The vulnerability of workers in the gig economy to exploitation was emphasised to me by an example that I read about from the United States. A process known as shift bidding is in place for many different kinds of work, and the example I read was in hospitals. In this process, the lowest bidder gets the shift, and there was no protection for them if the shift was shortened or cancelled, sometimes as they arrived at work. The part that struck me as the most insidious though, was that the apps would record the bids that users would make and use this information to make lower future starting bid offers. In some cases, the apps would access financial data such as personal or credit card debt, and make lower future bid offers on the basis that the person would be desperate enough to work for less. Fortunately, there are moves within the US to try to counter this exploitation, but it still seemed egregious to me that such a system would be developed.
Perhaps I am a little naïve. After all, there have been workers who are vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and systems for a very long time. The workers in this morning’s Gospel reading parable were examples. At the time of Jesus, Romans and local elites were taking over subsistence level farming, creating large estates, and then using slaves and insecure labour to farm the estates, including the former owners of the small-holdings. For these workers, getting work today was no guarantee of work tomorrow. Some might get work every day, and these would be getting by, but many did not. For them, a denarius might have to last a week.
The landowner responds to these vulnerable workers mot with exploitation, as so many would have, but with generosity. He provides them not with what is earned but what is needed. Such generosity cuts across not just ideas of exploitation, but even of what we consider to be fair.
In my previous job in education, I was part of the committee that negotiated EBAs between my employer and fellow employees, and this primed me further to think about fairness- making sure everyone got a fair deal. The parable we just heard turns the whole concept of fairness upside down – I can’t imagine a workplace where this kind of pay agreement would be voted in, either by employees or by employer.
The beginning of the parable starts off reasonably enough- a vineyard owner needs extra labour to get his crop picked quickly. There is no suggestion of laziness on the part of the workers hired later in the day, they were just waiting for someone to give them work. Why didn’t the owner hire them earlier then? Perhaps the vineyard owner misjudged how many workers he would need to get the vines picked- perhaps the job suddenly got more urgent. Sometimes these things just happen- nothing untoward. For whatever reason, the workforce gradually increased as the day went on. The real twist in the story comes at paytime – where those hired last receive their pay first, to heighten the dramatic effect. A full day’s pay for one hours’ work. Sweet. Such generosity leads to increased expectation – how much extra will we get. It turns out – nothing. No-one is ripped off (except possibly the owner) – they all received the daily wage, the agreed amount. The grumbling of these first workers perhaps comes from disappointment or even envy, these latecomers are not being treated as they deserve, and perhaps a bit of regret- if they had known the vineyard owner would be this generous, they could have had a sleep in!
The problem is that the transactional view of society, both then and now, has trouble with generosity. They, and we know what was fair and what was not, what people had earned by their labour and what people deserved. Everything has a value and a price. Like the exploitation of the apps in the nursing shifts, the generosity of the landowner cuts right across our notions of fairness and transactional love. The idea that someone would just act generously, giving people what they did not deserve, is hard to fathom from this viewpoint.
I suspect that this viewpoint is not just limited to first century Palestine, it is just as true in our society today, and I suspect, in our churches. The seductive aspect of a transactional view is that we remain in control- we can make God love us by what we do for Him, we are the ones making the decisions. It also comes with a bonus of judgement, whereby we decide who is not deserving of God’s generosity, because of their behaviour. Michael McGirr, in his book “Things you get for free” wrote of a crisis of belief today, but not in the way we think. The crisis of belief is that people inside the church sometimes cannot believe that people outside its structures can experience the love of Jesus. God loves and guides the church but is not bound by it. God is busy about making sure those who might be last have a chance to become first. The tricky bit is to acknowledge that God is bigger than us and is generous to us whenever we encounter him.”
This is difficult, because it means acknowledging that nothing we do can alter how much God loves us, that God is the one ultimately in control, and all we can do is decide how we respond to that generosity, and even that does not change God’s love, it only changes us. Can we hand over control to God, to let God love us regardless of our faults and failings? Are we able to accept this generous love?