Speakers focus on poverty issues

from The Record Eagle

The Rev. Dr. Paul H. Sherry has kept his promise.

When asked about plans following his retirement as president of the United Church of Christ in 2000, Sherry vowed to make poverty his big issue.

Sherry, a Tamaqua native and one-time Kenhorst pastor, is doing just that. As national coordinator of Let Justice Roll, a coalition of some 90 faith and community groups, he was the leadoff speaker on a recent teleconference sponsored by Washington-based Faith in Public Life.

Of the various speakers advocating action on different social-ministry issues, Sherry is the only one who can already point to significant progress.

The Senate followed the House lead a week ago in approving a hike in the minimum wage; action by the committee reconciling the two versions is the next step.

Speaking prior to the Senate vote, Sherry called the $5.15 minimum wage “unconscionable,” and the proposed $7.25 “quite modest but significant on the way to a living wage for all.”

Sherry asserted that the minimum wage was “the foremost values issue” in the 2006 election, noting that polls showed it had “enormous public support within the faith community.” He termed it a moral issue besides making economic sense.

He pointed out that when Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech in 1963, the buying power of the minimum wage was higher than it is now.

“It's time to fulfill the dream,” he said, sounding like an Old Testament prophet; “long past time.” And then he echoed one prophet, Amos (5:24), “Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Jeffrey Carr of the Sojourners agreed that overcoming poverty is a priority issue, but his group wants to go further, to reduce poverty for children in half and bring down the extreme global poverty, partly through free-trade agreements.

The other speakers focused on their particular concerns immigration, the war, torture, the environment but agreed that one impacts others. Sherry declared that the Iraq war has “literally stolen from resources that could assist poor working people.”

It was an eerie coincidence that the night before the Senate took its action, PBS was showing a documentary on the Supreme Court, which climaxed with a good look at the 1937 decision that for the first time validated efforts to impose a minimum wage.

In 1905 in the Lochnor case, the Supreme Court had invalidated a New York State law limiting bakers' hours to 60, on the theory that “liberty of contract” was mandated by the 14th Amendment.

The same principle that “the right to buy and sell labor is a fundamental freedom” was followed in 1923 when a District of Columbia minimum-wage law was thrown out, and in 1936 when one from New York State was rejected.

But 70 years ago the Supreme Court changed its mind by 5-4, in a case brought by chambermaid Elsie Parrish against the West Coast Hotel in Seattle, because she wasn't being paid the $14.50 minimum for a 48-hour week mandated by a Washington State law.

Unfortunately, PBS did not mention that the justice who switched was Owen J. Roberts from the Pottstown area.

In that decision, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that the government had the right to “correct the abuse which springs from employers' selfish disregard of the public interest,” and that “the community is not bound to provide what is in effect a subsidy for unconscionable employers.”

Sherry has more in common with Hughes than a concern for the poor and a liking for “unconscionable.” Hughes was also a former president of a major Protestant denomination the Northern Baptist Convention.