Unemployment: It’s Not So Simple

“Around the eleventh hour he found others standing around, and he says to them, ‘Why have you been standing all day idle?’  They say to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’” (Matthew 20:6-7) Jesus gives us a scene where people are unemployed against their will, a scene all too common in our day, but hard to find in Scripture.

Proverbs 22:29 gives us a hopeful declaration: “Do you see a person skillful in their work? They shall stand before royalty; they shall not stand before the obscure.” Today’s economy, however, tests my faith in God’s word on this point to the maximum. Like many today, I am cynical about whether talent and hard work gets rewarded, even as a general rule, let alone a 100% guarantee.

Paul has harsh words for those who choose to be idle (a-taktos, literally “without assignment”).  In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, he blasts those who use Jesus’ return as an excuse to sponge off fellow believers with the command, “Whoever will not work, let them not eat.” In 1 Timothy 5:14, Paul sets aside his default preference for singleness when he recommends that young widows remarry, bear children, and rule their households, lest they become busybodies with time on their hands.

For Paul, productivity is not optional for those who are able to produce. We see from our first minutes on earth in Genesis 2 that God didn’t put us here to be couch potatoes. As pastor Michael Slaughter puts it, “Jesus didn’t die on the golf course!” Nor, might we add, did he die watching soap operas or reading books. Not that there’s anything intrinsically evil about golf or TV or books. But there’s got to be more purpose to life on earth than leisure.

Paul wants to discourage needless dependency. Yes, none of us is truly independent, but it is never healthy for us to let others do all the lifting. In 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, Paul counsels believers to work with their own hands, so that they will be in need of nothing (NRSV: “be dependent on nobody”). It is baffling how some folks want to outlaw feeding our wildlife for fear of creating dependency, but yet the same folks don’t mind creating wholesale dependency among humans through our government policy towards the poor.

But I wonder whether Paul could have pictured our modern American context, where tens of millions do not choose to be idle. They want to work, but are unable to find a place to use their skills, or even the proverbial job that nobody else wants. We’ve come a long way from the decade where unemployment was so low that employers couldn’t fire bad workers for fear of being unable to replace them. We now live in a day that is determined to make a joke out of Proverbs 22:29.

I myself have bright and talented adult children who have had to struggle to compete for jobs with applicants who appear to be much less qualified than they are. I pray harder for my kids than I do for myself or anyone else. I fear that they may be sentenced to a lifetime of a vicious economy like the one we have had up till now.

While it is possible to get money by pointing a weapon at someone, you can’t really get a job that way. Neither can government create jobs by command or by force. But if government really cares about the poor and about creating jobs, here are some initial suggestions:

1. Don’t strangle and butcher the goose that laid the golden eggs. Make it affordable for job creators to hire more people. Too many of our laws and policies destroy jobs. They put businesses out of business through tax and regulatory burdens, or they tie the hands of those who would earn part-time income by selling homemade tamales or renting out an extra bedroom. My cautious hope is that tax reform may bring billions of dollars home to create jobs here in our own country.
2. Don’t shut down oil drilling in the Gulf, then borrow money from the Chinese to loan to Brazil to drill in the same Gulf, spending money we don’t have to outsource those jobs rather than create new ones. (That was dumb. Are we still doing that?)
3. Don’t incentivize truckloads of illegal immigrants to take away jobs from our minority fellow-citizens. Being hospitable is a virtue, but not at the expense of our own people who need those jobs.
4. Quit attacking the profit motive. Don’t expect doctors and producers of goods to work for nothing, unless you’re also willing to make government workers take $70,000 cuts in salary and serve out of the goodness of their hearts. Or give away their autobiographies for free.
5. Be careful about monkeying with the minimum wage. Yes, the free market can be unnecessarily brutal, and can hold wages ridiculously low for talent that it would be a tragedy to lose. I’ve been on the wrong end of that stick before. But raising the minimum wage often has the unintended consequence of killing jobs by reducing the number of people that employers can afford to hire. Who’s going to pay $15 for a hamburger, so that workers can get $15 per hour?

The past few years have given me a lot of advance practice for retirement, and a heart for the unemployed and underemployed. I have gotten to see what it’s like to get rejection letters that try to assure me and 100 fellow applicants that we are so highly qualified, but not good enough for them to interview any of us. Getting out of that meat market euphemistically called the “job search” comes as welcome relief to me.

My present existence is not anything like the scenario I once dreaded. The issue for me is not monetary; it is existential. God did not put me here to retire and walk away from making myself useful to the world. God has plans for me. But where? Am I being disobedient by refusing to move, by passing up a chance to serve in rural Iowa or Cairo, Egypt?

My heart now beats for the millions whose present experience would question the truth of God’s word that those who are skillful in their work shall not be condemned to obscurity (Proverbs 22:29). I wish I had more to offer them than the words that I write.