Honor the Line

Until April of this year, I was the MoveUP (COPE Local 378) shop steward at the small Canadian non-profit where I worked as IT lead. Then the role ended and the position went with it. The years I spent in that role thinking about and fighting for the rights of my colleagues changed how I read scripture more than any sermon ever did.

This is the piece I wish someone had shared with me twenty years ago, and what I want my fellow Christians to read whether or not they have ever given a second’s thought to labour rights.

The point I’m trying to make is simple. Christians cannot morally cross a picket line. This belief is not grounded in mere political preference. It is not a woke left-wing addition to the gospel. Rather, this behavioural imperative is a matter of basic biblical obedience.

It is a moral obligation for Christians to never, never, never cross a picket line, and this ideological axiom is supported both by biblical scripture as well as centuries of cross-denominational tradition.

The unfortunate reason most of us were never told this plainly is that the church has become placatingly comfortable (some might even say complicit) with the extractive power structures of neoliberal capitalism that it has lost the ability to read its own scriptures plainly.

So let’s read them plainly.

What a picket line actually is

Before we actually dive into the supporting evidence, let’s define exactly what we are talking about.

A picket line is not a traffic cone. It is not a polite suggestion. It is workers (i.e. your neighbours, in most cases) standing together in the cold to say we are being crushed, and we will not be crushed quietly. It is a cry made visible on the sidewalk so the rest of us cannot pretend we did not hear.

The first stage of any labour dispute is a thousand small humiliations the public never sees: job responsibilities overhauled without notice or consultation, benefits quietly cut back, workloads inflated, the slow accumulation of being treated as a cost rather than a person. By the time a picket goes up, enormous amounts of damage have already been absorbed in silence.

The second stage is usually uncooperative or bad faith negotiation on the part of the employer.

The line is what becomes audible when the thousands of indignities suffered in silence are not properly acknowledged or addressed. Strikes and picket lines are famously a last-ditch effort to wield the largest level of influence that workers have at their disposal. Strikes are not the rumblings of spoiled workers who should feel grateful rather than entitled. Rather, they are the cries of workers with legitimate grievances about specific injustices that they are forced to suffer on a daily basis (e.g. the airline stewards who don’t get paid for work until the airplane door is sealed).

Scripture has a great deal to say about that cry.

The texts

The Bible’s economic ethic is repeated, legislated, and prophesied across both testaments, and it consistently sides with workers against those who would withhold what they are owed.

Deuteronomy 24:14–15 — “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy labourers… You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt."

Leviticus 19:13 — “You shall not defraud your neighbour; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a labourer until morning."

Jeremiah 22:13 — “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbours work for nothing, and does not give them their wages."

Malachi 3:5 — “I will be swift to bear witness… against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages…"

James 5:1–4 — “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you… Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts."

Notice what the language assumes. Not that wage theft might offend God in the abstract, but that the cries of workers reach God directly.

The picket line is exactly that cry made visible.

James 5 in particular reads as if it were written about the modern shareholder economy. The harvesters are still mowing. The wages are still being withheld through more sophisticated mechanisms than first-century Palestine could imagine. The cries are still reaching the ears of the Lord of hosts.

The parable that settles it

Jesus tells a story (Luke 10:25–37) about a man beaten and left on the road. A priest sees him and crosses to the other side. A Levite sees him and crosses to the other side. A Samaritan crosses toward him.

The phrase the KJV renders as passed by on the other side is the whole parable in miniature. Two religious professionals choose to cross away from suffering. One outsider chooses to cross toward it.

Jesus asks who was the neighbour, and the lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan; he just says “the one who showed him mercy."

A picket line is a literal version of this choice.

The workers are on the sidewalk. Their cry is audible. The Christian standing across the street has exactly two options: cross toward the suffering and stand with them, or cross away and into the business that is causing the suffering. There is no third option.

The pretence that crossing the line is somehow neutral — “I just need to grab one thing” — is the priest’s pretence. It is what passing by on the other side feels like from inside.

The tradition is unambiguous

This is not a fringe reading. The mainline Christian tradition, across confessional boundaries, has been remarkably consistent for over a century.

Catholic Social Teaching begins in earnest with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), which affirms the right of workers to form unions, the obligation of employers to pay just wages, and the dignity of work as participation in creation. Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI, 1931), Laborem Exercens (John Paul II, 1981), and Caritas in Veritate (Benedict XVI, 2009) build on this without retreat. There is no Catholic teaching that permits crossing a picket line.

The Anabaptist tradition (i.e. Mennonites, Brethren, the Bruderhof, etc.) has practised mutual aid as a constitutive Christian discipline for five centuries. The early Anabaptists were themselves persecuted workers and refugees and their economic ethic was built from below.

The Black church has been the moral spine of the North American labour and civil rights movements. The Memphis sanitation workers' strike of 1968 — the strike Martin Luther King Jr. was supporting when he was assassinated — was led by Black workers organizing under the slogan I AM A MAN. King’s last sermon was about that strike.

The Canadian Social Gospel gave us J.S. Woodsworth, the Methodist minister who founded the CCF, and Tommy Douglas, the Baptist minister who built public health care in Saskatchewan and pushed it into being nationally. Both understood without hedging that the gospel required standing with workers.

If your version of Christianity tells you crossing a picket line is fine, it is a version that has had two thousand years of moral tradition surgically removed from it.

The objections I have actually heard

“I have to. It’s just one errand." The priest had reasons too. The Levite had reasons too. Luke does not record them because they do not matter. The text records what they did with their bodies, not what they told themselves.

“It’s a political dispute, and I don’t want to take sides." You are taking a side. The side of doing nothing is a side. In a labour dispute the employer has, by definition, the power to wait the workers out; workers have only the power of public solidarity. Withholding that solidarity is not neutrality; it is a vote for the party that already holds the power.

“My job/family/finances make it complicated." Sometimes this is true. Christianity does not demand martyrdom for every errand. But the answer to “this is complicated” is to think harder and find creative solutions, not to default to whichever option is most convenient.

“It’s against my freedom to be told what to do." The gospel is full of being told what to do. The freedom Christ offers is freedom from the logic of self-interest, not freedom for it.

“The union is also flawed." Of course it is. Unions are made of people. So are churches. The flaws of the union are not a reason to side against the workers in dispute with their employer, any more than the flaws of any congregation are a reason to side against the people praying inside it.

What to do instead

The practical implications are not complicated.

• Find out which workers are on strike or in dispute in your region. In BC right now, that means paying attention to public-sector bargaining, port workers, healthcare, education, and the long roster of private-sector disputes that rarely make the news.
• Reroute. If your usual grocery store, coffee shop, hotel, or contractor is being struck, go somewhere else for the duration. This is the cheapest form of solidarity that exists.
• Show up. Picket lines benefit enormously from supporters who bring coffee, donuts, hand-warmers, or simply just a few more bodies. Workers on the line are tired and cold and often demoralized. Your presence matters more than you think.
• Talk about it from the pulpit. If you are clergy, name this in a sermon. If you are a lay leader, ask your minister why labour disputes never come up in prayer. The silence is itself a teaching.
• Honour the line even when it costs you. Especially then. Anything else is the priest in Luke 10, telling himself a story about his schedule.

The line is a sacred place

I am no longer a steward. The role ended in April with the position. But the time I held it taught me to read scripture with my eyes open in a way no theological education had quite managed.

The Bible is not subtle about workers. The tradition is not subtle about workers. The only thing subtle about the whole arrangement is the way the contemporary church has been trained to look past what its own scriptures plainly say.

A picket line is one of the few remaining places in late capitalism where the cries of workers are made audible to the rest of us. James says those cries reach the ears of the God. Luke says love is a direction of travel. The whole tradition, from Leviticus through Tommy Douglas, says the people of God stand with workers.

The line is a sacred place. Walk toward it.