Larger Editorial: Why Jesus Would Support Unions

Partial Caveat: This could easily go into Sunday’s Sermons (and was supposed to originally) but if I wait until Sunday to post it, who knows if unions will even still be around. Plus, this section is where I post something I value every week, and for me the issue of unions is about as close to religious as politics can come.

If you don’t know by now, Wisconsin’s unions (except for the police unions which supported Walker and are exempt from his changes) are in a fight for their life against Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker. It won’t surprise anyone reading a site called Alabama Liberal that I’m firmly on the side of the unions, but it might surprise some people as the reason.

Full Caveat: I have worked part time for a teacher’s union before. It was extremely brief temporary work and I might have made more money selling used canned goods on the side of the road, but I feel obligated to mention it. I also feel obligated to mention I didn’t do it for the money—all thirty dollars of it—so much as the complete and total belief in what education unions represent. I could fill up an entire editorial about teacher’s unions specifically (and plan to in a few weeks) but I want to talk about the larger issue of government unions and why some religious people think it’s okay to hate them.

I have heard so many people in the last week talk about how “powerful” unions are and how they must be stopped. Stopped from what, providing retirement to firmly middle class Wisconsin schoolteachers? And if they’re so powerful why aren’t teachers making six figures and living in mansions? I must have missed the episode of MTV’s Cribs where they take us inside the home of a Milwaukee schoolteacher, and she shows off her golden cow statue behind the front lawn’s fountain.

Unions are not even close to the power of the corporation, the boss, the overlord, the “man.” At one time, 35 percent of the United States was unionized, and now it’s less than 7 percent nationally. Teachers in Wisconsin are the David in this fight, but so many “Christians” nationwide are taking the side of Goliath.

I don’t know how or when it started, but sometime ago Jesus Christ’s message on economics (what might be labeled socialism under today’s Tea Party focused definition) got airbrushed out of the Christian agenda and full, unblinking support for Goliath got stenciled in. I don’t know how Christians can pick up a Bible and skim right past the thousand sections on economics, sharing the wealth, the rich not hoarding their prosperity, and the fact that Jesus may very well have been the first union organizer.

He would absolutely support collective bargaining as the little guy’s way to be heard against Goliath, just as he would have supported the non-violent resistance of the Civil Rights Movement. Some say “Well, really he was above politics” which is to completely miss the revolution he kicked off at the time and swaddle modern Christianity in a comfy blanket of irrelevance to current events so it doesn’t pertain to “messy” things like income inequality. He wasn’t above politics because he wasn’t above injustice. He wasn’t above inequality, and that includes income inequality. He never would have bowed down to any establishment figure or shown a love of corporate America’s “CEOs first, workers dead last” policy, and would have absolutely abhorred the income inequality in the United States where the richest 1 percent makes more money than the bottom FIFTY percent.

If this were Jerusalem, and Jesus saw that a few rich kings (the richest one percent) were hoarding more money than the bottom half of the population (the peasants), where do you think he would stand? With the firmly middleclass Wisconsin schoolteachers asking to hold onto their benefits or with the richest 1 percent that raised heck about having their taxes increased a measly 3 percent? Governor Walker is using the deficit as an excuse to destroy unions and hold out any hope collective workers have in getting equal treatment, but if Republicans really cared about the deficit, they would have let those Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy.

As some young Christians are so fond of pointing out, Jesus was the consummate rebel, a thorn in the side to any establishment or old world figure of his time. So then why do white Christian conservatives almost always side with rich over poor (or “welfare bums” as they might call them), corporate over union, overlord management over struggling employees, Goliath over David? It’s gone on for so long, we’re entering an age where there might not be too many Davids left.

Note: I also want to tag this article that talks about America’s deepening income inequality since 1980 http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110223/ts_yblog_thelookout/separate-but-unequal-charts-show-growing-rich-poor-gap You can’t look at the stats and tell me Wisconsin schoolteachers are bankrupting America so much as an enormously wealthy upper class hogging up all the wealth and refusing to pay taxes on it.