Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Going it alone: Howard's 21st Century Australian workplace
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Reverend Elenie Poulos

UnitingJustice - Australia

CHRISTIANITY AND WORK:
WHY CHRISTIANS CARE ABOUT INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

Cutting his holiday short, the Prime Minister returned to Canberra a few weeks ago to sell his proposed industrial relations changes. We need them, he said, because they will be good for the economy. It follows, in fact it is self-evident, that whatever is good for the economy will be good for people. If the Government takes care of the economy, people will take care of themselves, mostly.

This ideology plays itself out every time we have an election – what matters most is which party can better manage the economy. Elections and government are about interest rates, and budget surpluses, and trade. More recently they are also about security. But that’s not by choice – within this rhetoric it is a matter of plain fact that the floods of refugees and the terrorists have forced us to make it an issue.

Religions, however, almost universally, condemn the single-minded pursuit of wealth as foolish. Religions teach that the path to happiness and fulfilment cannot be bought or won and that people’s deepest needs are not so easily defined or satisfied. They also teach that violence is a sin and that hospitality to strangers is important. One of the deepest parts of our humanity is that longing for something more than we can feel, see and touch, that sense that there is more to life than this, whatever ‘this’ may be. Religions teach us that our humanity cannot be measured or satisfied by material success, wealth or power.

I am a Minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, currently the National Director of UnitingJustice. UnitingJustice is an agency of the national council of the Church. It’s responsible for offering leadership to the Uniting Church in Australia on matters of social and ecological justice and peace.

It has a mandate to advocate for justice on behalf of the Church with government and in the public forum. My work includes the development of policy and position statements and national resolutions for the Uniting Church, submissions to Senate committees and other Federal parliamentary inquiries, some media work and the production of educational and advocacy resources.

UnitingJustice has lobbied against Australia’s participation in the Iraq war. We have been advocating on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees and for changes to our immigration policy. We have spoken out against Australia’s unwillingness to sign the Optional Protocols on the Convention Against Torture and to ratify the Kyoto Protocols. We have stood up for the rights of gay and lesbian people in the Church. We have made submissions to parliamentary inquiries including those on poverty, the proposed amendments to the Human Rights Commission Legislation and the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.

We produced the Uniting Church’s federal election resources, No Security Without Justice and worked on the Church’s public statement on abortion which said that it was the Church’s position to care and support women, not to judge them. We have expressed our concern about the proposed industrial relations changes because we care about the most vulnerable workers in our society.

Before I talk more specifically about the Church and why we care about industrial relations reforms, I would like to look at the relationship between Christianity and politics more generally – it does seem to be one of the hot topics of the moment and the religion of choice of many of our current crop of politicians.

Desmond Tutu wrote once that the Bible is the most radical political manifesto there is. He believes, as I do, that the Christian tradition is, at its very core, political.

Politics is not just about groups of elected or unelected officials sitting in wood panelled rooms in capital cities around the world jostling for power and position as they try to make decisions about budgets, trade agreements and security issues. Politics is not just about elections and politics is not just a dirty game.

Politics is, of course, about how we organise ourselves as nations and administer our life together. Every person has a responsibility and a right to be involved in the political life of their society and nation and those of us who live in democratically organised nations need to know that if we don’t use our democracy we will lose it. I believe that Christians have a very particular responsibility.

The Bible is a political manifesto because it contains principles which are meant to guide us in how we live together. It is radical because its principles challenge so many things about the way we organise society. Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr, the Christian churches in Germany helping Jews escape the Nazis in the Second World War, were all engaged in political action, challenging the way the forces of political power were organising their societies because they believed God’s will is for a just and peaceful world.

There is, though, a necessary limit. Christianity should never be, or even try to be, the religion of the state. Christians are called to live on the radical edges, at the margins, with the marginalised. The closer to the centre we move, the more we risk the heart of our faith. Christianity is not meant to be a religion of power and force. It is the religion of the poor which seeks justice for everyone. It is the faith of the humble who worship God with goodness in their hearts. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey, alone, not on a white charger with an army behind him. History has shown us that whenever Christianity has moved in to the centre of political power it has corrupted itself to become a force for hatred and violence in the world.

On the other hand, Christians are called to be involved in political life – it is part of our discipleship to be involved in our societies helping to build communities where everyone is treated with dignity and respect and where the systems and structures which organise our lives promote justice and peace.

Christianity is, at its core, political, because when you have a faith that begins with the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, then you're going to have to think about what that means when people are treated like dirt by governments or armies or groups of school bullies.

When you have a faith that grows out of one man eating with the poor and marginalised of his society, healing the sick, preaching freedom and dying nailed to a tree because he had made a political nuisance of himself, then you do have a faith which has serious political and economic implications.

Christians are called to challenge, in word and deed, systems and structures that breed hate, greed, oppression, poverty, injustice and fear. Anything less than this is at best a pale and anaemic version of the faith, and at worst, a perversion.

In an interview with Geraldine Doogue on Compass in October last year John Howard said that he regards ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition as the single greatest influence for good in the Australian Community’ and that he has a ‘very strong belief in the...stabilising influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic in this country’.

I would be very interested in seeing the evidence on which the Prime Minister based such a massive claim, but I’m even more interested in the fact that the Government’s responses to concerns about its policy raised by the people charged with the expression of that ethic would suggest that he regards that influence as one ‘for good’ only some of the time. Maybe it depends on whether the values expressed are associated with a particular stream of Christian tradition. Or maybe it depends on their political usefulness at any one time.

During the last Federal Election campaign George Pell and Peter Jensen had significant media coverage when they decided to criticise Labor’s school funding policy. But who heard about the Uniting Church calling for a commitment from both parties to cancel the debt of the world’s poorest countries or commit to a treaty process with Indigenous Australians?

In the lead up and the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, however, all the Churches received some considerable media space – maybe it was because we all agreed on something and that in itself is newsworthy. By August 2003, however, the Government, and Alexander Downer in particular, was obviously fed up with being on the receiving end of some pretty harsh criticism. In a public lecture he told Church leaders to stop spreading our amateurish ignorance and ‘one-sided moral message’ about the invasion of Iraq and go back to doing what we’re supposed to, by which he meant tending to and praying with our little flocks in our decaying buildings at 9:30 on Sunday mornings and visiting them when they get sick. But, more recently, I didn’t hear him tell those church leaders who wanted to change abortion legislation to stop preaching that one-sided moral message.

And just the other week, Kevin Andrews, after assuring us all that the proposed industrial relations changes were consistent with Christian teaching, expressed concern about the uninformed opinions of church leaders who are worried about the changes.

It certainly seems that the Government is OK with churches speaking out as long as they aren’t criticising its policies and as long as they stick to issues of personal morality.

The Uniting Church, however, cannot comply.

In 1977, in its first public statement, it announced to the country that it fully expected its allegiance to God, which underpins its commitment to human rights, justice and peace, to sometimes “bring us into conflict with the rulers of our day”. The Statement went on to say that regardless of that possibility, “our Uniting Church, as an institution within the nation, must constantly stress the universal values which must find expression in national policies if humanity is to survive” and it promised “to hope and work for a nation whose goals are not guided by self-interest alone, but by concern for the welfare of all persons everywhere”.

It is because of the promises made in this Statement that UnitingJustice was the first Church agency to express its concern about the proposed industrial relations changes.

We care about workers and work and industrial relations because work is a fundamental aspect of human life. It is one of the most significant ways that people find meaning in their lives and the means by which they live out their responsibility to contribute to the common good. Along with that responsibility, however, comes the right to be treated with dignity and respect in that work.

One of the fundamental clashes the Church has with how the neo-liberal economic agenda plays out is that we believe that human beings are not commodities in the service of an economic system and an unfettered global market. The economy should never be an end in itself. It is nothing more and nothing less than a tool for the benefit of people.

The Government’s rhetoric around their proposed changes is all about the system and not at all about the people. Their commitment is to fixing a system so that the sums improve for the benefit of the market. When the Government talks about productivity and flexibility it is always with reference to the benefits for business and the economy. The discourse is about competition and figures and dollars not around human need.

Human labour is not a commodity and people should never be exploited in the drive for profit. People will always be most productive at work when that work enables them to meet their basic needs; when they are treated with respect and afforded a sense of dignity; when they are treated fairly and feel valued and secure; and when they work in an environment of trust and cooperation where they know they can make a positive difference.

Awards, collective bargaining and unfair dismissals laws are all mechanisms that exist to protect employees in their working lives. They reflect long-held understandings that the employer-employee relationship is never equal; there is a need for wages to keep pace with social circumstances and inflation; for employees to give each other advice and encouragement in pursuing better conditions in their working lives; and for miscarriages of justice to be rectified in accordance with fair and equitable procedures.

The Government’s proposed changes will undermine trust and security in the workplace and threaten the livelihoods of Australia’s most vulnerable workers. In fact, their deregulation agenda has already taken its toll. While the Prime Minister claims responsibility for the current low levels of unemployment, he neglects to mention the cost to the wages and conditions of many low paid employees. He also neglects to mention the increasingly high numbers of people in casual employment, especially women. Too many Australians already have no access to very basic needs-based entitlements, such as sick leave, and there is nothing in these proposals which will improve the situation for casual employees.

The Government’s promise of increased flexibility for business and more jobs for workers will be realised as a promise for more under-paid, casual jobs with few guaranteed rights and entitlements. The numbers of working poor in Australia are set to rise.

There are currently about 1.5 million Australians who rely on the minimum wage determinations of the Industrial Relations Commission. Under the new provisions there will be one minimum wage, regardless of the skills involved in the job and it will be set by a new ‘Fair Pay Commission’. It is unclear whether the new commission will be independent of Government and whether it will continue to set the minimum wage according to ‘needs’ principle and the ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ principle. While these principles are about one hundred years old in Australian legislation they have been around a lot longer in Christian theology.

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII warned:

Let it be granted then that worker and employer may enter freely into agreements and, in particular, concerning the amount of the wage; yet there is always underlying such agreements an element of natural justice, and one greater and more ancient than the free consent of contracting parties, namely, that the wage shall not be less than enough to support a worker who is thrifty and upright. If, compelled by necessity or moved by fear of a worse evil, a worker accepts a harder condition, which although against his will he must accept because the employer or contractor imposes it, he certainly submits to force, against which justice cries out in protest.

UnitingJustice is proud to stand in a long Christian tradition of concern for just employment. We will continue to demand that Government and business respect systems and structures that recognise that employees are not objects. Human beings have a right to live and work with dignity, earning a wage that will allow them to see their families grow up in health and happiness. These are basic principles that must be maintained in the face of the ever-increasing drive for profit.

The Government begins with the economy and says that if we get that right people will benefit. The Uniting Church will always begin with people and say that if we get that right our society will flourish in all sorts of ways. We will always be most concerned for the most vulnerable. We will continue to speak up for what is just, and we will strive to be a source of great hope in our society. We will strive to be faithful to the heart of the Christian gospel which is a reminder to us all that we are capable of something better and that if we work together, those of us of all faiths and no faith, we can build a world where nature is respected and all humanity flourishes in dignity and hope.

UnitingJustice Australia website

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