Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
September 9, 2005
Would You Work for Nothing?
Post-Labor Day Reflections
This past Monday was Labor Day, and it brought back memories for me. You see Labor Day used to be a much more festive and, frankly, a much more significant day than it is today. It used to be the day when presidential campaigns began in earnest. Every candidate for the presidency would go to Detroit on Labor Day to see the parade and more importantly, to be seen with leaders of the labor unions. That photo op said to all who saw it that organized labor was a powerful force in this land. A candidate had better cultivate its leaders if he wanted to be elected to high office.
Labor Day was originally set aside to honor the unions which, by means of collective bargaining, protected working men and women from exploitation. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Steel Workers Union and the United Mine Workers of America in nearby West Virginia were powerhouse organizations. The threat of a steel workers strike or a mine workers strike or an auto workers strike or a Teamster’s put the fear of God into the residents of Western Pennsylvania. Frankly, friends, I cannot remember a single strike in recent years which really set the country back.
This past July the AFL-CIO met to mark its 50th anniversary at its quadrennial convention. If we followed the media coverage, we learned that today there are 56 affiliate member unions of the AFL-CIO, while ten years ago there were 79. AFL-CIO membership is only slightly more today than 50 years ago, when the Union was founded, despite this country’s tremendous population growth in a half century. Union membership now represents less than 10% of the private-sector workforce. To compound the problem, several unions want to break off from the AFL-CIO, which would further weaken the union politically. Already, because so many unions are showing membership losses – a net decrease of 168,000 members between 2003 and 2004 – unions have less money to contribute to political campaigns and fewer workers to campaign and vote. The result is that unions enjoy far less clout than in former years.
Since the unions are now so much weaker, Labor Day is not much of a holiday anymore. Furthermore, for some of us, Labor Day used to be the last chance to shop or take a trip before our children started school. Now, our kids are back in school two and three weeks before Labor Day.
So, in that context, I want to ask you what may seem at first to be a silly question. Would you be willing to work at a job in which you had to do all kinds of labor and for which you would get paid nothing at all? Now you may think the answer is obvious. Of course, we would never take a job in which we had to do all kinds of work and get paid nothing for it – right? Well, this evening I would like to point out four examples where, whether we realize it or not, all of us have been conned into doing millions and millions of dollars of work for which we get paid exactly nothing. Old-time union bosses ought to be spinning in their graves, and maybe we need to hit the picket lines.
It started back in the 70s with food courts and fast food restaurants. They taught us to stand in line to order our food, and then to carry our trays to our seats. And then, what do we do when we have finished eating our meals? We dutifully take our trays and carry them to the trash bin and empty them there. And if we do not; if we dare leave our trash on the table – people stare at us as if we have no manners.
I do not know how or even when the fast food restaurants and food courts made the transition. There was a time when these places had waiters, waitresses, and busboys who did this work. But somehow they were able to persuade us to do it ourselves. And as a result, we took the place of the teenage boys and girls who, for minimum wage, used to do this work for us.
Who won when this transition was made? Not us. Now we do the work of the wait staff for no pay. And surely not the service employees. They lost their jobs. The restaurants get the benefit of free labor done for them by their customers.
Then the gas stations got smart. They learned from the restaurants. And so, somewhere back in the 80s, they instituted serve-yourself gas pumps. A person had a choice. He could either get out of his car and pump the gas himself or, if he wished, he could pay a few cents more and someone would pump the gas for him. They called these two choices: self-service and full-service. That was stage one.
Then came stage two. We no longer had a choice. If we wanted gas, we had to get out of our cars. Whether it is freezing cold or very hot outside makes no difference. We have to get out of our cars and pump the gas ourselves.
Are you old enough to remember the time when they had gas station attendants who would not only pump the gas for us? They would also check the oil and, if we asked them, they would even check the tires for us? And if we needed air in our tires, they would put it in for us at no charge. We might give them a tip if we wanted to, but that was up to us. And then the gas station operators got smart. They figured out that we consumers could not only pump our own gas, but we could also check our own oil and check our own tires and put air into the tires ourselves if we had to. We also have to pay for the air in many places.
Now we’re in stage three. We have been trained to swipe our credit cards into a slot and complete the purchase by ourselves. And so, we can now do our own gas pumping, windshield wiping, oil checking, tire airing, credit card paying, and be on the way without ever having met or been helped by a single human being.
You would think that eliminating the person who fills the gas tank for you and eliminating the person who checks the oil and air for you and eliminating the person at the cash register who takes your payment and gives you your change would make the purchase of gas much cheaper than it used to be. Right? Wrong!
Gas is at an all time high. And we cannot blame the people who used to work at the gas station; they are not there anymore. They have lost their jobs. So I guess we have to blame those people who have so easily adjusted to doing the work that these attendants used to do, and who do it at no pay – namely, us.
Just think: for the gas station owners, this is a very good deal. Not only do we do the work of filling our tanks and our tires ourselves, but we don’t have to be paid any salary, nor do we have to be provided with any health benefits or social security or pension. We get no days off for sick leave, we get no vacation, and we do not file sexual harassment charges.
It is a great deal for the gas station owners. It is not such a great deal for the people who used to work for them, whose jobs we have taken over from them for free. And it is not such a great deal for us, who do manual labor for no pay, and never stop to think about how strange it is.
Example three. The biggest stores in the country today are places like WalMart, Office Depot, and Office Max. And what do these places have in common? Two things. The first is that they all have someone who stands at the door and welcomes us, and tells us how happy they are to see us – which is lovely and flattering and makes us feel at home. The other thing that these stores have in common is that the person at the door who welcomes us is probably one of the last employees that we will see until we check out. If we want someone who can show us where a product is, or who can help us compare and choose between two products, good luck. There are very few service people in these stores.
Perhaps that is meant as a compliment. Maybe the owners of these stores feel that you and I are so intelligent that we can find the products we want to buy by ourselves and that we can compare them without any help. If that is the reason why they have so few servicepeople to help us on the floor, I guess I should feel complimented. But somehow, as in the food court and the gas station, I have the feeling that I am being used, that I am doing the work of someone else, and that only the owners of the store are really benefitting from my free labor.
Now let me give you a fourth and by far the most exasperating example. When I want to talk to my doctor, or when I want to talk to an airline to make travel plans, or when I want to talk to almost anyone nowadays, I am directed to what they call "voice mail." A machine is going to ask me a great many questions. If it is an airline that I am calling, the recording will ask me if I am trying to book an overseas or domestic flight. Depending on my answer, the machine will tell me whether to dial one or two. Then it will ask me whether I want to fly AM or PM. Depending on my answer, it will tell me to press one or two. Then it will ask me if I have a frequent flyer number. If I say yes, it will ask me to press three and dial it in. And this will go on and on and on for who-knows-how-many times until finally, finally, finally, if I am lucky, I will get to a human being. And then I will have no idea whether this human being who is handling my call is located in Africa or in the Philippines or India or somewhere else where the minimum wage is lower than it is in this country.
And if I call my doctor, I will go through a similar ordeal. First, the machine will want to know if I am a physician or a hospital or a patient. Then the machine will want to know if I am calling to schedule an appointment or to cancel one. And then the machine will want to know my social security number, my mother’s maiden name, the name of my health insurance company and my policy number. And then, when I finally, finally, finally get through answering all these questions, the machine will tell me that my doctor is not in, that his receptionist is out to lunch, but that if I will please leave my name and my phone number someone will call be back – eventually. I may have called because I was worried about some minor ailment but, by the time I finish this torturous tour of choices, my blood pressure has gone way up, and I really need to see the doctor now!
You and I have become unpaid replacements for the human beings who used to answer the phone and talk to us and tell us whether we needed to come in for an examination right away or not. Just as in the food court where we have replaced the wait staff, and just as in the gas stations where we have replaced the attendants, and just as in the super-stores we have replaced the helpers, so on what they call "voice mail", we have become the unpaid receptionists and message takers.
And so, fellow Labor Day celebrants, let us salute ourselves – we the consumers who, for no pay, and with no thanks, have chosen to do all this unpaid and unappreciated labor.
Friends, you might have anticipated what comes next in this Shabbat Eve sermon. What does the Jewish tradition have to say in response to this exploitation that we are currently experiencing? What does Jewish law have to say about this manipulation of the customer which turns him or her into an unpaid and unappreciated laborer? While Jewish law developed long before much of the machinery that we struggle with today – to the best of my knowledge there were no fast food courts in the time of the Talmud – we cannot look there in search of an answer whether we should carry our own trash to the bin or not. And there were no gas stations in the Bible either, and no credit cards in the rabbinic period, so we cannot search there for an answer to why we should fill up our gas tank for free and why the person who used to do it has lost his job. Surely the Responsa literature, so far, seems to have no guidance as to whether maxi-stores with mini-staffs or voice mail is kosher or not. But I do know two halachic sources which I think relate to these questions. I share them with you this evening with thanks to Rabbi Jack Riemer, who brought them to my attention.
The first comes from the halachic discussions of whether machine made matzos are kosher for Pesach or not. There was a serious debate on this question, pro and con, that began when the first matsa making machine was invented in Austria in 1852. Rabbi Shlomo Kluger of Cracow wrote a letter to Rabbi Hayyim Nathan and to Rabbi Leibish Horowitz, declaring that machine made matzos were absolutely forbidden and could not be used on Pesach. In 1859 Rabbi Kluger published a collection of responsa on this question by well-known rabbis who agreed with him, under the title: "Moda’ah l’veyt Yisrael" – An Announcement to the House of Israel.
In that same year, Rabbi Yosef Shaul Nathanson, the rabbi of Lemberg, gathered responsa with a contrary opinion, that machine made matzos were kosher l’pesach. He called his collection: "Bittul Moda’ah" – A Cancellation of the Announcement. In the end, the pro machine matsas won the day, and today it is common for Jews to eat machine made matsas.
I cannot say for sure what was behind this fierce debate, but I have the sense that it was more than just an argument over technicalities – whether machines had intelligence, or whether hand made matzos could be defiled by contact with leaven. I have a hunch that those who fought the battle for hand made matzos were concerned with what would happen to the bakers? How would they make a living if machines took their place? I believe that this was at least in part the issue which motivated those who first tried to outlaw machine made matzos.
One more halachic story. Rabbi Eliezer Silver of Cincinnati was one of the leaders of the Orthodox Jewish community in the 20th century. And it is told in his name that when his chauffeur drove him on a highway, Rabbi Silver gave him instructions that, when they came to a toll booth, if they had to choose between a booth that was manned by a human being and a booth where you threw in your coins and the gate automatically opened, that he should always choose the booth that was manned by a human being. Rabbi Silver said that to do otherwise might save a few seconds, but it would humiliate and make unnecessary the work of a human being, and that we Jews are not permitted to do.
I am sure that Rabbis Kluger and Silver never joined a labor union or participated in a strike. And yet let me suggest in all seriousness that we ought to honor them both on this post-Labor Day Shabbat. For the two of them, each in his own way, affirmed the dignity of the working person against the incursions of the machines that were gradually taking away workers’ livelihoods and dignity. I can imagine what these two sages would have said if they were asked to carry their own trays to the trash bin, pump their own gas, find merchandise on their own, or if they were put on hold by a machine. If they fought against the machines which replaced people many years ago, I suspect that they would be upset by all the ways in which we have become replacements for modern-day laborers. I suspect that they would be upset by all the ways in which we now do work – for the gas station, the food court, the super-store, the airlines – without being paid and, thereby, put good people out of work.
I suggest, friends, that it is time for us – even if we are not union members – to think about the state of the working man and working woman and to consider how many jobs we have caused to be eliminated by working for no pay. Perhaps all of us need to reflect about creative ways to help make Labor Day once again a genuine holiday and holyday for all those who work in this great land of ours. Amen
This message is based on the work of Rabbi Jack Riemer.
