Justice for Janitors

The day after I published the last post (“It Didn’t Start in Africa”) I received a phone call from the Rev. Mark Hardin. Mark is an African-American pastor in Lufkin, a former student of mine at the Houston Graduate School of Theology, and a Chaplain in the U.S. Army. In fact, he was in Neal Hicks’s chaplaincy training class. Last year UBC’s two gospel quartets went to Mark’s church to provide the music for a men’s night program. Anyway, Mark called out of the blue. I had not spoken with him in more than six months. I missed the call but returned it the next day.

After the usual exchanges of how everyone is doing, I asked him how I could help him.

Mark said, “I need your help with a social justice issue.” I have never had a call like that in my life. But it comes this week, following my preaching and writing on that very subject. Mark had not read this blog, by the way. I was all ears. “Tell me about that.”

I am still surprised, although I should not be, with how persistent God is with matters when he is teaching us. Jesus is our Teacher. And when we are ready to learn about something, his resources are quite remarkable.

Mark is working with a program called “Justice for Janitors.” He faxed me information about their concerns: Houston janitors are not high school kids working after school to earn some spending money. Generally they are one of the primary wage-earners for a family. On the average, Houston janitors make $5.25 an hour. Do the math: times forty hours a week = $210; times 52 weeks = $10,920. The poverty line for a family of four (unrevised in 40 years) is $19,350. WIC and the federal school lunch programs use the figure of $35,798 as the measure of self-sufficiency for a family of four (185% of the poverty line). This represents the earnings a family requires to meet its basic needs without government assistance. That figure does not include healthcare. Janitors in other cities across the U.S. earn up to twice as much as they do in Houston, some of whom work for the same companies. So the campaign is to help them receive a more just wage for the service they provide to society.

Mark sent me this information and asked me if I would come downtown on Wednesday and participate in an interfaith prayer vigil on behalf of these issues and these people. I agreed to show up and pray with them.

As soon as I hung up the phone I realized I had some personal accounting to do. What do we pay our custodial workers at UBC? And what does the service we use (American Janitorial Service) pay its employees? I didn’t know the answers to those questions. I assumed we were fair. I have done some checking and have found that we do much better than the city average. I have turned to our Executive Council to double-check and to think with me about these issues. We will do the right thing.

Here is the situation as I am seeing it from the perspective of biblical justice. We expect Christians to be more Christian than our culture in many areas of our morality. In the arena of sexual morality, for example, we expect Christians to live by a different set of values than the culture. But what about economic areas? Are we expecting ourselves to live by the culture’s values or something higher?

Do you see how easy it would be for any organization – a church or a business operated by Christian people – to find itself in the position of exploiting the poor in a matter like this? The culture says that an organization needing its buildings cleaned should take bids from several janitorial services and, other things being equal, choose the lowest bid. That makes good business sense. But in the case of certain contracts, the poor may be the ones who pay for the business’s “good deal.”

What are the economic weaknesses of the men and women who work as janitors for these services? Often, their language, educational, or vocational skill sets keep them from being able to take other jobs. So they take a job and work hard doing for companies a valuable and necessary service. They clean carpets and toilets and scrub walls so that when we arrive at church or work the place is clean. We value cleanliness.

The fact that the local market will support a wage averaging $5.25 an hour does not necessarily mean that Christians should pay that wage. Should we not be asking what is just? Should a person who is willing to work at a job that contributes to the ability of an organization to do its mission be paid a salary that keeps them from being self-sufficient, that keeps them in poverty? Are we not taking advantage of their weakness by paying only that? Would that not be the definition of “exploitation”? And should a Christian become involved in helping to remedy that situation in their city?

I have never asked such questions before nor have I heard them asked as we have worked to squeeze the most out of our budget income at UBC. But as I read Isaiah 1 or Isaiah 58 or this week’s lesson from Jeremiah 7, I understand that such questions must be asked. Doing something different here will require spending money that we could not then use for other things. And nothing in the culture would require us to do that. Perhaps we need to be asking what is right and not what is expedient, comfortable, or usual.

Suddenly, “doing justice” becomes costly. And personal. The words of the prophets about people coming to worship while continuing to exploit the poor become contemporary. People with no intention of doing such a thing could nevertheless do so by simply neglecting to question our actions. Reading of God’s displeasure with such behavior becomes downright frightening.

This is not the forum for discussing what we should consider doing as a church. You have elected people to serve in roles where those decisions are made. And they are faithfully and wisely considering these things.

This is the place to say that our religion has to be more than words. I cannot preach and write about justice and then be unwilling to join those in prayer who are working on it. Neither can I be willing to join them and pray about justice without taking a hard look at my own life and the organization that I am part of. Neither can you. Integrity demands that we make these matters practical and personal.

So I went downtown last Wednesday. I was asked to wear a suit – outdoors on a Houston August afternoon. I took the MetroRail downtown and joined about fifty or sixty people on the corner of Fannin and McKinney. Several organizations had people there – mostly Black or Hispanic. I joined a rabbi, an imam, a priest, and an African American Baptist pastor as representatives of the religious community. People carried signs saying “All Religions Believe in Justice.” We marched with a purple banner through six or seven blocks of downtown Houston to a park between Minute Maid Park and the mall. Someone in the back of the line had a guitar and began to sing “We Shall Overcome.” We assembled under some trees. One woman handed out bottled water to the group. Channel 45, a Spanish-language channel, had a camera and a reporter there. We actually got about five minutes on the evening news.

One woman who works full-time as a janitor explained in Spanish the difficulty of living on $5.25 an hour with no health care benefits. We religious leaders prayed, one after another. I voiced a prayer for these people and their families, and for their employers. Inwardly I was repenting.

And I was sensing there may be much more to repent of down the line. I am not yet certain of how deeply entrenched my life is in a system that regularly steps on or over those whom God has said that he sides with. But I am determined to learn as much about that as I can. I want to be on the same side as Jesus is in this matter just as I want to on other issues.

One preacher I read said that in Matthew 25:31-46 Jesus taught that no one gets into heaven without a letter of recommendation from the poor. That is not a bad reading of the text. The text is not about earning our salvation by doing good works. It does, however, insist that true followers of Jesus will be about the same things Jesus was and is about. We minister Christ to people by ministering to people as if they were Christ.

That whole experience was a first for me. I didn’t go looking for it, it found me. I suspect I’ll be found again before long. God has a way of doing that with sinners.

rrc