Justice @ Work – Rationalizing

What is the biggest challenge to justice in the workplace? Is it greed? Or selfishness? Or hunger for power? Much less obvious, but insidious and almost universal is rationalization. I suffer from it – so probably do you.

Raymond Chandler says “However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.” How true! Rationalizing is a technique we use to convince ourselves that some action or outcome that we might otherwise find morally questionable is in fact OK. For example a person evades paying taxes and then rationalizes it by talking about how the government wastes money (and how it is better for people to keep what they can). Or I excuse the difference between what I earn and what our receptionist earns by any one of a number of things:

• We’re in a capitalist society in which prices (including labor) are driven by supply and demand
• The company would be impacting far more by my leaving than hers
• She’s become accustomed to living on much less than me
• And so on

I’m not sure why I started writing this, because it is really uncomfortable. There is no Biblical mandate that requires financial equity – that is that requires everyone to own or possess the same amounts. What we are given is entrusted to us by God to be used for Him anyway.

My point here is that we can find an excuse for any action whatever if we want to. So how do we catch ourselves from going down what my boss calls “the slippery slope”. I am fortunate in having a boss who is very ethical (almost to a fault in that he pushes an ethical point so far in favor of one group that it damages another group – it is often a zero-sum game). Given the extreme financial challenges we’re facing – he as owner and I as his operations executive – we have plenty of scope for going down a path that is expedient but not ethical, that skirts the law, or that benefits one party at the expense of another.

There are rarely straightforward answers. He is open to my perspective on Biblical justice (though doesn’t necessarily agree) – but that’s not always clear-cut either. What we do have is a willingness to challenge each other, pointing out the beginning of the “slippery slope” and pulling one another back. I’m very blessed. So my recommendation is that, whatever your work situation, you try to find someone with whom you can talk through business decisions, large or small, to challenge you and hold you accountable to stop rationalizing.

The other approach is always to seek to see situations through God’s eyes. This sounds impossible, but to a degree I’m convinced it is not. “Pray continually” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) means keeping our communication channels with God open in everything at all times. Combined with daily, in-depth, Bible reading and study we can truly see God’s perspective to the extent our limitations allow. And God does not rationalize!