Equity

Do we believe in Equity? Should We?

The second of the seven principles of our Unitarian faith states that we believe in “Justice, Equity and Compassion in human relations.”

Equity? The dictionary says this means fair. Not necessarily equal. Fair enough.

But I think that when there are gross discrepancies in income, wealth and opportunity, that is unfair. I’d like to think Unitarians think so too, so that our belief in Justice, Equity and Compassion includes a more egalitarian society, which limits how much more some of us have than others.

If so, we share with other religionists in our Judeo-Christian culture, a concern that has been an all-important issue for thousands of years. I could lead you through the Gospels all morning, proving without doubt, where Jesus stood on equity. Indeed, his uncompromising position though the years has proved an acute embarrassment to the wealthier churches that have been gathered in his name.

In them, their ministers have even sometimes assured well-heeled parishioners that there once was a gate in the walls of Jerusalem named “The Eye of the Needle” through which camels could pass with ease. Bulls too. That’s bull, not camel.

In the 70s, I had the privilege of living in a poor rural area near Edson, Alberta. During the great depression, there had been a family on nearly every quarter section in that area. Some were farmers from southern prairies, dried out and forced to move to land, which, though thin of soil, had rainfall in abundance. Others were immigrants and the unemployed. None of them had much in worldly goods. Their stories were recently collected. I want to read to you part of one, that of Ewan and Annie Jackson.

“In 1959, we had a very pleasant and interesting thing happen to us. We received an invitation to the Queen’s Tea Party in Edmonton on July 22nd at the Parliament Buildings. Of course we couldn’t go, as we had no decent clothes for such an event; however, we had a greater surprise when our friends of Shining Bank came to our rescue and lent us their best clothes. As I was quite big and stout, there was only one person in the community that had clothes that I might get into, and as he had just recently got married, he had a suit, so Clayton Barrass provided that. Annie had a little more difficulty, but Mary Conover lent her a dress, Ceridwen Barrass a coat, Della Roberts provided a hat, gloves and a purse, and Ada Barrass a necklace and earrings. We were ready to go. We felt like we were the King and Queen ourselves and we had a wonderful time. We will never forget how the people came to our rescue.”

“The people of today will never understand the things we had to do without, or the understanding that people had for one another in those tough times, and how it was appreciated.”

Hey, maybe poverty isn’t all that bad. It produced in my neighbours there a generation who were the best neighbours I’ve ever had, or hope to have. In suits and purses, they were poor, but they were seldom hungry, not while there were berries to pick in abundance. Some families put up 100s of jars. There were moose to shoot a plenty, rabbits so thick you could club them if you had no rifle. The streams and lakes were full fish to hook. There were potatoes from the garden, and often milk and eggs you couldn’t sell but you could use or share. And the bush provided logs for a shack and fuel for the stove. If you had no shingles, you could make a sod roof, though a poor one. A person could survive on almost no money.

When a government program ARDA, was launched by the Socreds to help my neighbours out, one said indignantly, “We may not have any money, but we aren’t poor.”

There, see. Maybe Ralph Klein and Jim Dinning are right. It’s foolish to try to solve the problem of poverty by just throwing money at it.

There, then, maybe it was.

My neighbours survived with their dignity intact, I think, because, though they had no money, they lived in a very egalitarian society. Nobody had any money. It was a community, which for many years, was as isolated as if it had been an island. The roads were wretched and in the spring, for months they were impassable. If there were Canadians better off than they were, my neighbours didn’t know about it. There was no TV, there was no radio, there was no power, or electric light or running water for anyone they knew of.

Canadians can be proud of the fact that for many years, we have protected the most vulnerable members of society with a comprehensive program of educational, social and health programs. The poorest 20% of Canadian families actually increased their household income from 1973 to 1993 from about $7000 to $10,000, when you include UIC, Old Age Security and other transfer payments, an increase of 1.7% annually. But exclusive of transfer payments, the trend ran the other way, from almost $2000 in 1973 to less than a thousand in 1993, a loss of 3.8% annually. This loss was mainly due to unemployment, poorly paid or part-time jobs.

At the same time, the top 20% jumped in earnings from $80,000 to $91,000.

Canadians today can be ashamed of the fact that we are giving that up now. In the past two years, the federal government has slashed the transfer payments by 7 billion dollars.

The governments of Ralph Klein in Alberta and Mike Harris in Ontario have really stuck it to the poor. This comes at a time when the stock market is at an all time high. I read an article last week, which claims that the money manipulators on Bay Street are so flush today, that the entire stock of luxury cars in Toronto dealerships has been sold. If you want a nifty new Mercedes or Jaguar, you have to suffer the indignity of a waiting list. Senior executives in 300 Canadian companies, according to a new study by Sobeco Ernst & Young, will take home a 6.2% raise this year. Workers will get only 1.8%. At the same time increasing thousands of Canadians are homeless.

Today’s poor are in an entirely different situation than my neighbours in Shining Bank were in the 30s, 40s and 50s. A poor single mother living in Edmonton or Toronto today is stuck in an entirely different universe with no garden, no rabbits and no roof without money. Without enough money, she and her children are going hungry, and to compound the injury, she probably does have a television set, on which she can watch, with them, programs like “The Homes of the Rich and Famous.”

Mr. Harris is, at the same time, promising a 30% tax cut for Ontarians who pay income taxes, which is to say, everyone but the poor, who have virtually no income.

An article, “the Buddy System” by Jonathan Freedman in last December’s Globe and Mail, captured the gross unfairness of this inequity deliciously.

“A lot of us in town are really looking forward to the Ontario tax cuts. I’ve been putting off getting lawn furniture for around the pool but will buy it just as soon as the cuts start. My neighbours George and Anne are planning to get a new dishwasher. And Sam and Edna, who live just down the street, are going to spend an extra week in Florida, courtesy of the tax cut. Of course, we are all planning to save some of the money. We aren’t like the people on welfare, who can’t seem to save a dime.

“Speaking of people on welfare, I have been a little concerned about how they may react to the tax cuts right after their own incomes have been cut. They may resent it, which would cause them to feel distant from the rest of us.

“I think I have found a solution to this problem. We should institute a kind of buddy system that matches welfare cuts to tax cuts. Here’s how it would work: I figure that my taxes are going to be cut about $300 a month, and that a single mother on welfare will have had her payments cut by almost the same amount. Instead of the welfare mother’s cheques being reduced, she should get the same amount as usual, but every month she should send the $300 directly to me. This would make her feel much more part of the system. No faceless bureaucrat would be taking the money from her. She would send it out to a real person. It would also make her feel closer to me and to people like me. That ought to go a long way toward preventing the kind of resentment I worry about.

“Of course it won’t always work out exactly even. Some people, like George and Anne, will only get about $150 a month, so the welfare mother will have the extra bother of sending out a cheque to them and also to someone else. On the other hand, this means she will have two buddies instead of one, which should make up for the extra effort. And some of my rich friends will get cheques from two or even three welfare mothers. I can just see old Hubert bragging about how many welfare mothers he gets cheques from.

“When this scheme really clicks, I expect the buddies to exchange cards or notes. My welfare mother might send me a note with her cheque saying how she and her three-year-old daughter are doing, with maybe a picture of her daughter enjoying her plain noodle dinner. And I sure would send her a card thanking her for the cheque, along with a picture of the family sitting around the pool on our new lawn furniture. I really don’t expect my buddy to send notes or pictures every month, but I do hope she’ll send them pretty often.”

Freedman puts his finger on the big drawback to inequity. The greater the gulf between rich and poor, the more distant they become, the less compassion the rich feel, the more resentful the poor, which leads to more indifference and even hostility and more crime, and more hostility, and so more inequity.

Last winter, the Joint Social Action Committee our church has with the Unitarian Church of Edmonton sponsored forums on health care cuts and social services cuts. On a bitterly cold night, the UCE auditorium was jammed for the forum on health care.

But health care is about us. Social Service cuts are about “them.” To their welfare we are somewhat indifferent. So the UCE auditorium was only half full for the forum on cuts to social services. I apologized for the poor turnout to one of the speakers, Pastor Leslie Regulus of the Mustard Seed Church downtown, (who spoke here on Mother’s day, 1995). But she was delirious with joy for all the souls we had mustered. Ours was the third such meeting she’d addressed on that day. Others are even more indifferent, crowds at the other meetings numbered 3 and 4 concerned citizens each.

We had a hat out and on that night, instead of using the proceeds to defray forum expenses, we gave it to the Mustard Seed. It was about $80. She told me when I loaded her purse with loonies and townies it might pay for tomorrow's onions. >Just the onions for their thin stew. The Mustard Seed is feeding a lot of hungry people.

We Unitarians say we believe in equity, compassion and justice. We preach equity. We sing it. But how many of us have been to a demonstration to protest the increases in inequality in this province? How many of us work within the political system to resist the trend? How many of us have even bothered to attend a forum in our own churches on the subject? If you ask yourself these questions, it will help to figure out if you really believe in equity or just give it lip service.

If you opt for lip service, you’re probably thinking, “Eh, how bad can it get?”

About 20 years ago, The United States hung a hard right-hand turn on the road to inequality. In roughly the third quarter of this century, the lowest 20% had actually gained more, percentage-wise in income than any other group, gaining more than 3% annually, while the richest quintile had the least gain, in percentage. But in the next 20 years, the rich got richer, and it was at the expense of the bottom two quintiles. The second to the lowest quintile lost a third of a percent a year, and the lowest over 3.4% a year.

If you look at the very top, the inequity is sharper. Twenty years ago, the typical chief executive officer of a large American company earned 40 times as much as a typical worker. Now it is a hundred and ninety times as much. A researcher named Graef Crystal studied 424 companies. Their CEOs are pulling down, on average, 3.7 million smackers per annum.

American productivity shot up 30% in the period 1977 - 1992 when American workers earned less every one of those years, 13% less in all.

One American, William McDonough, addressed a conference recently and said, “A critical issue is facing our country, it is the growing disparity of wages earned by our labor force. It is deeply troubling that during the 1980s the real wages of low-skilled workers in the US have fallen sharply, both in absolute terms and relative to the wages of highly skilled workers. The issues are equality and social cohesion. We are forced to face the question of whether we will be able to go forward together as a unified society with a confident outlook, or as a society of diverse economic groups suspicious of both the future and each other.

What McDonough is saying in a very nice way is, if we don’t clean up our act, we are going to have terrorism and revolution. We shouldn’t be surprised though, that he chose words of delicacy and good taste. He is not a communist. This rabble-rouser is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. If he thinks they have a problem, they have a problem.

John Cassidy quotes his remarks in a New Yorker Article, Who Killed the Middle Class?

As the title of the article suggests it’s too late to save the American middle class. It is dead. How do we know? They already have terror and revolution.

Our country spends 7.4 percent of our GNP on education, 50% more than the US. It’s one of the reasons a UN measure places us as the best country in the world. Maybe we are, but if so, we are giving up our place in line. I want you to try to imagine what it is going to be like sending your kid off to school each morning if we follow the US’ lead in making cuts to education and social spending, as Paul Martin, Ralph Klein and Mike Harris are doing.

What this is like is detailed in an article in the Journal a couple of weeks ago about James Henderson. He always walks his son to and from elementary school. He is a 6’6” 280 pound African American who says “I fear for my child’s safety every time he heads into the school. Every parent in L.A. feels that way. School in Los Angeles is a war zone. Here, you don’t hope your kid graduates. You hope he survives.”

In LA, there are, police estimate, 500,000 teenagers in gangs. A 10-foot high chain link fence surrounds every one of the 653 schools in the LA district. Hand-held metal detectors and body searches are used to keep knives and guns out of the classroom, and the school district operates its own police force, placing an armed officer on every high school and junior high campus. Even so, there are about 300 assaults with a deadly weapon in the schools each year.

Of course, the US, with its statue of Liberty, welcoming wretched refuse from teaming shores, is a bastion of equality, compared to Central American countries like our NAFTA partner Mexico.

Sean Kelly’s mother Terri lives in Edmonton. Sean, of native ancestry, went to LA to study how to make motion pictures. He showed great promise. Then one day last May he made a day trip to Tijuana. Three weeks later his body was found in the morgue under Luis Rodriquez. At some time in between he’d given someone the PIN number to his bank account; it was now empty. Someone moved his car from the US parking lot, paying $60, and had returned it, minus I think, some bloodstains and fingerprints. His mother has been desperately trying to find out what happened.

What happened is he somehow fell into the clutches of the Mexican Police. They beat him until he gave up his pin number and then they killed him so he wouldn't tell. A long time ago, the government, like our provincial government here, put a freeze on the pay of civil servants. In a country where there are a few rich and many poor, with little or no middle class, the rich are so powerful they need not pay taxes, and the poor are too poor to pay any. The police have to raise funds any way they can.

Kidnapping is common in Mexico. Recently a businessman was kidnapped. As his captors were transporting him to their hideout, the police stopped the car for a routine check. Here, we’d consider this a rescue, but there, the kidnapped man wisely did not to alert the police to his plight. He knew he was much safer in the arms of the civilian criminals, who released him unharmed after a modest ransom was paid. If he fell into the clutches of the cops, he knew Sean Kelly’s fate might await him.

In Mexico, every citizen of substance guards against kidnapping the best he can, but it still happens all the time. And of course, the inequity is such that there is armed revolution, and the state’s resistance to it includes state torture.

Would you want to live in such a country if you had a choice? Of course, our native people do live such a place, and they don’t have any choice, which is why their suicide rate in 7 times the white rate, infant mortality is twice the national average, and the high school dropout rate is about 50%

So do many non-native Canadian children. According to The Bread for World Institute in Washington, which released these figures on Wednesday, using their own definition of poverty, our child poverty rate is second, tied with Australia at 14% and eclipsed only the by the United States, at 22% among industrialized nations of the world, while in the more egalitarian countries of Scandinavia, it is only 3%.

Every initiative of the Klein government here, from privatization of liquor stores and document registries to the outsourcing of hospital laundries and the firing of thousands of nurses has had the same effect. That is reducing the economic situation of workers and/or the poor, to the enrichment of private companies and their executives.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the political right and the religious right, and one between the political and religious left. We, I think, I hope, are part of the religious left. So is the Catholic Council of Bishops.

Speaking for it, Archbishop Michael Gervais of Ottawa said this Thursday:

“In our society, if a parent denies a child food, clothing and security, it is considered child abuse, but when our government denies 1, 362,000 children the same, it is simply balancing the budget.”

In US, also on the religious left, there is Call to Renewal, formed as a counter-weight to the very influential Christian Coalition.

In the morning’s second reading, Ellen Willis pointed out a reason for its ineffectiveness. She concluded her thought provoking critique of liberal moralism by writing, “the purpose of politics in a democratic society should a cooperative effort to create social conditions conducive to the pursuit of happiness.” I think she is right.

You may remember that in my sermon on employment, I described the Scanlon Plan, where many factories were made to be more egalitarian in listening to workers’ ideas for how it should be run, and share in profits. Productivity soared, and “everybody loved working there.”

I have long believed, and still believe, from the bottom of my heart, that a more egalitarian society is what creates conditions conducive to the pursuit of happiness, for everyone. In it, both the more affluent and less affluent are going to be better off.

Now it just so happens that some social scientists have recently made an incredible breakthrough. They have devised a means of determining whether an individual is happy, and the relative degree he or she is happy. The instrument used is fiendishly clever in its simplicity. They ask them. “Taking all things together, would you say you are (1) not at all happy, (2) not very happy, or (3) quite happy, or very happy?

According to that socialist house organ, MacLean's Magazine, citizens of 38 countries were grilled on how happy they were. It turns out people in some countries are much happier than those in others.

The unhappiest people live in seven countries of the broken empire of the Soviet Union, where theoretical and also largely actual equity has recently be replaced by rampant inequality, with nobody paying any taxes (Preston Manning’s idea of heaven) and thus they have pauperized pensioners and government workers, while at the same time, gangsters are riding around in limousines. Here, the long held ideal of an egalitarian society has been officially abandoned. Only 37% of Bulgarians are happy, with higher percentages respectively in Belarus, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia Estonia and the former Czechoslovakia. - where only 66% of Czechs and Slovenes say they are happy.

The happiest people (my conclusion, not MacLean's) live in the most egalitarian countries topped by four in Scandinavia - Iceland at 97%, then Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and followed by the similar culture in the Netherlands, and Northern Ireland and Belgium where 92.8% said they were happy.

Those of the radical right will tell you that egalitarian ideals are airy-fairy; that they are impractical. They say their end result is dignity-robbing dependency on the state, and a net increase in human misery. Turns out t’aint so.

More egalitarian societies are both more productive and people who live and work in them love living there.

Do we Unitarians really believe in equity? I wish I could tell you that we do, and no doubt about it.

Should we believe in equity? That’s an easy one. We should embrace equity as if our spiritual and material lives depended on it, which they do.

Given that commitment and that faith, how can we make our society more egalitarian? Not so easy.

I’ve visited Oslo and Stockholm, Reykjavic and Copenhagen. They’re all delightful, but I wouldn’t go to Mexico City on a bet.

But if we do not do something to put our belief in equality into practice, our great grand children are surely going to live in a place very much like it. Many of our native people, and a rapidly increasing number of Canada’s other children already do.

Mr. Wrigley formerly served First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto, and The First Unitarian Church of Edmonton. He is retired.
He now attends the Edmonton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.)

Added to archives October 20, 2008