All You That Labor: Religion and Ethics in the Living Wage Movement

2. Living Wages: Religious Ideology and Framing for Moral Agency

37   2 Living Wages Religious Ideology and Framing for Moral Agency In a small classroom on the campus of North Park Seminary in Chicago , three leaders from the National Council of Churches’ (NCC) Let Justice Roll campaign gathered with a student activist from the University of Notre Dame and a local Chicago alderman to train other activists on building successful living wage campaigns. While handouts and handbooks were circulating, Rev. Paul Sherry, the retiring director of the NCC’s national campaign, mused, “One of the most important parts of the campaign was to find a phrase that really captured the imagination. I think we did it with ‘A job should keep you out of poverty, not in it.’”1 Conversation moved to the importance of infusing and maintaining a moral tone in any discussion of living wages. This national workshop was just one among the many in which lead organizers emphasized a key strategy to their living wage victories: sticking to the “moral high ground” rather than arguing numbers (such as how the living wage was calculated, the probable costs, and so on). Attention to numbers was certainly critical, and many living wage campaigns hired economists to track economic impacts. But numbers-crunching did not draw the most “conversions,” or new allies, and it certainly is not what motivated persons to join the fight. In fact, when asked what major lessons they wanted other activists to take from their campaigns, lead organizers echoed each other: “Don’t get caught in debating numbers” but emphasize the values of fairness, hard work, and just wages. In other words, “framing” the living wage required keeping the moral dimension of this issue front and center in the movement’s message. Religious living wage activists navigate deep cultural assumptions about the “nature” of the economy and its nonrelationship to morality. To 38  Living Wages do this well, they must be creative enough to enter the dominant political /economic discussions convincingly while simultaneously challenging them by offering alternatives to reverse the tidal wave of damaging policies . They also seek to cultivate the engagement of persons and communities that are largely tangential to the insider conversations of most government economic policies. In other words, they want the working poor and their allies to be legitimate policy contributors in American democratic capitalism, not just objects. To do this, religious activists intertwine ethical arguments about the moral nature of the economy with pragmatic claims about proper economic interventions in the market. They document and, importantly, teach others to document the sociological reality and theological good of people’s social, economic, and political interdependencies . They identify and explain our collective responsibility for the creation and continuation of working poverty. By developing and practicing new combinations of religious political speech, religious activists cultivate analytical capacity and moral commitment—or moral agency—for challenging the current political economy. The effectiveness of framing in the living wage movement is built on amplifying core economic ideals of the “American dream” and its surrounding civil religion.2 Many religious activists are well versed in the moral arguments on political economies from theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, John Ryan, and Martin Luther King Jr. Their political success depends, in part, on using religious values and tropes that resonate with dominant U.S. culture and its neoclassical economic ideals. This framing strategy introduces, at minimum, an effective triage mechanism for falling wages and, optimally, a pathway for ongoing moral education that enables persons to criticize and concretely re-envision the current political economy. But as with all ethical and rhetorical work, some of the movement’s current framing for “living wages” has implications that may be damaging in the long run. Promoting such neoclassical ideals as independence from government, for example, could be seen as stigmatizing any necessary and good government “dependence.” These potentially undermining implications must be addressed in order to support other poverty-fighting measures and recognize everyone’s “dependencies” on government for their well-being (or welfare). By remembering the sociological and theological importance of our interdependencies, religious activists can hold these neoclassical ideals in check and better support long-term economic political change. Living Wages  39 Moral Agency and Framing As ethical and social movement theories inform us, moral agency is analytically cultivated, in part, by helping people dissect and deconstruct the “givenness” of social structures and discern the impact those structures have on their lives. The capacity...