“Advancing A Political Agenda”: When Freedom Of Religion Becomes A Sword, Not A Shield
Growing up, I went to a small school in Boston that was affiliated with the church across the street. The headmaster was Father Day. We went to services, the school had a great arts program and I loved my classmates. But what I remember most about it was that it was a warm and loving place to learn and grow.
Years later, I went to an historically Jewish university. Worship wasn’t part of the curriculum, but at some level, religion was knitted into every nook and cranny. I had the time of my life. It was a great place to be.
Those two experiences reflect my mixed religious lineage. I’m not sure what you’d call me today, but it’s the background I come from when thinking about the religious controversies that have been making headlines of late.
If you’re like me, freedom of religion feels something like this: It’s the right to believe, to express your belief without fear of reprisal, and to worship in accordance with your beliefs. It’s one of our country’s most fundamental rights, and it should be. No one should be able to tell you what you can and can’t believe, and no one should penalize you for your beliefs.
So the freedom of religion cases that feel the most intuitive are those in which someone’s ability to express their religious faith has been compromised. The Sikh who is told he can’t wear his turban at work. The orthodox Jew told to work on Saturday or lose his job. These kinds of cases feel immediately unjust: Unless your religious beliefs somehow irredeemably impair your ability to complete your duties, what business is it of your employer to tell you how you can or cannot live out your faith?
In other words, in these cases, the freedom of religion acts as a protection, a shield rather than a sword. That helps explain something else that feels right about cases like the ones just mentioned, at least in terms of how we understand them on a gut level: In each one, its the more powerful employer who is trying to impose its will on the less powerful employee who is only trying to exercise his or her faith. In other words, the person in need of protection is the one finding protection in the Constitution.
That feels very different from how some of the more recent controversies surrounding the freedom of religion have been playing out. Take the Arizona bill that would have allowed businesses to deny service to homosexuals. The argument for it was: If I own a business I ought to be able to operate it in a way that accords with my most fundamental beliefs (and if I think homosexuality is wrong, I shouldn’t have to serve homosexuals). But here the power dynamic was different. This wasn’t a case where a person being discriminated against cited the Constitution as evidence that the discrimination was impermissible. Instead, it was the opposite: a case where the person who wanted to do the discriminating sought justification in the Constitution.
In the Hobby Lobby case that was before the Supreme Court this week, the power dynamics are similarly flipped. Here, it isn’t a case of an employee charging that a much larger corporation is forcing him or her to choose between livelihood or beliefs. Instead, it’s the corporation that’s saying its religious beliefs have been compromised, and that the remedy is to withdraw a benefit offered to its (less powerful) employees.
In other words, here the freedom of religion is being used as a sword, not a shield. I’m not asking you to protect my right to believe what I want, I’m asking you to take something away from someone else on the basis of my belief. That’s a different kind of thing. And it doesn’t feel right.
There are other themes that factor into these kinds of controversies, of course. On the one hand, there are those who see the most powerful actor in these disputes as the government, and its efforts to compel people to behave in ways they would rather not. On the other, there are people like me, who see the claim of religious liberty being deployed by some as a way to advance a political agenda that really may not have all that much to do with religion.
But look, I’m one of those people who believes that when it comes to religion we ought to spend a lot more time listening to each other and a lot less time being knee jerk, because for many of us faith is so personal and important. Different people will feel differently about what their faith means, how it is expressed and how it may be impinged upon. And in my experience, when we assume we know someone else based entirely on their religious faith, or the lack thereof, more often than not we’re wrong.
But here’s something I’m pretty sure about, too: While everyone is entitled to their freedom of religion, we don’t honor that freedom when instead of using it to protect you from discrimination on the basis of what you believe, we use it to justify discrimination against others on the basis of who they are or what they believe. And that’s true no matter how uncomfortable you may find their beliefs, or the expression of it, to be.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, March 27, 2014
“Killing Germs, Not Jobs”: A New Report Confirms That Business Fears About Paid Sick Day Laws Are Unfounded
Every time the idea of implementing a paid sick days law – which requires that workers earn paid time off to use when they fall ill – gets floated somewhere, the same thing occurs: Businesses and conservative lawmakers cry bloody murder about the effect the law will supposedly have on small businesses and job creators. Every mom and pop store will have to close, they say! Job creators will flee elsewhere to escape the job-killing mandate! Oh, the humanity! (Check out the Cry Wolf Project for some choice quotes.)
Reality, though, stubbornly refuses to conform to the script. For instance, when San Francisco adopted a paid sick days law in 2007, its job growth actually outperformed surrounding counties that did not have a similar law. (This isn’t to imply that having paid sick leave caused any job growth, just that it didn’t hurt either.) And a new report from the Center on Economic and Policy Research shows that Connecticut experienced much the same thing after becoming the first state to adopt a paid sick days law 18 months ago.
Gathered via both surveys and site visits, the Center’s data show businesses faced extremely modest costs – if any – due to the sick days law. As the Center’s Eileen Appelbaum, Ruth Milkman, Luke Elliott and Teresa Kroeger wrote:
Most employers reported a modest effect or no effect of the law on their costs or business operations; and they typically found that the administrative burden was minimal. … Despite strong business opposition to the law prior to its passage, a year and a half after its implementation, more than three-quarters of surveyed employers expressed support for the earned paid sick leave law.
Not only that, but the data show that “in the period since [Connecticut’s law] took effect, employment levels rose in key sectors covered by the law, such as hospitality and health services, while employment fell in manufacturing, which is exempt from the law.” Some job killer! Business warnings about employees abusing their sick leave also failed to come true.
On an economic level, this actually makes perfect sense. Sick employees coming to work and infecting others reduces productivity, as does the constant turnover if workers have to quit to recover from an illness or are fired for missing time while sick. In addition, most workers already have paid sick leave, so the disruptive power of applying it to the usually low-income, service sector workers who don’t is low. San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Jersey City and Washington, D.C. all have some form of paid sick leave requirement, and all of them continue to have functioning economies. Plus, paid sick day laws have the added benefit of cutting down on the transmission of diseases, including those of the decidedly deadly variety.
This report is actually the second knock this week to the notion that business regulation automatically increases costs and kills jobs. A Bloomberg News report yesterday noted that in the 15 years since Washington state voted to gradually increase its minimum wage, its job growth has outpaced the national average, with jobs even growing in the sectors thought particularly susceptible to a minimum wage hike, such as food services. Even the recent Congressional Budget Office report showing that a national minimum wage increase would cause some workers to drop out of the labor force or reduce their hours showed benefits that vastly outweigh any cost.
The moral of the story is this: The Econ 101 notion of more regulations or higher mandatory wages automatically translating into fewer jobs and higher business costs doesn’t actually hold true out in the real world. Paid sick days laws actually kill germs, not jobs.
By: Pat Garofalo, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2014
“The Mad Men Problem At Home”: Closing The Wage Gap Begins With Remedying The Housework Gap First
When President Obama addressed the gender-based wage gap during his State of the Union address last week, women cheered and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro even gave out high fives. Obama called on Washington and businesses to help women succeed at work and “do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode.” However, the President forgot to name a key constituency in his call to help women succeed: husbands.
All the workplace policies in the world aren’t going to get women to parity unless we do away with our Mad Men-era policies at home, too. Despite the fact women are the sole or primary source of income in a record 40% of U.S. households, they still do the majority of housework and childcare. According to the Pew Research Center, during an average week[OK? The study, if I’m looking at the right one, seems to have measured weeks rather than days.], women spend more time cleaning, doing laundry, and preparing food then men do. Men, on the other hand, spend more time watching television than women do. And even in households where the woman is the sole breadwinner, the labor division is far from equal. Men who stay home average 18 hours of housework per week, while their working partners average 14. Stay-at-home mothers, though, average 26 hours of housework. Their working partners average just a third of that time. America has a housework gap, and it’s fueling the gender gap at work.
Research indicates there is a direct and negative correlation between housework and the wage gap. One theory, from research in The Journal of Human Resources, suggests this could be employers’ negative reactions to women who appear dedicated to household activities. It could also be that many employers believe mothers are less committed to their jobs than other employees, as Shelley J. Correll, a sociology professor at Stanford University, posits. As a result, employers are reluctant to hire them and offer them high salaries. The “mommy penalty” is real. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater than that between women and men, according to the advocacy group MomsRising.
It appears that in 2014, we have high expectations of what a woman can accomplish at work, but we still have 1950s expectations about her role at home. But it’s time to rethink and renegotiate who does what where. Men who have opted out of housework should lean in at home so their wives can lean in at work. And they should advocate for, and take advantage of, family-friendly policies such as paid sick days, paternity leave, and flex benefits in order to create a more equitable arrangement at home.
If we truly believe that, as Obama said, “when women succeed, America succeeds,” then we need to stop ignoring the housework gap. Laundry and dirty dishes may not be standard agenda items for our legislators and business leaders, but they should be. After all, a woman can’t have it all if she’s too busy doing it all.
By: Liz O’Donnell, Time, February 4, 2014
“Not A Creator Or Manufacturer In The Lot”: America’s Would-Be Aristocrats Forget The Most Important Thing About Business
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every successful small business shares the same traits. And they all begin with high-quality employees. I’m thinking of three local establishments where I’ve traded for years: an auto repair garage, a dentist’s office, and a one-size-fits-all country store where I buy cattle- and horse-feed.
Along with just about everything else the aptly-named “Toad Suck One-Stop” might conceivably carry: from crickets and minnows to motor oil, pain remedies, kitty litter and homemade sandwiches. If you get up early enough, they’ll even fix you breakfast while somebody else loads feed sacks into your truck. (Toad Suck is a place name designating a long-ago ferryboat stop on the Arkansas River.)
It’s much the same at George Jett’s auto garage down in Little Rock; also at my dentist (his name is Lamar Lane). The first thing you notice is familiar faces. People who work at these places stay for years. And they do so because they’re well-paid, earn decent benefits, and are treated respectfully. So they like their jobs, take pride in their work, and are glad to see familiar customers.
Now I’m not going to lie that I love going to the dentist. But I do like feeling among friends, even if it means hearing Dr. Lane carry on about his LSU Tigers. (Because my wife was born in Baton Rouge, where her daddy played ball, I get a double dose.)
Something else: how a business treats employees also tends to be a reliable predictor of how they treat customers. Dr. Lane does high-quality work and stands by it. If a crown breaks, he replaces it free without asking if you were shelling pecans with your teeth.
My man George Jett hires good mechanics, values their skills, and guarantees their work. If the rattle’s still there, he’ll drive the vehicle around the block and then put it back on the lift to figure out why—also at no additional charge.
Jason down at the One-Stop isn’t exactly a philanthropist — at least not where Bermuda grass hay and Canadian night-crawlers are concerned. Keeping a business with so many moving parts running requires constant attention to detail. New hires that stand out back smoking when shelves need restocking tend not to last. Loyal longtime employees won’t cut them much slack.
Gas is cheaper at the Walmart across the river in Faulkner County, but the One-Stop’s pumps stay busy. It’s the community’s unofficial town hall. If you want to know who’s looking for a lost blue heeler or how Holly’s orphaned baby raccoons are doing, it’s got to be the One-Stop.
Ordinarily, such commonplaces would hardly be worth recording. So there are friendly folks at the country store.
Who’d have thunk it?
Unless, that is, you live in the United States of America, a large proportion of whose tycoon class appears determined to drag us back to the Gilded Age.
If they gave a Scrooge McDuck Award for the nation’s greediest knucklehead, the 2013 winner would be Home Depot’s billionaire founder Kenneth Langone, a Catholic who voiced public alarm at Pope Francis’s seeming enthusiasm for the gospel of Matthew 19. That’s where Jesus observes that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
The Pope didn’t cite that verse, nor discuss politics as such. However, his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium did warn against “crude and naive trust in the… sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”
What, not worship money? Never mind that this is elementary Christian doctrine. Langone warned that American plutocrats don’t want to hear about it, even in church.
You may not be surprised this same worthy also regards President Obama as “petulant” and “unpresidential.” His hawklike visage appeared prominently in a Forbes photo lineup of “Anti-Obama Billionaires.”
Scrutinizing the list, I noticed that almost everybody on it made his pile either by manipulating money or squeezing minimum-wage workers dry: casino operators, real estate speculators, corporate buyout scammers, hedge fund geniuses, fast-food franchisers, big-box retailers, and Donald Trump.
Not a creator or manufacturer in the lot. This is our would-be new American aristocracy, largely bereft of — indeed actively hostile toward — the retail virtues I’ve celebrated. (None of whose practitioners necessarily share my partisan views; I’m talking morals here, not politics.)
But the good news is that according to Adam Davidson in the New York Times, old-fashioned business ethics may be making a comeback through the unlikely agency of a Turk. According to Davidson, the going thing in corporate circles is The Good Jobs Strategy, a book by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. business professor.
Ton argues that what some call the “Costco” strategy of hiring better-trained, better-paid employees “will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and—surprisingly—larger corporate profits.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 8, 2014
“A New Meaning Of Volunteerism”: Wisconsin Lawmaker Wants To Take Away Workers’ Weekends
Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R) is pushing to undo the state’s law that employers have to provide their employees with at least one day off a week, the Huffington Post reports.
The Huffington Post obtained an email Grothman sent to other state lawmakers on Friday in which he proposes legislation that “would allow an employee to voluntarily choose to work without one day of rest in seven.” State Rep. Mark Born (R) is sponsoring the legislation in the state Assembly.
Wisconsin is somewhat unique in having the law on its books. “Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” Grothman told The Huffington Post. But workers don’t have to get a day off every seven days, as they could work for up to 12 in a row “if the days of rest fall on the first and last days of the 2 week period,” according to the law. Grothman called the law “goofy” and called undoing it a matter of “freedom.”
While he argues that the law would ease workers’ ability to work overtime, it’s possible that employers would force their employees to work the extra time, making it less than voluntary. “It’s a very hard thing to know whether something is truly voluntary or not,” Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute Ross Eisenbrey told the Huffington Post. “If the employer puts pressure on people and lets them know they will be unhappy if workers exercise their right to have a day off, that might be enough so that no worker ever does anything but volunteer to work seven days a week.”
In fact, the power usually lies with employers and instances of them abusing labor laws are already on the rise. In 2009, two-thirds of low-income workers said they had experienced a wage law violation in the previous week alone. Wage theft, where an employer illegally withholds overtime pay or makes its employees work off the clock, robs low-wage workers of more money than is stolen from banks, gas stations and convenience stores combined. Actions filed in federal court alleging wage and hour violations increased by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011.
And the law doesn’t always come to workers’ rescue. In California, workers recovered less than half of what was taken from them from 2008 to 2011, and, worse, 83 percent of those who actually proved a case of wage theft still never got what they were owed.
American workers already put in more hours and are guaranteed less time off than most other developed peers. We work more than in any other industrialized countries. Unlike in the United States, it’s illegal in six of the 10 most competitive countries in the world to make workers put in more than 48 hours a week. The United States also lacks laws guaranteeing that workers can take time off if they or their family members are sick, will get vacation or holiday time off, or can take paid time off for the arrival of a new child. Many other developed and competitive countries, on the other hand, do guarantee these things.
Grothman would also go further and take away the national holiday for government workers on Martin Luther King, Jr., day. He was a sponsor of the country’s first preemption bill that blocked cities and local communities from enacting paid sick days legislation in Wisconsin.
By: Bryce Covert, Think Progress, January 5, 2014
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