Inherent Worth and Dignity (March 30,2014)

In Ithaca, the town where I live, I am told that there are more restaurants per capita than any place else in the US except Manhattan. We are lucky that so many restaurants near our house are independent locally owned businesses, and many feature local organic produce and local humanely raised pork and beef. If you are a foody and if you care about ethical eating it’s a great place to live.

Now I worked in restaurants while I was in school- as a bus person, as a waitress. I worked at fancy places and family restaurants. It’s hard work -- that I know. Never was I so physically exhausted at the end of a work day as I was when waiting or bussing tables. But it is good work you can feel proud of. I loved that feeling of rapport with the customers, I loved the food we served. I loved the camaraderie with my fellow servers who were some of the most fun co-workers I’ve ever had. I even got good at carrying plates on my arms, or on one of those huge trays on my shoulder. I didn’t love working a 7 hour shift with no breaks, and I didn’t love the days when the restaurant sat empty while we refilled salt shakers or wiped down the wait station with no customers to wait on, and no tips to be earned from empty tables, and I’m glad I didn’t have to support a family on my tips. The Restaurant industry is one of the largest growing in the country, and it is work 10 million Americans are proud, as I was, to call their own. 

I was surprised to find out that the so called “tipped minimum wage” has not changed since I was waiting tables- it is still $2.13 an hour[i] nationally. I have to tell you it’s been 20 years since I waited tables, and I was shocked to find that waiters in most states today made the same wage I did 20 years ago. It turns out that the minimum wage and the tipped minimum wage rose together until 1996 when Herman Cain, then the head of the National Restaurant Association, struck a deal with Congress to de-link the two — the minimum wage will continue to rise, but the minimum wage for tipped workers will be frozen. Now in theory, if you don’t make at least the minimum wage in tips, your boss is supposed to pay the rest so you are making minimum wage. Some bosses do, and some don’t. The law also requires that wait staff are taxed based on 15% of their sales. This means that if someone forgets to leave a tip, or chooses not to leave a tip, you still get taxed on 15% of their meal. Those taxes are taken out of your paycheck, as they are for most folks, so many waiters and waitresses get a paycheck of , with a paystub detailing which taxes were withheld. 

It is a common misconception, I think, that waiting tables is a lucrative profession. You look out over the dinner rush as you calculate your tip, and you think, geeze- if my waitress gets this same tip from everyone seated here she’s going to make a ton of money. What you don’t see is everything that goes into that tip. You don’t see the hours a waiter or waitress spends before the restaurant opens polishing silver and filling salt shakers. You don’t see the wait staff waiting anxiously as the early customers trickle in- hoping their tables will be filled more than once that night. You don’t see the waiter stuck at work as he waits for that last table to finish up- the table that hasn’t ordered anything in an hour, but is enjoying each other’s company. All the waiter can do is, well, wait for them to move on so he can clear their table and re-set it for the next day. You don’t see that in restaurants where there are bus people, they also make $2.13 an hour, and so when I worked at such restaurants the waiter was required to take part of his or her tips and give it to the bussers, and to give part to the bar tender- it’s called “tipping out”. I’ve also been the bus person who sees the tips left on the tables and easily calculates that what the waiter is handing me is not the full percentage of his tips.

You don’t see that the Friday and Saturday night dinner shifts go to the most senior staff. Waiters and bus staff start off working Mondays, or the other less popular shifts. A Restaurant Opportunity Center study showed that only %20 of restaurant workers make a living wage, and those are mostly in fine dining restaurants[ii] (p. 141). So, yes, if you work at a fine dining restaurant in NYC and get the Friday and Saturday night shifts, you can make a decent living. But I think for too long we have let the image of the tuxedoed waiter rolling in tips keep us from making sure the waitress at the local pancake house can also earn enough to feed her family. In fact within the restaurant industry are 7 of the 10 lowest paying jobs (p. 71) as are the 2 lowest paid jobs in U.S. (p. 101). Restaurant workers rely on Food stamps at double rate of rest of the work force, and their poverty rate is triple. 

So what does this have to do with Inherent worth and dignity? I would like to propose the radical idea that “Affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person”[iii] needs to go beyond our good thoughts about our brothers and sisters, beyond treating our neighbors kindly, to creating a society where all our brothers and sisters can live in dignity. I propose that we could best affirm the worth and dignity of all honest hard work through a living wage. Right now the minimum wage in this country, in this state, is not a living wage. And what do I mean by that? A living wage is defined as the amount of money that a person needs to earn to put a roof over her head, food on her table, to go to a doctor when she is sick. I also heard a republican legislator say recently that this country was built on people saving up their money and starting their own businesses. Well, if we believe that is important, then we should pay our workers enough that they can put away a little bit for a rainy day, for their retirement, or even to become their own boss someday. That is what we mean by a living wage. [iv] A living wage means that anyone who works full time should not need public assistance to survive. Of course what it costs to live in Manhattan is different than what it costs to live in Chemung County[v]. In Tompkins county, where I live, the living wage as determined in 2013 to be $26,242.21 a year or $12.62 per hour.[vi]

Does it strike anyone else as odd that the minimum wage is not based on a living wage? That hard working Americans are living in that difficult gap between $8 an hour and a wage one can truly live on? This past October while Jeff Stratton, president of McDonald’s USA, was giving a speech to the Union League Club of Chicago, a McDonald’s employee yelled out from the back of the ballroom:

“It’s really hard for me to feed my two kids and struggle day to day. Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 when I have worked for McDonald’s for 10 years?” 

Nancy Salgado was taken from the room by police, and in an interview later told reporters:

“… he needs to know we are what all the employees at McDonald’s are going through. We’re struggling day to day to provide our needs in our houses, things for our kids. And it’s just–it gets harder and harder with just the poverty wage they have us living in.”[vii]

I want to be clear, it is not just the restaurant industry where people are paid less than they need to live. In fact it is so prevalent in this country we might despair that change is possible. We are told that any attempt to remedy this injustice would lead to a collapse of industry and a massive loss of jobs. But there are enough working examples to show that something more just is possible. For example, in seven states the tipped minimum wage is now re-joined with the regular minimum wage and all of these states continue to have growing restaurant industries. 

I wonder if what is happening here is what my old theology professor used to call a “Language event.” In an age where the Supreme Court confirms that Corporations are people, but the workers of the world are called "labor costs" that need to be “minimized.” As long as we think of the people who bus our tables, wash our dishes, and make our phones as "labor costs" that must be "minimized" we are stripping them of their inherent worth and dignity. 

When we explain why we can’t pay employees enough to meet their basic human needs, we hear a lot about market forces. But as near as I can tell, the market does not take care of people who make things. We cannot leave that to "the market" because it is the explicit job of the “market” to "minimize costs." The lives of human beings are not a cost. They are a blessing. Each and every one has worth.

No it is not the job of the market to make sure that each and every person on this planet is afforded dignity, and that we honor their worth as human beings. Such ethical concerns fall to people of conscience like us. I am not aware of any religious tradition the world over who hold as their highest principle “maximizing shareholder value” or “minimizing labor costs.” And you will not find either among the Principles and Purpose that join Unitarian Universalists in a common purpose. I know these are powerful ideas in our culture right now, almost like a sacred cow we must refrain from harming, but I believe the “inherent worth and dignity of all people” is more powerful, is more sacred. I propose that whether our brothers and sisters who put food on our tables can themselves afford to feed their own families is not something we should consider “if market forces allow.” “Inherent worth and dignith” is a fundamental ethical principle that we must bring to every decision we make as a country, as a community.

When you hear about market forces, remember that YOU are a market force. The market has no inner ethical compass except for yours. Not everyone knows that tips are not just a bonus for extra good work, but are rent money, grocery money. Not everyone knows that the IRS assumes you tipped your server %15. But the next time you are eating out with friends, and dividing up the check, have a conversation about how the tipping system really works. The next time you are eating out-- get curious. Do you know which restaurants offer their employees something better than the $5 per hour required by law here in New York? Do you know which restaurants have a history of making their employees clock out before they are done working, or taking a portion of their employees tips? As UUs concerned about ethical eating, we have gotten curious about whether our vegetables are local, or the beef grass fed. Let’s start getting curious about which restaurants offer paid sick days and promote from within. Let’s get curious about which restaurants honor the inherent worth and dignity of their employees. And then let’s be a market force- let’s support the restaurants that are ethical leaders.

These restaurants need our support in Washington[viii] and Harrisburg as well. Owning a restaurant, especially a small local restaurant, is challenging. Owners who want to pay a living wage to their staff really have to work hard and get creative to compete with all the restaurants who pay only $2.13 an hour. And it would really help level the playing field if we encouraged our legislators to re-connect the tipped minimum wage to the regular minimum wage. One bill that has recently been through congress, but was defeated, would have set the tipped minimum wage at %70 of the federal minimum wage so that whenever the minimum wage goes up with inflation our waiters and bussers would see their wages go up too. I know there is a popular myth out there that if the minimum wage is raised, food will become so expensive that none of us will be able to afford to eat out any more. The proposed Fair Minimum Wage Act[ix], introduced in 2012 and again in 2013 by Representative George Miller (D-CA) in the House and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) in the Senate would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour over the next 2 years and the tipped minimum wage from $2.13 $3 and then to 70% of the regular minimum wage. Studies show that the actual impact on American families would be only about $.10 per day over 3 years.[x] Wouldn’t you pay $.10 a day to raise many Americans out of poverty, to reduce the need of working people to subsidize their wages with food stamps? I would.

We are a people who affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Those words are beautiful and inspiring, but challenging too. To promote the worth and dignity of every person we must go beyond the respect for one another that we hold in our hearts, that we aspire to live out in our day to day interactions with our brother and sisters, we must also create a world where each person who works receives a wage that allows them food and shelter and medical care, without which dignity is hard to come by. Be they restaurant workers, farm workers, or garment industry workers- we are called to stand by every worker until each can live in dignity. 

Feel Moved to do something? Visit the UUSC website to learn how to get plugged in.

 Endnotes

[i] minimum wage as of 1/1/14 per the department of labor http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
· Federal: $7.25 $2.13
· NY $8.00 $5.00
To learn more about wages in the restaurant industry visit http://www.uusc.org/ccc/frequently_asked_questions_about_restaurant_workers
[ii] All page numbers refer to Behind the Kitchen Door by Sarumathi Jayaraman, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15936992-behind-the-kitchen-door?from_search=true
[iii] http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles/ 
[iv] http://livingwage.mit.edu/ and http://www.alternatives.org/livable.html
[v] http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/36015
[vi] http://www.alternatives.org/2013livingwagepressrelease.html
[vii] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/09/mcdonalds-worker-arrested-after-telling-company-president-she-cant-afford-shoes/ 
[viii] http://www.timeforaraise.org/benefits-of-raising-the-minimum-wage/
[ix] S.460 - Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/460
[x] http://foodmyths.org/reports-resources/a-dime-a-day-the-impact-of-the-millerharkin-minimum-wage-proposal-on-the-price-of-food/

Language of Reverence: Queer (March 2, 2014)

Maybe a decade ago I used the word “Queer” in a public meeting to describe myself. One of the members of my congregation came to me afterwards and admonished me “NEVER use the word queer about yourself- you don’t have to put yourself down like that.” 

Her comment shocked me into remembering that for many people “Queer” is a loaded word. But for me it is just right. As a bisexual woman married to a man, I have always felt that both the words “gay” and “straight” didn’t quite fit; either word felt a little dishonest. I’m also not crazy about the word “bisexual” – not only does it sound kind of clinical, but it doesn’t sound like you can be monogamous when you’ve got the prefix meaning “2” right in the word there. 

When one of my seminary professors, whose name was then Elias Farajaje-Jones, delivered the Sophia Fahs lecture in 2000 (the lecture is named after the famous UU religious educator) I had just made the choice to enter into the Ministry of Religious education, which many people dismiss as a marginal sort of ministry that involves mostly cutting out construction paper shapes and lining up magic markers. When Elias delivered his lecture “Queer(y)ing Religious Education: Teaching the R(evolutionary Sub)V(ersions)! Or Relax!... It’s Just Religious Ed” it was like some walls I had in my mind came crumbling down. I suddenly knew that I was a queer person doing a queer ministry. I knew that the ministry of Religious Education is not tame and marginal to our movement, but radical, revolutionary and at the core of our religious formation as Unitarian Universalists.

So what do I mean by “Queer” in this expanded context? First, queer means “non-normative.” We have been raised to believe that some things are “normal” and other things are “not normal.” We get the message every day that being straight is normal, being white is normal, being able-bodied is normal, being middle-class is normal. (or if you watch a lot of tv it starts to seem like being rich is normal). When I use the word “queer” I mean anything that defies those norms. 

When the Gay and Lesbian rights movement started here in the US, those brave activists were fighting to add “Gay” as a possible category that a person could be. So we had “Gay” and “straight” – expanding the number of norms to 2. It’s even in our Hymnal [sing] “we are Gay and Straight together.” There were struggles to determine cultural norms for how to be Gay until our thinking evolved and we realized that not only is straight not “normal” but there is no “normal” way to be gay. Then the Bisexual folks came along and said “Actually…” Being a person who identifies as bisexual, I don’t want my own third box, I want to queer all those norms. I want to have room to be whoever it is I really am. As Dr. Farajaje said that day: “Heterosexual identity exists only by virtue of defining itself as the norm over against queer deviation. But if there really is no norm, then there aren’t really any deviations. We’re all then just a big mix of possibilities of desire just waiting to happen!” [p. 29]

I am reminded of a song by that great singer-songwriter Ani Difranco:

when I was four years old
they tried to test my I.Q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong

We were all taught at a young age to assume that if there is 3 of one thing it is “normal” and the one that is different “does not belong”. What I am trying to suggest is that not only can the pear take pride in being “queer” but that oranges are not normative. 

My fruit analogy is breaking down quickly, so let’s look at Race for example. Scientists tell us that race is not biological, but an intellectual construct. In American we often talk about race by dividing it into two neat categories “White” and “People of Color” even though we know that, for example, Irish immigrants used to be considered non-white and are now considered white. We know that though President Obama is of mixed race, he is often referred to as the first Black president. What if we changed the way we thought about race to acknowledge that from a scientific perspective there is no such thing as “racial purity” -that we are all racially queer? It was only in the year 2000 that the US Census allowed people to check more than one box under “race”, that people didn’t have to choose one part of themselves and discard the rest. 

Moreover, Dr. Farajaje is proposing ( along with others in the field of cultural theory) that gender, sexuality, race, class, whether we are temporarily able-bodied, “These things are inseparable for us; we cannot and will not pull these apart without doing irreparable violence to our very bodies, souls, and minds.” [p. 26] He calls this “Intersexionality.” All the parts of who we are intersect. In an adult RE class I taught last spring I invited all the participants to write down 5 identity words for themselves. People wrote things like “White, gay, mother, UU, able-bodied, male” Many of us struggled with the exercise- how do you know which 5 to pick? No matter what words you pick you are leaving out part of yourself. 

Moreover, each of those words describes a whole multiplicity of ways of being. For example, how many of you self-identify as “white”?  Now look around at all the different ways there are of being “white” --what Dr. Farajaje might call “multiplicities of whiteness”. Or let’s take another one- If you are willing to out yourself as identifying “temporarily able-bodied” please raise your hand. Look how many different bodies this describes! There are multiplicities of being temporarily able-bodied. 

By looking at the world, at one another, in this complex, intersectional, wholistic way, I propose that we are doing something radical. We are interrupting that conversation about “which one is different and does not belong.” We are interrupting norms; we are rupturing walls and boxes. Remember the scene in” the Wizard of Oz” when Toto pulls back the curtain? The “wise and powerful Oz” is revealed as he really is- an ordinary man from Kansas who got lost. These boxes, these walls, these definitions of who we are and what is normal are not divinely given, which becomes clear as we pull back the curtain to see how they work and where they come from. This we can call “Queering” the conversation, because we are creating a space not defined by walls and boxes. 

This is a dangerous act. Every year we hear stories in the news of queer people who have been victims of violence. Gender theorists believe this violence arises in a culture that is threatened by anyone existing outside the two-box gender system-- male and female. We also hear about those who took their own lives because it was too painful not to be able to fit easily into the two boxes our society defines… too painful to live in a culture which asks “Which one is different and does not belong.” I call us to interrupt this conversation, to “queer” this conversation by saying “everyone is different, and everyone belongs!”

That is why Queering the conversation is also healing. Back when I was doing the internship every UU minister has to do in a hospital, I worked in the outpatient Cancer center. A kind, wise, circumspect woman I had the privilege of talking with told me: “my doctors don’t treat me, they treat people like me, that is --people with cancer.” It is hard to heal when people don’t see you, they just see a box. When her treatment wasn’t working like it should, when she had unusual side effects, or when she wanted treatment alternatives, she was constantly banging up against the walls of that box “Cancer patient” with all its clinical norms and expected outcomes. 

I suspect every one of us has some part of our self that does not fit neatly into a box-- some part of ourselves that does not look like the images we see on TV or in the movies. This leads us to feel “broken” or “incomplete,” “damaged” or “abnormal.” By radically acknowledging all that we are, we become whole just as we are. By radically affirming that each and every one of us belongs, our communities are made whole. For me, reframing my self-understanding from “not-really straight and not-really gay” to someone who was perfectly and completely queer filled me with a sense of pride and belonging. To hear that my non-normative call to the Ministry of Religious Education was still at the heart of ministry, to hear that I was not giving up my radical, questioning revolutionary self to in taking on “religious Educator” as part of my identity was so healing and affirming. This reframing helped me realize that I didn’t have to throw away the box called “religious Educator” to enter a box called “parish minister” when I was called to serve my congregation in Athens, because religious education is not just something that happens in a classroom with children, if we let it out of its box, it is happening right here, right now. 

When I was in the process of applying to seminary, I sent away for the catalogues for the 3 uu seminaries. I looked over the high-gloss brochure from Harvard and noticed that there was a page about their “women’s studies” department. I read the brochure from Starr King and I noticed that women and queer people didn’t have their own department, they were right there in the body of the catalogue. As Dr. Farajaje, who joined the Starr King faculty when I was in my last year at the school, writes about his approach to teaching:

 “Each class that I teach, whether it be liberating the Bible for UUs , African Religious in Diaspora, or the Divine Feminine in Russian Orthodox Religious Thought is taught in a way that calls us to continually and simultaneously consider issues of race, class, gender, embodiment, environmental issues, cultural representations, sexualities etc. These are not treated as peripheral considerations.”

I chose Star King because I wasn’t looking for a separate box to contain the non-normative parts of myself. I wanted to bring everything I was to my formation as a minister.

We often wonder “what is UU?” Members of every congregation I’ve ever served have come to me and said “Can I really be UU because I am … in the armed forces, republican, Christian, a person of color, transgender, Jewish, pagan, atheist, undecided?” What they are really asking is; “Do I fit in the UU Box?”

This, I believe, is part of our calling as Unitarian Universalists in the 21st century. Let this community be a place where you don’t have to leave your sexual orientation outside, you don’t have to leave your financial situation at the door, you don’t have to leave your body at home. Theology, spirituality is not something that hovers above the body, but I believe it is deeply embedded, imminent in everything that we are. We are all part of one interdependent web of life. From the very first days of Universalism we were rejecting the two-box system (the elect and the rest of us who were damned.) We reject the two box system of heaven and hell. We reject the two box system of God and the Devil. Back in 1805, the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou suggested:

 Is [God] not perfectly joined to his creation? Do we not live, move and have our being in God? …to take the smallest creature from him, … you have left something less than infinity.” (Treatise on atonement P. 81-82)

We believe in a God who can hold all our queerness, all our multiplicities. 

Our Unitarian Tradition has always been one that looks behind the curtain, to see who is defining the parameters, who is making the boxes into which we are asked to fit. Our Unitarian Tradition challenges us to open our minds beyond the conventional ways of looking at things. Our Universalist Tradition challenges us to open our hearts to hold every being in the oneness of the divine. 

This is why I propose to you with great pride, that ours is a queer theology. Or perhaps that in this ambitious tradition in which we stand, we are “queering” theology. We are “queering” church. Last year I spoke from this pulpit about the possibility of a “Language of Reverence” for Unitarian Universalists. I humbly suggest that we add the word “queer” to this list, because it honors something special about the radically inclusive place we strive to occupy among religious communities, and because it honors the wholeness of each and every one of us; all that we are, and all that we bring.