大象传媒

Some of the stories in the Bible don't at first make much sense. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, picked on one recently when he addressed a business conference in London called by his Roman Catholic opposite number, the Archbishop of Westminster. It was the parable about the owner of a vineyard. The owner insisted on paying the same wages to those he hired in the morning, those he hired at midday and those he hired in the afternoon.
It wasn't their fault, the archbishop said, that they hadn't been picked at the start of the day. They had the same needs, above all they needed to feed their family. And the vineyard owner, bless 'im, saw it that way too. Which is also - and this was the point of the parable - God's way.
Both the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster lead churches which have formally signed up to the living wage campaign. It is part, they say, of treating people as having been made in the image of God. The list of those churches committed to it includes the Baptists, Methodists, the URC, the Salvation Army, the Presbyterians, the Church of Scotland, the Catholics, Anglicans, you name it. Other faith communities are also signing up. All the Catholic schools in Britain recently entered an agreement with their union to pay all their staff - and the staff of any subcontractors they may have - the current living wage.
If ever there was an idea which began as a grass roots movement, it was this. It started with a non-political effort in the early 2000s to highlight the gulf between executive pay in Canary Wharf in the East End of London, and the money paid to the local people who cleaned their offices.
A group of them, with backing from local churches, union branches and other community groups, formed the East London Communities Organisation, TELCO, and the idea grew from there. Its community-organising Gospel, which it describes as grass-roots activism on behalf of the common good, inspired the body called London Citizens, which eventually became Citizens UK, a national movement.
Though some people fear it could drive up unemployment, the Living Wage has growing cross-party backing. For instance Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson both support it as Labour former and present Tory mayors of London.
Why does this Living Wage idea appeal to churches and other faith communities so much? It may be because they want to take the Bible seriously even if they don't take it literally. How one treats the poor appears again and again in both Old and New Testaments - as it does, in say, the Koran - as an acid test of the state of one's soul. As the vineyard owner in St Matthew's Gospel saw it, if you reduce people to mere units of labour, to be hired as cheaply as possible, that's bad for them, bad for business, and bad for the common good - and bad for you.