On Saving Money

Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives. (Oprah Winfrey; Quoted in A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink). 

Saving money has a great sound to it...suggesting thrift, frugality, responsibility, competence, and a promise of increasing wealth.  As I say, such is the SOUND of it.  In ACTUALITY I have seen business entities and individuals rob workers of their just and fair pay all in the name of an intoned allegiance to puritan thrift.  These people are not puritan and they are not righteous, they are thieves.  And all too frequently, the galling thing about it is that such cupidity is intoned by the head of, for example, a hospital management conglomerate with a personal salary of millions while those workers in his organization tending bed pans live in grueling poverty.  Providing effective health care is very much a democratic endeavor and it is sourced in many essential tasks though pay frequently does not reflect this simple fact.

 So often we overlook the worth and significance of those who are not in professional jobs, or those who are not in the so-called big jobs.  But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity, and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth ... For the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician.  All labor has worth. (Martin Luther King in his speech "All Labor Has Dignity"; quoted in Today in the Word - Moody Bible Institute - July 2014, page 29).

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