Being a Rich Oppressor

So this verse knocked the wind out of me when I read it last week:

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.

Matthew 5:1-4 (emphasis mine)

We have some help with our yard, and we're looking at getting some additional help with things when the baby arrives. I also manage several large vendors at work in my operations function who do a lot of basic labor like landscaping and cleaning. The personal and professional goal is to hire folks to do work as inexpensively as possible and still get the job done well. I don't know what the hourly wages are of some of the folks hired by the people we hire, but I bet it's less than $10/hour or so in many cases.

The HHS Poverty Guidelines state that a family of four making $20,650 a year lives in poverty. That is $9.93/hour for a single parent working a full-time job raising a family of three kids. Also powerful, almost 17% of children in Mecklenburg County live in poverty (over 23,000). I couldn't find a statistic quickly online because the BLS web site is down, but Emily remembers that there are local community reports with statistics that show the problem of poverty in Charlotte is not unemployment. Back-of-the-envelope evidence is that approximately 12.8% of Mecklenburg's population lives in poverty, and our unemployment rate is approximately 4.3%.

The relevance: (1) Over 23,000 children live in poverty within 20 minutes of my house (2) Children are poor because their parents are poor, (3) Parents are poor because they don't make enough money, (4) One reason that many parents don't make enough money is because they work but aren't paid enough, (5) I am part of the system that drives decisions to not pay parents enough.

Bottom line, I am part of the system that has yielded 23,000 children living in poverty within 20 minutes of my house (17% of all children in my County).

So, the challenge becomes what to do about it? I'm thinking God is pointing me to start with the things I have direct control over, building concentric circles of influence outward from my own house.