I recently heard news reports about many school systems that are in financial trouble. So much so they are planning to lay off thousands of teachers and increase class sizes. Of course these municipalities are also planning on balancing their budgets by cutting their arts and sports programs. Music, drama and art have often been the first thing to go in schools when budgets are undernourished. Most people in these fields know and have testified to long stretches of unemployment and working in transition jobs just to keep food on the table. My daughter and I went to a restaurant in New York city where all the wait staff were aspiring young actors who would sing show tunes to the customers between taking orders and serving food. In a conversation about pastoral compensation I had some times ago with a parishioner, she told me that I went into the wrong profession if I wanted to make a living.
Why is it that people gifted in some professions are valued with compensations beyond my dreams and with job security and huge severance packages, while people gifted in other professions worry about having work at all? When I hear in news reports espousing reasoning for big financial field bonuses--"We need to pay this to keep the best and the brightest,” I get infuriated. There are “best and brightest” in all fields and our current system of compensation and reward does not acknowledge that. The current supply of workers is reaching toward outstripping the demand for workers, the number of jobs available. Is the mass of workers so large and the jobs so few that this argument of “the best and brightest” bubbles to the top to justify business practices without responsibility and without recognition that all human beings are of value and deserving of recognition for their gifts.
Compensation as a means of valuing what a person offers is out of balance in our culture. It seems to me that happiness and well being, not compensation, should be the means of valuing all gifts, talents, skills. Why is it we can not make it possible for all workers to offer their gifts and find happiness and satisfaction as well as a living? It’s the pursuit of happiness that we are guaranteed in our constitution, not the happiness itself. Does that mean that we are free to pursue work all we want only to find our gifts unappreciated and undervalued and our happiness illusive because we aren't compensated for them? One clear path to happiness for me is to offer my gifts in service to healing and health. A musician offers her gifts in service to her music and a poet to his poetry. Why should a banker’s gift of making money be of more value than these? What is a true sign of the happiness we pursue?
I like the egalitarian view that the writer of I Corinthians proposes for the faith community. The same could bring healing to our current economic culture. Here’s a peek…
If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?.... If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. (I Corinthians 12:15-18,20-24)
It seems to me that our economic body needs to live this lesson. Mutual respect and contribution to the betterment of the whole globe will make us stronger human beings and a body that values all healthy pursuits and happiness.
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