Sermons

READING
Christian Scripture, Gospel of Matthew 11:28-29

Matthew 11:28-29 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
²⁸ Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

READING ~ about Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor 1933 – 1945

Frances Perkins (1880-1965) achieved historic gains as U.S. secretary of labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College where she majored in physics and chemistry, she was a teacher before becoming involved in social reform. She earned a Master of Arts Degree in Sociology from Columbia University and studied economic at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first woman to serve on the New York State Industrial Commission, as well as the first to hold a U.S. cabinet post with her appointment by Roosevelt in 1933 as his Secretary of Labor. She remains the longest serving person in that position. Perkins championed many of the policies that became part of the New Deal, and established the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts. After President Roosevelt died in 1945, she resigned her position and went on to write a best-selling book and teach at Cornell University.

SERMON
When is the last time you worked at a job that paid the minimum wage?
Can you remember?
Maybe you never had a job that only paid the minimum wage.
I did. It was Two Dollars and Ten Cents an hour. A pretty good raise was five cents an hour. That was 1975. Some of you, no doubt, remember working for less than a dollar an hour. When is the last time you worked at a job that not only issued safety gear to you, but made you wear it or use it appropriately?

When is the last time you worked at a job that paid overtime after 40 hours in a week?

In my life, I’ve been able to take all these things for granted. A minimum wage. Overtime. Safety regulations. People who came before me fought and sometimes died to gain these simple protections and provision for hourly workers.

Tomorrow is Labor Day. Sure, we’ve come to view Labor Day as the end of summer – no more white pants and shoes after Labor Day. Back to school for everyone. The days are getting noticeably shorter and the nights cooler (thank goodness for that this year!). These are all aspects of the holiday that have been tacked onto it and along the way we somehow lost sight of the origin and meaning of the day.

Labor Day honors and celebrates those who labor. Without labor, our economy would grind to a halt. Without labor, there would be no manufacturing and no farming and no health care. Recognizing the contributions of people who work for an hourly wage is important, especially now when it seems that some members of our political and economic leadership are doing all they can to weaken the status and well-being of laborers. The rights and protections for workers are under full attack from those who value profits more than people. This is one more way that I see our country turning away from the good of all and back toward a time when the very wealthy ruled ruthlessly and carelessly over everyone else.

Today, I want to take time to honor and value and support labor.

We wouldn’t have the rights and protections that I have been able to take for granted and that now seem vulnerable to reversal without the tireless vision and work and determination of others upon whose shoulders we all ride today. There are many, many people who made up the labor movements of the 20th century. For me, one person stands out in the crowd. Frances Perkins was an unlikely hero in the struggle for labor and ordinary Americans. Yet, it was her grit and determination that finally resulted in much of what we call the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Frances Perkins was not the first Secretary of Labor. That was William Wilson who served under President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921. She was, however, the first woman to serve as a member of the president’s cabinet. FDR was persuaded, against his initial preference and judgement, by the forceful and persistent women in his life to appoint Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor in 1933.

The details of that campaign of strong democratic women is wonderfully displayed next door at the Castine Historical Society special exhibit on the powerful women of Castine. It was Florence Kelley, Molly Dewson and Eleanor Roosevelt who had the most influence on FDR in getting Perkins into the Labor Secretary position. She came to the job with a full and carefully crafted agenda that changed American life and made recognition of labor mandatory. You will recall from your visit to the Historical Society exhibit just how vital

Perkins was to the accomplishment of the New Deal. In this summer’s expanded exhibit, there is additional information about the relationship and work of Molly Dewson and Frances Perkins that makes personal the otherwise purely historical.

Frances Perkins, along with many others, was motivated by her clear and unwavering sense of justice and commitment to social reform. She understood the challenges of the working class. Though she had a relatively privileged upbringing, as a young woman she worked in the settlement houses of Chicago and learned firsthand the difficulties faced by people newly arrived in the United States, the unemployed and the homeless. In 1907, Perkins moved to Philadelphia and then to New York City where she worked for social reform groups and simultaneously earned a master’s degree in sociology and economics from Columbia University. In 1910 she became secretary of the New York Consumers’ League where she investigated labor conditions and successfully lobbied the state legislature for a law to restrict the hours of women workers to fifty-four hours a week. In 1910, Perkins began advocating for workers as the head of the New York Consumers League. She saw first-hand the deadly potential of poor working conditions as a witness to the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that killed more than 100 factory employees. That experience changed her life and set her on the course toward greatness in labor rights and history.

What was this New Deal that Perkins and others made the foundation of FDR’s legacy? The Fair Labor Standards Act remains the strongest protection of the rights of working people we have. Minimum wage. Overtime. A set work week of seven days. Restrictions on the use of Child Labor. Basic safety provisions. These are all vital protections for workers and families that we must support in the strongest possible ways. Through the years since its passage, the FLSA has been amended and updated, but the basic worker protection provisions remain in place. Until now.

There are those who would enthusiastically rescind almost all the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. These people are primarily wealthy and economically powerful people. You have no doubt heard that some politicians support the repeal of the minimum wage and the overtime provisions claiming that each worker ought to be free to negotiate for whatever wage and working conditions she or he can get. In practice, we know that the power difference between the wealthy owners and managers of business and a newly hired worker or job applicant is so great that a person negotiating alone would achieve nothing beyond what the manager-owner was already willing to provide. It would quickly become a race to the bottom for workers – just what the already rich and powerful seem to advocate. Frances Perkins and her Department of Labor successfully overcame the resistance of the business owner class to achieve passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. We risk losing it now and we must not allow that to happen. A return to the days when labor earned only enough to keep from starving but not enough to rise above poverty would be devastating to the majority of Americans.

On this Labor Day, let also remember Frances Perkins for her efforts to pass the Social Security Act which served as a way to protect workers in their older years from being reduced to abject poverty when they could no longer work in the jobs they held for years. Because workers could not earn enough to save much for retirement, the Social Security Act devised a method of saving that pooled the resources of all wage earners – even those at the top of the income scale – for distribution to our senior citizens in retirement. This system too is under attack by those who wish to sever the individual citizen from the combined resources of the common good and force each person to rely on her or his own initiative, luck of birth, and life circumstance to survive elderhood.

As I prepare for another Labor Day, I am gripped by the conviction that we must support and advocate for the rights and protections of labor in ways that we have not needed to do since the great worker and union movement of the 1930s and 40s. All the gains and protections and social good that were earned on the backs of those who came before us are now at risk of being repealed, rescinded or simply ignored without legal or social consequences. Frankly, I am appalled.

I confess that I have not always been a great friend or advocate to labor and labor unions. In fact, I have worked against labor organizing drives in my life. What I understood then was that the luxury of not being in a union shop was largely due to the across-the-board rights and protections afforded to all workers through legislation like the FLSA and the regulatory action of the Department of Labor; rights and protections fought for by those labor organizers of decades ago and made part of American employment law and practice for all. I thought we had made permanent and sufficient gains. I was wrong.

The powers and principalities of this world that are motivated by greed and power are hard at work chipping away at all the gains of ordinary working people. Real wages have stagnated since the middle 1970s while executive pay has increased by orders of magnitude. Health and safety regulations are being relaxed or outright repealed. The disregard for the health of workers currently working in some of our most dangerous and dirty industries – like steel and coal – is sinful, plain and simple, sinful. The push to roll back wages and union bargaining authority can only benefit the already privileged at the expense of those just trying to get by.

There is a disdain for working class people in this country that is immoral. Terrible things are being done to undermine the working class while adding to the status and wealth of the richest class, and it is being done dishonestly with false and disingenuous promises to the very people the policies actually seek to destroy. It is bad enough that our nation has a new tax system that will intentionally redistribute the wealth of the many in the poor and middle classes to the few richest people in America while adding a trillion dollars to our national debt. And here is my rant for the morning .... This week, this week that includes Labor Day when we set aside our normal routines to recognize and honor the contributions of working class people to the wonder and success of our nation .... This week, the President wrote a letter to Congress informing them that he would be cancelling the already promised pay raises and equity adjustments for millions of federal workers and setting the new pay adjustment for federal employees to Zero. The reason he gave for this draconian action was two-fold. National Security and the need to reduce government expenditures to prevent the economy from collapsing. I am not making this up. I could not make it up. The President is suggesting that in order to mitigate the devastating effects of the recent massive tax cut for corporations and the richest Americans, ordinary wage-earning public servants will be denied their fair and promised compensation. Happy Labor Day everyone!

Frances Perkins, where are you now? We need your voice, your commitment and your determination.
Frances Perkins, Molly Dewson and Eleanor Roosevelt were not Unitarians or Universalists, but I like to think that if they were here today they would be sympathetic to our religiously liberal and justice focused work for a fair and reasonable economic system. One that appreciates the needs of the common good as well as individual freedom. One that recognizes the power differential between bosses and owners and employees and provides a regulatory framework that allows for mutually beneficial work and pay agreements. One that gives a much-needed balance between the need for work and productivity and competitive systems and the needs of human beings for time away from work to be with family and friends, to pursue personal interests, and to rest.

It was Jesus who said two thousand years ago, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Maybe Jesus understood Labor Day better than many religious and political leaders do today. Jesus faced the same sorts of challenges in his day that we face now. The rules of the powerful crush the laborer and make it impossible to gain relief from the requirements of the system – whether that system is the economy, the religion or the body politic. When the rules called for forced labor and unfair advantages to the powerful, Jesus advocated a quiet steady revolt - - leave that system and come to me and I will give you rest. It is not good that a person should be forced to labor without rest or to carry a burden so heavy that he or she cannot stand up straight. When the systems crush the citizens, it is time to change the system.

Friends, it is time for us to be alert and on guard for attempts to change our system in ways that lay heavier burdens on those who labor so that those who do not labor have even greater privilege and wealth. Ultimately, nothing good will come from a system that destroys and diminishes labor. Let us celebrate and honor those who labor and may we be great advocates for their well-being. Our lives may very well depend on it.

Blessed Be. I Love You. Amen.