‘Living Wage’ Urged for Church Employees

As Labor Day nears, Los Angeles bishops and religious activists who backed City Council imposition of a “living wage” requirement on government contractors are looking inward--asking their own institutions and congregations to pay workers no less.

“Some churches might have initial difficulties, but we can’t have one standard for general society and another for our own church workers,” said the Rev. Richard Gillett of Pasadena, who heads the Episcopal diocese’s social concerns committee.

The so-called living wage is $7.50 an hour, which proponents say was chosen because it would provide a full-time worker $15,600 yearly--right at the federal poverty level for a family of four. Federal law sets the hourly minimum wage at $4.75, while the state of California requires a $5 minimum.

The national Episcopal convention in July adopted such a recommendation at the urging of Los Angeles diocesan leaders, who will in turn ask their own regional convention in December to do likewise. Bishop Frederick Borsch and his aides are already “working to assure that diocesan workers” make at least a living wage, Gillett said.

A similar proposal will be submitted to the Sept. 11 board meeting of the Southern California Ecumenical Council, whose members include representatives of 16 denominations, mostly mainline Protestant. The nonbinding statement “has a very good chance of being adopted,” the Rev. Albert Cohen, executive director of the council, said this week.

“Among the key principles shared by all faiths are the importance of paying workers fairly for their labor,” begins the resolution, which would ask all religious institutions to pay full-time, part-time and contracted employees a “living wage” as well as health insurance and other benefits.

In the San Fernando Valley, where the Valley Interfaith Council holds the only Labor Day religious service in Los Angeles County, council president Jeff Utter said that churches sometimes “make people feel they have a moral-religious obligation to do the work of the church without concern to how much money they make.”

Utter, who is also a United Church of Christ pastor, said the practice amounts to exploitation of idealists.

“People should be paid the equivalent of what they would be paid in other segments of the economy,” he said. “If a church employee wants to return part of that money as a church contribution, then they are free to do that.”

The ninth annual Valley Interfaith Council-sponsored Labor Day service--this year at Temple Judea in Tarzana at 7 p.m Monday--will feature a talk by Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who led the council to a unanimous adoption of the living-wage ordinance in March. The measure requires contractors with the city to pay wages of at least $7.25 an hour to employees with insurance benefits or $8.50 an hour without benefits.

Mayor Richard Riordan vetoed the action, saying, among other things, that the provision would make Los Angeles less economically competitive with other cities. But the council, on an 11-1 vote April 1, overrode the mayor’s veto.

Rabbi Leonard Beerman, addressing the council on behalf of a coalition of the measure’s backers, said the ordinance would be crucial to the human dignity of some 5,000 workers who proponents said would be affected.

“What it demonstrates most clearly and passionately,” said Beerman, the retired senior rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles, “is that by your vote you have made it profoundly clear that the moral conscience has a place of honor in this city.”

Earlier, New York, Baltimore and other cities had adopted similar wage standards, and the Pasadena City Council agreed in May to consider a living-wage measure.

In keeping with a generally pro-labor tradition in Catholicism, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony had joined Episcopal Bishop Borsch and United Methodist Bishop Roy Sano in backing the living-wage proposal for Los Angeles.

The U.S. bishops’ annual Labor Day statement, issued this month, noted that even as unemployment percentages have dropped this year, many workers struggle with low wages and part-time hours.

“Perhaps most disturbing of all is the widening gap between the rich and the poor in our land,” wrote Bishop William S. Sklystad of Spokane, Wash., who chairs the bishops’ committee on domestic policy. “Workers who add to the wealth of the company and the community should share in the prosperity they help create.”

The moral principles that bishops apply to society should apply also to church-related offices and institutions, according to priest-theologian Richard P. McBrien of Notre Dame, whose pointed column appeared in Friday’s Tidings, the Los Angeles archdiocesan weekly.

Citing the U.S. bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter as saying that “the church should be exemplary” in implementing standards of fair pay for church employees, McBrien wrote:

“There are hundreds, more likely thousands, of Catholic school teachers who would not agree that these standards are being met in the parish schools and diocesan high schools where they work, especially with regard to wages and benefits, as well as job security.”

Suggesting that additional hundreds of parish religious education directors and Catholic hospital employees face the same dilemmas, McBrien concluded: “It is never permissible to say that working for the church requires people to accept less than what is just.”