This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 23, 2011 - Is it OK to break the rules to help a deserving employee in need?
Would you dock a worker's pay if she went home a few minutes early because she couldn't afford after-school day care for her third-grader?
Would you pad your employees' overtime hours because they can't afford their utility bills on what your company pays them?
Sociologist Lisa Dodson has discovered that some middle-class managers and professionals are quietly helping their poorly paid employees with under-the-radar acts of kindness that violate their companies' rules.
Dodson shares stories of what she calls "acts of civil disobedience" in her book "The Moral Underground: How Ordinary People Subvert an Unfair Economy," which she will discuss at the Missouri History Museum at 1 p.m. Saturday. The book grew out of eight years of research on the difficulties faced by low-wage Americans.
While interviewing managers in several U.S. cities, Dodson discovered that some had reached personal conclusions at odds with business bottom lines: When pay and policies are economically unfair, it is sometimes fair to break the rules.
These modern-day Robin Hoods were not acting out of a broad sense of political activism but simply doing what they felt was right for their employees, she said.
"Some people feel that at a certain point if you pay people less than they need to feed their kids, the company has lost its right to make moral claims. That's really what it comes down to," Dodson said in a recent interview with the Beacon.
Such acts might range from "time theft" -- supervisors who look the other way if an on-the-clock employee leaves for an hour to take a sick child to the doctor -- to food store managers who give dented canned goods to minimum-wage employees who can't afford enough groceries for their families.
"People did know they were taking risks," she said. "Almost everyone thought they were the only person doing it. Everybody's hiding it. Keeping it low profile."
Some asked her not to use their stories because they didn't want their "strategies" exposed.
A notable example in the book is "Bea," the manager of a big-box chain store in Maine who tried to keep a professional distance from her employees but couldn't help but notice their struggle to get by on less than $8 an hour. Dodson -- who was careful not to identify her sources by name -- wrote about Bea's distress when she learned that Edy, the daughter of one of her workers, wasn't going to her prom because her mom couldn't afford to buy her a dress.
Bea not only felt that her employee's wages were unjust but that she was implicated in the injustice. When it was time to order prom dresses for the store, mistakes were made and it all got very confusing, she told Dodson.
And Edy, by the way, "knocked them dead" at the prom.
Across the Economic Dividing Line
The nation's economy has changed drastically since late 2001 when Dodson started her research. She is a public sociologist at Boston College and formerly taught at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center at Harvard University.
"It's hard for us to remember this now, but into 2008 the public narrative was one of pro-consumerism and spending and expansion. But in the backdrop, low wages were frozen, and there was drift of wealth up," she said. "There was a lot of money being spent, but it was not being spent at the bottom and in the middle there was this kind of erosion that we didn't recognize until the bubble burst."
Dodson said she had been interviewing the working poor whose hardships were increasing because they were not taking home enough money to sustain their families. She sought additional insight from managers, teachers and small business owners who interact with low-wage workers daily in the workplace, schools and health-care institutions.
"I think of these as class intersections," she said. "I wanted their inside view of what's going on."
Dodson said she is fascinated by the line that divides people who work very hard to earn what is an "unsustainable income" from people who are also working hard but are making enough money to get by.
"I'm really interested in how people look across that line and recognize how close they are," she said. "That's what I felt I was hearing people say. 'If this is no good for my child, why is it OK for hers?' To me this is the class divide where I think there is the most potential for building alliances."
Dodson acknowledges that only a minority of the people she interviewed in her research engaged in acts of subterfuge. Some managers told her their company's low wages were justified and their employees' problems were none of their business.
"Some people don't have the moral dilemma at all," she said. "One man told me, 'If I could lower the wage, I'd do it tomorrow. I don't care if someone in their family has chronic illness; it has nothing to do with me.' "
Dodson believes that Americans should be having a national dialogue about an economy that gives free rein to businesses.
"There is no mainstream conversation about the idea that corporations have any responsibility for the damage that their policies or their wages do," she said. "That if you do business in this country and you have enormous economic gains that you have some responsibility for your impact on workers and their communities."
While the book discusses economic shifts that have given wealthy Americans a larger chunk of the pie, Dodson concentrates on the personal relationships between low- and middle-class Americans who interact with one another.
"I pay little attention to the super-rich," Dodson said. "I think the super-rich are so gated off, it's a little like Marie Antoinette. They're like monarchs. They live so differently and they're a tiny number in a democracy. But in a democracy, that number should not run things."
Acts of Kindness -- or Theft?
Dodson uses the term civil disobedience to describe the "hidden resistance" by some Americans to an economy that harms working families.
Some call it stealing.
"I've been blasted for this," Dodson acknowledges. "The fact that I present this morally complex map of what's going on -- as opposed to just calling it stealing -- just infuriates some people."
But Dodson said the reaction is usually mixed when she discusses her findings in public appearances, with some people relating personally to the stories she shares. Afterward, she will get calls from people who relate their own experiences about bending the rules -- and who thought they were alone in taking such risks.
"My goal with this book was to raise the discussion about these acts of disobedience as a way of talking about the bigger issue," she said. "I hope we will remember that there are many ordinary Americans who care about this issue of fairness and who are really concerned with the inequality. This is profoundly important to all of us. And we ought to be talking about it."
