He said of his disciples, and by extension all who labor, “The laborer deserves to be paid” (Luke 10:7). Jesus, himself a tekton (“carpenter” or “manual laborer,” as he is described in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3), spoke specifically to the struggles of workers.
Indeed, clear-eyed readers of the Bible know that there are a multitude of passages that specifically inveigh against the exploitation of the laboring poor by the rich and the powerful.įor instance, Deuteronomy 24:14-15, one of the earliest biblical labor prescriptions, commands “ you shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers.” The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed with righteous outrage, “ Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice who makes his neighbors work for nothing and does not give them their wages” (Jer. For generally, eighteenth and nineteenth-century evangelicals differed greatly from the right-wing evangelicals that bedevil today’s political terrain in this crucial respect: earlier evangelicals actually honored the concern for the plight of workers that pervades the Bible, from the deliverance of the Hebrew laborers from inhumane demands in the book of Exodus and beyond. Like so many of the rancid claims of today’s right-wing evangelicals this, too, is a radical departure from the more humane and socially enlightened historical roots of American evangelical Christianity. Typical of their responses is the shrill 1940 charge the Church League of America trumpeted to its 100,000 members that the National Labor Relations Act “tied the hands of every employer (large or small) so that any criminal … could go into any plant and start organizing the employes into a dues-paying corral regardless of the merits of the case.” This was merely an early volley in the ongoing war waged against America’s labor unions, the only bulwark that the working folk of America has against the depredations of big business, by the unholy alliance between big business and right-wing evangelicals. Yet most right-wing evangelicals did not welcome the labor supporting mandate of the NLRB. According to labor historian Jane McAlevey, the Act “created the legal architecture that legitimated unions, transforming them from organizations the employers could ignore without penalty into legally binding mechanisms that could practice collective bargaining.” Right-wing evangelicals and corporate capitalists are still outraged by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the New Deal policy that established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to both give teeth to federal labor laws that govern collective bargaining and to craft laws to rectify unfair labor practices.