Newcomers Should Be Grateful

He knows the number because he saw a payslip that was not his, left on a bench, face up, for about four seconds.

Four dollars twenty an hour. Same work, same crew, same shift, and the man whose payslip it was had been there fourteen months and he had been there four years.

He did not say anything that day. He said something two weeks later, once, carefully, to the foreman, in a corridor with nobody around, and he phrased it as a question about how the rates were set.

And the foreman said, not unkindly, in the voice of a man passing on a piece of practical wisdom: newcomers should be grateful.

That was it. The conversation lasted about forty seconds and he went back on shift.

That was three years ago. He is now the man who trains the new ones, which means he has trained four people who are paid more than he is, and he has been good to all four of them because it is not their fault and they are young.

His wife knows the number. Nobody else does. His mother thinks things are going well and he has let her think it because she is seventy nine.

If somebody has used the word grateful on you, this article is for you, and I am going to be plain.

Whose case it is

Let me say it without softening, because you have had three years of a word being used as a lid.

Gratitude is real and it is good, and you have plenty of it, and nobody reading this is going to tell you to stop being thankful for work. That is not what happened in that corridor.

What happened in that corridor is that a true word was used to close a true question, and those two things have nothing to do with each other.

Now read what Proverbs says about a thing done at a gate, which is where the poor got their business done in that world and where they got taken advantage of.

Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate: For the LORD will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.Proverbs 22:22

The Lord will plead their cause. That is a legal image, and it is God taking a brief.

Notice who is not asked to be grateful in that passage. Nobody. The instruction is entirely to the other party, and the reason given is not that the poor man will complain. It is that God will take it up Himself.

You have a case that God has already taken, and He took it without waiting to be asked. That is not my opinion about your wages. It is written in Proverbs 22:22, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So three years of the word grateful has not been humility. You have a dignity God gave and no rate of pay can measure, and it is intact this evening. The word settled that before you took that job, and the same Spirit who inspired it is at that table while you read this.

What the word was doing in that corridor

Here is worth being exact about, because you have half known it for three years.

Newcomers should be grateful is not an answer to how the rates are set. It is not even in the same category of sentence. You asked a question about a system and you were handed a statement about your character, and that is a very old move and it works because it is embarrassing to keep going afterward.

And notice the shape of it. It does not say the rate is right. It does not defend the rate at all. It moves the subject from the payroll to your attitude, and once the subject is your attitude, there is no fact left that anybody has to answer.

The proof of it is what has happened since. You have trained four people who are paid more than you, and the rate has never been mentioned again by anybody, and nobody has ever explained it, because nobody ever had to.

You have a question that was never answered, and asking a question about a system is not ingratitude. Proverbs 22 has God taking up the cause of the one taken advantage of at the gate; His Spirit is the one who lets a man see plainly what was done to him in a corridor.

Now, plainly, and this is the part of this page that matters most. Nothing here is telling you to leave that job and nothing here is telling you to stay. I do not know your papers, your rent, your mother's care, the state of the industry where you live, or what a wrong move would cost your family, and a page that issued you an instruction about that would be pretending to a knowledge it does not have. That is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is that you are allowed to find out what your rights are, from somebody who knows: a labor office, a union, a legal aid line, a workers rights organization in your state. That is not ingratitude and it is not a failure of humility. And if any of this has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.