2022.09.18 | Honesty is the Best Policy
“Honesty is the Best Policy”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 18, 2022
Luke 16:1-13
Today’s parable presents us with two main characters.
The first character is the Rich Man. In light of how his hired Manager treats him, you may feel a little bit of sympathy toward him. But it’s important to note that in the Gospel of Luke, parables about rich men are often moral lessons for what one ought not to do, especially when it comes to money.
In fact, in quite a few of Jesus’ stories about rich men in Luke, the rich man ends up either dead or dead and in hell. It’s also telling that in Luke if a man of wealth is doing the right thing, such as the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, he isn’t usually described as a rich man.
The author of the Gospel of Luke, which dates to 80 to 90 CE, had strong feelings about wealth and the responsibility of the wealthy to the poor. Kicking off this parable by saying “there was a rich man” is a clue to us that we shouldn’t blindly accept that the rich man is in the right or is the one being wronged.
The second character is the Manager. In light of his abrupt termination after the Rich Man hears he’s been squandering his property, as well as his concerns about having to dig or beg and having no one to host him, you might feel a little bit of sympathy toward him. But it’s important to note that the Manager was quite possibly guilty of squandering what wasn’t his, is thoroughly self-absorbed, and undertakes a rather shady business, after he has been terminated, of reducing the amount of oil and wheat the Rich Man’s debtors owe him. And it should be noted that the reductions he makes to the bills are not piddling, especially if expressed in the wages of a typical day laborer. The reduction in oil would equal 1.5 years of labor while the reduction in oil would equal about four years of labor.
If you’re pondering over how the Manager’s action with the debtors make things right with the Rich Man and restore the Manager to his good graces, the simple answer is it doesn’t. All it achieves is that the Manager has now ensured that he has friends among the very wealthy men who owed the Rich Man vast amounts.
In the final conversation between the two characters, the Rich Man commends the Manager for acting shrewdly. Behind his commendation, he may be angry or upset about the financial loss and about not having a good course of retaliation against his already-fired employee, but it also appears that he grudgingly admires the Manager’s savvy trick on him. It may have cost him a small fortune, but it sure was shrewd.
Jesus uses the two characters and their relationship to each other and to the accumulation of wealth that drives their relationship to make two excellent points about honesty and wealth.
First, honesty is a character trait, not a situational ethic. Those who are dishonest in one context are not likely to be honest in all contexts, including their relationship with family, friends, and God. The need to be honest in all things, even the small ones, gets debated a lot with children who sometimes find it hard to understand why parents draw big bold lines against white lies, a little cheating, and stealing extremely minor items. For parents, like Jesus, the issue isn’t about keeping someone’s lost toy but about shaping a grown up whose first impulse will be to do the right and honest thing.
Jesus’ second point is that there are some inherent conflicts between the pursuit of wealth and living a moral, honest life in service to God. The Manager, by being willing to cheat, and the Rich Man, by being willing to praise the cheater’s shrewdness, epitomize those who have gone wholly over to a value system that places wealth over honesty and service.
Although work and pay has changed tremendously since the first century, today’s parable offers some interesting insights into two labor-management phenomena that have been getting a lot of media coverage lately: “quiet quitting” and “quiet firing.”
Quiet quitting is a bit of a misnomer because it doesn’t refer, as you might think, to people outright quitting their job or ceasing to work while continuing to get paid. It refers instead to an undocumented trend that many workers are no longer willing to comply with the explicit and implicit expectation that they will work and be available to work 24/7 or participate in what many call “the hustle culture.” Hustle culture refers to a lifestyle that places work at the center of life and humble-brags or glorifies long working hours. Instead quiet quitters are closing their computers in the evening and on weekends and devoting that portion of the day to personal pursuits, including food, family, friends, exercise, and hobbies in the hopes of restoring and sustaining a real work-life balance. Some quiet quitters, many of whom may be Millenials and Gen-Zs, prefer to call their new approach to work as “working to rule, working to thrive, reverse hustle, acting your wage, or morale-adjusted productivity.”
In response, managers, large corporations, and the uber wealthy who have relied on hustle culture for productivity and profits are none too pleased with quiet quitting and there’s been a range of negative reactions and disparagement of such quiet quitters in the business media, often broad brushing them as underperformers whose behaviors undermine the competitive abilities of their companies.
Others, primarily labor experts and journalists, have suggested that the real problem inherent in quiet quitting is the “quiet” nature of this change in behavior. While not calling it dishonest, these experts are quick to point out that the technique may be too passive-aggressive and deny employers the ability to adjust working expectations to facilitate more work-life balance for all employees, not just those who “quiet quit.” As the US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said recently, “If you are an employer, you should catch on early enough that your employees are satisfied, aren’t happy, and there needs to be a dialogue, a conversation.”(1)
In response to all the publicity around “quiet quitting,” there have also been a spate of articles about another unconfirmed trend of “quiet firing.” Quiet firing refers to the management technique of demoralizing workers so they will quit, thus saving the company severance pay or unemployment benefits. A worker being quietly fired might find their favorite projects reassigned, their workload increased to an unmanageable level, and their new assignments limited to the worst tasks. They may also find themselves being left out of the loop or ignored, or worse, being criticized constantly or subject to increased demands to document their work.
One study by Linked-In, found that about 80 percent of employees had either been subject to or observed quiet firing in the workplace.(2) Another study by the Pew Research Center found that the vaunted “Great Resignation” was in fact a massive reaction by workers to years of feeling disrespected, having no opportunities for advancement, and low pay.(3) If that’s true, the “Great Resignation” could be considered the “Great Quiet Firing.”
As with “quiet quitting,” it’s been suggested that “quiet firing” isn’t just about saving the company some money — it may also be a passive-aggressive approach adopted by managers who are poor communicators, conflict avoidant, or afraid to tell the truth to an employee. Unfortunately, most advice for how to address quiet firing falls on the targeted employee who is advised to take the risky step of seeking out more information about their treatment and their future with their company. (4)
What all these media reports and studies on quiet quitting and quiet firing show us is that it is sometimes very difficult for both managers and employees to discern how to act ethically and honestly in today’s workplace, particularly in the professional fields that consider themselves exempt from the hard-fought labor laws of the 19th and 20th century that protect hourly workers with minimum wages, overtime, and mandatory breaks. One big scale answer to these problems of overwork is unionization. Unions, though often disparaged by management, are the most effective and safe way for employees to bargain collectively for pay, leave, benefits, and working hours and to seek redress for grievances.
Short of unionization and widespread corporate change, Christians, whether they are managers or employees, are called by today’s scripture to two work-related practices: honesty and choosing to serve God rather than money. Honesty means communicating clearly rather than quietly (or silently) about your dissatisfaction, your needs, and your working hours. Serving God means that making and saving money must take a backseat for employers and employees when answering bigger questions about what’s fair and how to achieve work-life balance.
My friends, I hope you will remember that honesty is the best policy and that you will be blessed with the ability to communicate your needs and the courage to choose, every hour of the day, serving God over serving money. Amen.
Rowalsky, Greg and Alina Selyukh, “The economics behind 'quiet quitting' — and what we should call it instead,” National Public Radio, npr.com, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/09/13/1122059402/the-economics-behind-quiet-quitting-and-what-we-should-call-it-instead, accessed Sept 17, 2022
Castrillon, Caroline, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2022/09/11/10-signs-your-boss-is-guilty-of-quiet-firing/?sh=628a412d4818, Forbes.com, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2022/09/11/10-signs-your-boss-is-guilty-of-quiet-firing/?sh=628a412d4818, accessed Sept 17, 2022
Parker, Julia and Juliana Horowitz, “Majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 cite low pay, no opportunities for advancement, feeling disrespected,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/, accessed Sept 17, 2022
Time.com, What to Do if You Think Your Boss Is Trying to 'Quietly Fire' You, https://time.com/6212167/quiet-firing-what-to-do/, accessed Sept 17, 2022