What started several weeks ago as a small-scale protest by employees from New England’s Market Basket grocery stores is now being seen as “a fight that encapsulates everything that is wrong with corporate America” (BBC).
While Market Basket employees are not the only American workers raising their voices, their goal is not higher wages and better benefits, as was the case in the recent fast food strikes. Instead, they are risking their jobs and potentially the future of Market Basket—which analysts estimate is losing millions of dollars per day—for “a worker and community-oriented corporate culture that goes against the grain.”
The 71 Market Basket stores attract and keep customers for two reasons: their prices tend to be 15-20 percent lower than their rivals, and they offer exceptional customer service—in part because the chain pays above minimum wage and offers both health benefits and bonuses. All workers display their years of employment on nametags. I’ve shopped in many of their stores during the past eight years, and it’s not uncommon for “Marie: 31 years” to simultaneously scan my groceries and offer her opinions on my choices: “Don’t you love this ricotta? I’m so glad we started carrying it.”
So why are Market Basket employees risking their careers? Why are they joining with shoppers to rally by the thousands? On the surface, they are trying to reinstate the previous CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas (recently ousted by his cousin), who found a way to value both his staff and customers while making a profit. But a five-minute conversation with one of those employees will reveal that something much bigger is going on.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, which advocates for working families and fair wages, the average CEO’s pay has increased by 937 percent since 1978, while the average worker’s pay has gone up by 10 percent. Many major corporations now maximize shareholders’ profits and CEOs’ salaries by any means possible, including harsh work environments (i.e. Amazon) and corporate offices located overseas to avoid paying US taxes (Eaton, Enesco, and Rowan). When the new CEOs of Market Basket took the helm in July, one of their first acts was to distribute $250 million to nine family shareholders.
For the past ten years, the gap separating blue-collar workers from their chief executive officers has widened, and the recent recession has built up resentment toward those at the top. At the same time, McDonalds and others have lobbied against minimum-wage increases. According to the Bloomberg, Tyree Johnson, a 20-year employee of McDonalds in the Chicago area would need about “a million hours of work—or more than a century on the clock—to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s paid then-CEO Jim Skinner last year.” A few exceptional cases prove it’s possible to bridge that divide. While dozens of college presidents make more than a million a year, the head of a Kentucky university recently took a 25 percent pay cut to give pay increases to the school’s minimum-wage employees.
Perhaps the question isn’t why are the Market Basket employees sticking out their necks, but why aren’t the rest of us protesting with them? Why aren’t we all demanding that more American companies stop exploiting power, overpaying their upper management, and start working for the good of their employees as well as their communities?
Without pressure from us, it’s highly unlikely that the guilty corporations will willingly repent and reform. And why should they? For that matter, why should any of us resist what writer Wendell Berry referred to in his essay Faustian Economics as, “the collective delusion of grandeur, [which] insists that all of us are ‘free’ to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens?”
We know Jesus and the writers of the New Testament issued stern warnings against greed. Jesus cautioned in the Sermon on the Mount, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” The apostle Paul equated greed with idolatry in Ephesians 5:5, “No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ.”
Our indignation over the inequity that results from capitalistic excess often gets quickly suppressed or forgotten, even though we Americans are, by nature, empowered protestors. Our acceptance makes a bit more sense when we acknowledge that the gospel of capitalism has slowly wrapped itself around the gospel of Jesus, choking out the admonitions connected to the idolization of wealth in the process.
According to Kate Bowler, author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, “Every Sunday, over a million people attend prosperity-oriented mega-churches; and two-thirds of all Christian believers are convinced that God, ultimately, wants them to prosper.” Pastor Kenneth Copeland, articulates this mindset in Laws of Prosperity, “You must realize that it is God's will for you to prosper. This is available to you, and frankly, it would be stupid of you not to partake of it." Again quoting Berry in Faustian Economics, “Our national faith so far has been: ‘There’s always more.’”
We resist the lure of capitalistic excess—which often includes the mistreatment of the earth as well as its people—when we practice what Christ preached. Following his radical teaching can feel as impossible as threading a camel through the eye of a needle. When others have stolen from me, I did not want to offer the thief my shirt; I wanted my stuff back. Jesus’ teaching on wealth challenges us to the core because he demands that we prioritize spiritual riches over worldly riches as well as trust him for all of our needs.
It remains to be seen whether the Market Basket employees will succeed. At least seven high level managers have already received pink slips. Thousands of customers, like me, are paying higher prices for our groceries and wondering if the shelves will ever be restocked.
Regardless of the final outcome, their raised voices have captured the attention of corporations across the country. Thomas Kochan, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said in a recent interview, “We’ve got to change corporate behavior. Events like [the Market Basket strike] wake up the public.” As Christians, we resist the pull of greed by realigning ourselves with the counter-cultural message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Dorothy Littell Greco divides her time between writing, making photographs, pastoring, and keeping three teenage sons adequately fed. She lives and works in the Boston area and is a reluctant Patriots/Celtics/Bruins/Red Sox fan. You can check out more of her words and images at dorothygreco.com and facebook.com/DorothyGrecoPhotography.
