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A common charge against Wal-Mart is that it doesn't pay a "livable wage."

Wal-Mart officials say the company's full-time hourly workers average $9.68 an hour, with a new, inexperienced worker beginning at $7 to $8 per hour. Wal-Mart's average hourly wage produces an annual income of $20,134.40, which is slightly more than the federal poverty level for a family of four ($19,350). Given that many "full-time" Wal-Mart employees work 34-hour weeks, though, the resulting average annual income of $17,114.24 falls well short of that standard for a family of four.

Are Wal-Mart wages sinfully low? Especially in the 19th century, Protestant and Catholic leaders made the theological case for livable worker wages. The industrial economy of the era was a human-rights disaster, prompting Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper to follow Pope Leo XIII's example and help spark Christian labor union movements.

In the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII argued that just wages should be determined not by the market but by that which is required to sustain family life. Pope John Paul II echoed that position in his 1991 Centesimus Annus. As Kuyper put it, "God has not willed that one should drudge hard and yet have no bread for himself and his family."

But does this mean that all jobs (flipping burgers, stocking shelves, etc.) should pay enough to support a family of four? Not necessarily. Theologians emerging in modern economies tend to emphasize merit as the primary grounds for pay, more amenable to market realities. In Biblical Principles and Business: The Foundations, Francis A. Schaeffer disciple Udo Middelmann notes that scriptural emphases on personal effort, contribution, and merit model the primary biblical bases for just pay.

Middelmann complains that "a world where choices do not have effects, and where different intellectual and material contributions lead to equal distribution of resulting wealth, is a world unknown to man."

That is, God creates all humanity equal, and we strive to provide equal opportunity to all, but Scripture does not command equal outcomes. Though Methodist theologian J. Philip Wogaman believes that human need should ultimately determine income, he says in Economics and Ethics: A Christian Inquiry (Fortress Press, 1986) that "in some respects this is a naïve doctrine, since it does not face up to the problem of how an employer could pay different workers different wages for the same kind of work."

Economist Thomas Sowell has shown that wages artificially elevated by government or unions lead to unemployment—to survive, employers simply make do with fewer workers. And theologians from liberal-leaning Miroslav Volf to the conservative Michael Novak agree that unemployment is among the gravest affronts to human dignity.

The devastating spiritual effect of unemployment is one reason the authors of Christian Ethics in the Workplace (Concordia Publishing House, 2001) argue that business owners have a moral responsibility to control expenses and to succeed. Raymond L. Hilgert, Philip H. Lochhaas, and James L. Truesdell (business professor, Lutheran minister, and businessman, respectively) add, however, that Christian ethics require employers to consider:

• whether employees have options to work elsewhere (a "semblance of equal bargaining power");
• whether the wage is significantly below the market for similar jobs of similar skills;
• whether the employer regards workers as human beings or as tools;

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May 2005, Vol. 49, No. 5