom earners. It was the extraordinary equality of income among the bottom 60% of American households, regardless of employment status. In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. The middle quintile earned $66,453 and 92% were employed. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only $61,350—just 26% more than the bottom quintile. . . .

After adjusting income for the number of people living in the household, the bottom-quintile household received $33,653 per capita. The second and middle quintile households had on average $29,497 and $32,574 per capita, respectively. The blockbuster finding is that on a per capita basis the average bottom quintile household received 14% more income than the average second-quintile household and 3.3% more than the average middle-income household.

That is to say, for 60% of Americans–everybody but the highest and the next highest 20%–those who don’t work do just about as well as, or even better than, those who do work.

The writers, who have written a book about all of this, say that blue collar workers are very aware of this unfairness and that it drives some of their resentment of the status quo. “This justifiable resentment is the economic source of today’s American populism,” they write. “It is ravaging the increasingly unstable Democratic political alliance between welfare recipients and blue-collar workers.”

Whatever the solution, whatever the policy implications (and feel free to address those in the comments), both Quiet Quitting and income equality between those who work and those who don’t raise theological issues of vocation.

To the latter, St. Paul enjoins Christians “to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one” (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). Here is the dignity of physical labor, as opposed to the notion that “working with your hands” is inferior to the white collar jobs where you supposedly “work with your mind.” Some middle class sorts, including college graduates who can’t find jobs in their field, think working in a factory or on a construction site is beneath them, so they don’t work at all. That is unbiblical.

To his readers at Thessalonica who didn’t fully get that message, St. Paul expands the point in his second letter to the church of that city, criticizing those who “walk in idleness.” Not the unemployed but those who continually and purposefully are “idle.”

Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. (2 Thessalonians 3:6-12).

The verse about not working and not eating is well-known, but the passage goes further than that. Yes, those who refuse an economic vocation end up being a “burden” to others, who end up taking care of them. That’s not loving those neighbors. This passage is not against the poor, who in St. Paul’s time as in ours often work harder than anybody but get little for it, or the unemployed who dearly want a job. Rather, “walking in idleness” refers not to the pleasant sabbaths we can take from our everyday busyness, nor does it have to do only with economic activity. “Walking” in idleness refers to those who continually and purposefully don’t do anything productive. We can speak not just of the “idle poor” but of the “idle rich,” those trust fund babies who have nothing productive to do, just live off the family fortune as they jet set around the world. (Cf. the “deadly sin” of Sloth.)

As for those who are blessed with a vocation by which they are earning their living but are doing the least they can to get by, the Bible also has something to say to them: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10; NIV).

HT: Jackie

Image by Mote Oo Education from Pixabay

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