Is employment inherently exploitative? A Biblical perspective
You don’t have to pay much attention to the news to know that people are obsessed with the number of jobs available. Jobs are commonly understood as a good things, apparently. Weirdly, we constantly hear rhetoric in the news like, “Can the U.S. keep creating jobs?” I understand what might be meant by this terminology. If taken in the right way, it could be an intelligent question, but if we allow the phrase to make us forget that people create jobs, then it is intellectually crippling.
King Solomon once said, “Whoever tends a fig tree will eat its fruit, and he who guards his master will be honored.” (Proverbs 27:18 ESV) It is an interesting comparison. You would think a master-servant relationship is the opposite of the relationship between a tree and a gardener. The proverb actually invites the servant to look at himself as the one in control.
How is this reasonable?
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A few months ago I switched to a new full time job. I had been a bus driver for a few years and then switched to driving for a retirement residential facility due to the lockdown. (I know you will be shocked to learn that school teachers got paid while bus drivers were “furloughed.” I couldn’t afford that.) But after a couple of years of such driving, I grew tired of certain stresses and the constantly changing schedule that sometimes required me to work on evenings and, occasionally, weekends. So I found a family-owned manufacturing business and warehouse that had fixed weekday hours that paid more, even for an unskilled laborer with no experience in the work.
The typical (Marxist) perspective on such businesses is that they exploit workers by profiting on their labor. But, to my mind, that is like saying a fruit tree exploits a gardener.
Yes, the owners make money off my labor. If they didn’t, how could they pay me anything? In fact, we are not always that busy and sometimes my only duty is to “be available.” And yet I am paid anyway. When I get busy at work, my productivity with the manufacturing machines is far greater than anything I could do without them. While a long-term decline in business would eventually threaten my job, a temporary decline won’t affect my wages. I will get my paycheck regardless. The owners pay me whether times are good or bad.
I don’t have to spend any time at all worrying about this; the owners are highly motivated to keep the business profitable, giving me job security. Because the business is their constant concern, I only have to show up for my shift. I don’t have to give the job any thought at all after I leave. My weekends and evenings are free.
Try to imagine hiring someone to provide you with access to an income stream. It wouldn’t be feasible. And if it was feasible, the cost would be exorbitant. You would basically be hiring an entrepreneur. If he could successfully create a business, why would he do that for someone who couldn’t contribute to the investment and share in the risk? He would feel exploited.
Yet, in a sense, that is exactly what I have done. I have found people with resources, relationships, and a reputation that required years and a fortune to invest, to bring about a relatively easy way for me to make some money in a regular and predictable way. Who is exploiting who?
When God created humanity, He put them in a garden that they didn’t plant. The fruit was there for the picking. Earning a living is by no means as easy as picking fruit, but then, money provides us with many more things than apples. And it is immeasurably easier because other people do most of the work, acquiring customers, providing automated equipment, and many other things that make it possible for my labor to create value.
Life is often not easy. Inflation and other “public policies” (the euphemism for a great deal of government folly) are a source of deprivation. “The fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice.” (Proverbs 13:23 ESV) In the Bible, humanity was made from the ground (“Adam” is related to the Hebrew word for earth), so this proverb applies to more than a poor farmer’s field. A landless peasant still has his working hands and, where justice is not practised, they are often enslaved by the powerful. When elites advocate and thrive on policies that drain the value of our savings, they are sweeping away the yield of the “fallow ground” of our working years. Furthermore, we sometimes make decisions that have, at least with hindsight, negative economic consequences, and which hamper our efforts to make a living.
But the existence of people who provide a way to acquire an income is not a reason life is hard. Without them, life would be far harder. The temptation to find fault with them is a form of the eternal attraction to scapegoat and blame visible targets for one’s troubles. To the extent that we are the cause of our own problems, this is a natural inclination. And to the extent that elites are engaged in policies of plunder, it is in their interests to devote some of their pillage to framing other groups—a kind of business expense.
But just as land can represent humans, so can trees. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” (Psalm 1:3 ESV) Everyone can pray and aspire to be such a tree economically (there are other, undeniably more important, ways to be fruitful), but many will probably need the assistance provided quite readily by other trees. To the extent that a nation allows such trees to flourish, it can be viewed as a garden, as an orchard, with plenty of fruit there for the picking.
Mark Horne has served as a pastor and worked as a writer. He is the author of The Victory According To Mark: An Exposition of the Second Gospel, Why Baptize Babies?,J. R. R. Tolkien, and Solomon Says: Directives for Young Men. He is the Executive Director of Logo Sapiens Communications and the writer for SolomonSays.net.
