A Reason to Believe (17 page)

Jefferson Sessions, the prosecutor, was soon nominated to the Federal District Court in Alabama, but the proposal died in the Senate Judiciary Committee in part because of concerns raised about his voter fraud prosecutions. Ten years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he serves to this day. Judge Cox was elevated to the
Court of Appeals. My guess is that they will never understand what happened in that courtroom. Those poor old black sharecroppers never lost their faith—in God, in the kindness of the people who were trying to help, and most especially in the hope that justice was still possible. Like the Jean-Pierres, they seemed genuinely proud and even overcome to see that the meek could be vindicated. That’s certainly why I was crying.

Several years later, at the Department of Justice, I was again inspired by these types of experiences: moments when the yearning for social justice was met with some affirmation against the odds that it was still possible. During my time in the Civil Rights Division, I was back in Alabama and throughout the South in response to a wave of church burnings, and I had a number of those meetings in backwoods churches, where people prayed for strength and comfort before they got down to the earthly business of solving problems together. These were examples of people seeing their stake in their neighbors’ dreams and struggles, as well as their own.

I’d like to think that my commitment to social justice remained consistent even when I wasn’t in the public sector. When I became a corporate executive, I tried to maintain a personal pledge to do good—to make the ladies of Cosmopolitan proud.

Not long after I left the Justice Department, private attorneys settled a closely watched employment discrimination case at Texaco, one of the largest oil and gas
companies in the world and a storied brand for decades. The company sponsored variety shows on television and Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Its jingle—“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star”—was familiar to most people in America then over forty.

The settlement required the court to appoint a task force to implement the agreement, essentially a complex set of policies and actions that would completely transform the company’s employment policies and practices. I was asked to chair the task force and did so for two years. Eventually the CEO asked me to join the company as general counsel. It was a great opportunity to get a different view of the law and of private sector management. Once the company merged with Chevron and Diane and I decided not to relocate to the new headquarters in San Francisco, I moved to Coca-Cola in a similar capacity in the wake of a similar employment discrimination class-action lawsuit. Again, I was asked to implement changes in the employment practices and to oversee the company’s global legal affairs.

I was able to travel around the world to try to solve a great variety of problems in many different cultures—and to make some money as well. Social justice was never far from my mission, even in those corporate settings. I know we made the workplace in both companies more fair and transparent. I worked to make Texaco the first major oil company to stop arguing about the science of
climate change and to join those in search of solutions. At Coca-Cola, I worked to resolve serious charges of worker mistreatment at a bottling plant in Colombia and to investigate a whistleblower scandal that ensnared a good, mild-mannered man who was trying to do the right thing. I learned that I need not and would not leave my conscience at the door for any job. Most of the people I worked with shared those values.

Politics presents different challenges to faith. In a world where it seems quite appropriate, even imperative, to address issues of social and economic justice, it can still be surprisingly difficult to accomplish. One tough-minded congressman I have come to know and like worries aloud that I am not mean enough for politics, that people feel they can mess with me and my administration without consequences. He said, “I love you, but I wish you were more of an SOB sometimes.” I told him that the reason he loves me is because I’m not. He laughed and admitted it was true.

An important distinction needs to be made in politics between allowing your values to guide you and keeping religion and government separate. Liberals are rightly concerned about government-established and government-supported religion, especially in our religiously polyglot society. But their unwillingness to engage on policy at the level of transcendent and timeless values, for fear of sounding too moralistic or religious, yields too much ground to the radical political right, which has come
to claim Christianity in particular to advance a deeply un-Christian agenda. Theirs is a faith based on intolerance, a faith without compassion. Hating homosexuals and despising illegal immigrants instead of hating poverty and despising homelessness seems to miss the point of a life of faithfulness. The Gospel of Matthew teaches us:

Hardly ever does the radical right invoke these truths. While they claim to be the political haven for God-fearing Americans, love—so central to Christianity—has no
place in their agenda. When they speak of faith, it seems obscene.

During my campaign for governor in 2006, the question of marriage equality was hotly debated. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had struck down practices that limited marriage to the union of a man and a woman, and many tried to organize a ballot initiative to overturn the Court’s ruling. I agreed with the ruling and supported marriage equality. Churches were deeply divided.

The black church was particularly agitated, in part because the radical right promised that unless the court’s decision was overturned, churches would be forced to marry gay and lesbian couples or risk losing their tax-exempt status. My sister and her husband, Bernie, were active in one of the largest black churches in Boston, which was led by a gifted preacher and a leader among the black clergy. He denounced me and my candidacy from the pulpit on many Sundays while Rhonda and Bernie sat in the front pew.

I met with the Black Ministerial Alliance in Boston during the campaign, asking for their support while acknowledging our differences on this issue. I said I believed in a politics that did not require that we agree on everything before we could work together on anything. And I challenged them to work with me on the issues I believed their parishioners cared most about, such as being able to pay their rent and their heating bill in the same month. I’m happy that I got their support in the end, but a lot of
nasty things were said. For some of these black ministers, the notion of social justice, faith in action, was secondary.

Once I won and took office, I worked hard to get the necessary votes at the constitutional convention that was convened so that the joint legislature could resolve the question. We convinced enough legislators to support marriage equality and to keep discrimination out of the Massachusetts Constitution. It seemed what faith in action demanded. I had no idea until many months later that our own daughter, Katherine, who was nineteen at the time, was getting ready to come out.

In politics, there are a handful of people whose wealth, connections, and influence are enough to assure that their views will always be taken into account. They have access to those in the White House, the Capitol, and the statehouses across America, regardless of which party is in power. Their calls will be returned, and as governor, I have returned their calls. But if social justice means anything in politics, it means opening up the process to those who have been left out, to hear
their
voices and return
their
calls. I ran for governor in part because I saw that so many people had dropped out of the process and had lost faith in their democracy. Sometimes the press calls them the “have-nots,” but I think they have plenty. They just have to be reminded that they have plenty to contribute—they have all the power they need to make the changes they want.

During my first primary campaign, I made a campaign
stop at the Local 26 Union Hall in Boston. Local 26 represents about five thousand workers in the hospitality industries in Greater Boston, and all the candidates were invited to one of their rallies. These were the working poor. For many of them, English was not their first language. The room was crowded and hot. They listened intently, but many shifted and murmured to one another. It was by no means clear they were getting my points.

Midway through my speech I stopped, put away my notes, and just looked at them.

“I want to say something else to you,” I said. “I want you to know, I see you.”

The room got quiet.

“I know you work places where people look right past you. They walk right past you. I know that. You take their dirty sheets off. You take away their wet towels. And they pass you in the room, they pass you in halls, and they don’t make eye contact. They pass you as you’re holding the door. They’re on their cell phone. They’re doing their thing, and they don’t see you. Well, I want you to know something.”

I paused, took in the entire crowd, and spoke slowly.

“I … see … you. And I appreciate you.”

It was suddenly a completely different room, and I could feel it.

“The reason I want you to come and vote is that I want your government to see you. And that’s not going to happen unless you claim a stake in that government. And
let me tell you something else. I want you to come and vote for me. But if you don’t come and vote for me, that’s okay. I understand. But you have to show up, because this is your claim. So stop leaving it to the pundits and the pollsters to tell us whose turn it is, who’s supposed to be next, and who’s going to win. It’s your turn.”

The place erupted. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a stronger connection with any group as I did with that one.

As it happens, I was back in that same union hall three years later. The circumstances were quite different.

In August 2009, two Hyatt hotels in Boston and one in Cambridge laid off ninety-eight housekeepers. The workers were mostly black and Hispanic women. Some had been cleaning rooms at Hyatts for more than twenty years. They earned about $15 an hour. The severe recession, of course, caused massive job cuts in Massachusetts and around the country, including ones I had to make in state government, but these layoffs were different. The Hyatt hotels didn’t actually reduce staff; they simply replaced the existing housekeepers with lower-paid workers from an employment agency. At my meeting with the housekeepers at the union hall, some of the women had tears in their eyes. They didn’t know how they were going to pay for food, rent, and utilities. I was recovering from hip surgery and was using a cane—hardly an inspiring sight—but I held the hands of the women who were now sharing their grief. They told me that Hyatt had asked them to train the new staff members so they could fill in during vacations
and holidays. They had no idea they were training their own replacements—who would be making $8 an hour.

There is a mindset in our country among hard right-wingers and free-market purists that poverty is exclusively the fault of the impoverished. They’re lazy. They’re not motivated. Capitalism produces the greatest good for the greatest number, and if there’s collateral damage in the process, so be it.

All that this market fundamentalism is about is letting people’s consciences off the hook. If the market is “just,” none of us is responsible for the havoc it may wreak. But the invisible hand of the market need not be free of ethical values, and ought not be. In any event, there is a right way to lay off people and a wrong way, and this was the wrong way. The Bible admonishes believers to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. Secular equivalents in every culture and community require us to respect the dignity of others.

I intervened in the Hyatt dispute to remind this company as well as others that the financial bottom line is not the only bottom line. There is also a community bottom line, an environmental bottom line, a moral bottom line, and public leadership should try to integrate all of them.

I communicated these messages to Hyatt’s chief executive in several telephone calls and letters. In one I wrote, “I understand first hand how difficult it is to manage through the current economic challenges without compounding the disruptions the times have caused. But surely
there is some way to retain the jobs for your housekeeping staffs, as other hotels have done, and to work with them to help the company meet its current challenges, rather than tossing them out unceremoniously to fend for themselves while the people they trained take their jobs at barely livable wages.”

I also warned that I would direct state employees to boycott all Hyatt properties when conducting state business unless the ninety-eight housekeepers were rehired. The threat was more symbolic than anything else. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts does not do enough business with Hyatt hotels to make a dent in their revenues, but I was not alone among public officials in condemning the company. Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, and U.S. Congressman Michael Capuano, among others, also expressed their outrage. Several hundred hotel workers and their supporters held a loud rally in front of the Hyatt Regency Boston and received ample television coverage. Protests were staged at Hyatts in Chicago and San Francisco. The Boston Taxi Drivers Association vowed to boycott the Hyatt properties unless the housekeepers were given their jobs back. A group of more than two hundred rabbis and cantors from around the country signed a petition saying that Hyatt had not only insulted its workers but insulted the Torah as well.