The Bible and the Living Wage

This extract of an article by Matt Williams from the Citizens UK and Centre for Theology and Community toolkit for Living Wage Week explains how the Bible underpins the call by churches for employers to pay the real Living Wage to their workers.

Jesus sums up the worker’s due in a simple saying: “For the worker is worthy of his wages” (Luke 10:7). Labour deserves payment that is appropriate to needs, specifically shelter and food, which the version of the saying in Matthew 10:10 makes explicit. But the context of the third appearance of the saying in 1 tiMothy makes it clear that this is a matter of honour (5:17), and not just the bare minimum for survival.

Earning a decent living is a matter of dignity, a means to social participation and not just material subsistence. Each of these occurrences of the saying comes in the context that directly concern Christian workers, whether missionaries or pastors. But elsewhere Paul connects this specific issue to more general regulations in the Torah about appropriate pay (1 Corinthians 9:9–14).

This alerts us to the fact the economic aspect of the Old Testament still has relevance with regards to this issue of pay. In fact it is there that we find some of the strongest exhortations about the responsibility of an employer (Deuteronomy 24:14–15... The dependence of the worker on their employer entails a responsibility to pay properly. Although the explicit issue here is timing rather than amount of wages, the fact that a person depends on their remuneration means that it must be sufficient to live on. Given that the norm was for a man to do paid work on behalf of his whole family, a decent wage covered the requirements of a household and not just an isolated individual. So, a wage that is enough for a household to live on can be construed as a ‘living wage’.

We can get a sharper sense of the right thing to do from looking at what was wrong. A common temptation then was (and still is) to abuse positions of power and ignore workers’ needs. This was the problem in Egypt, where Israel were treated as slaves, apparently being paid nothing (exoDus 5). God’s people were warned that if they adopted a monarchy, a centralisation of power like the Egyptian model, the temptations of power would be too great and workers’ needs would be ignored (Deuteronomy 17; 1 Samuel 8)...

Contemporary employers in the UK have a more restricted role than ‘masters’ or kings. But, as we saw in Deuteronomy, the responsibility for hired workers’ economic needs is no less... Otherwise we would have the bizarre situation that modern Biblical insight & enterprise for social purpose employment entails less obligations towards workers than masters had for slaves, or kings had for subjects.

Where things go wrong is when workers are seen as a means to an end rather than people to be cared for and even loved. Hence the commands in Torah summed up by ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ (levitiCus 19:18) sums up social and economic teaching. This includes the mandates to leave the gleanings of the harvest (19:9), deal with financial integrity (19:13) and act justly with the poor (19:15) and, most relevantly for us, the directive ‘do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight’ (19:13)... Paying a living wage is part of how an employer loves his or her neighbour (in this case his or her worker.

From Matt Williams, A Biblical Response to Working Poverty (Jubilee Centre, 2022)