Rest is Not a Privilege

“And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.”

- Genesis

I’m not a religious scholar. Nor am I studied in that ancient language in which the text above was originally composed. But I’d be willing to go out on a limb with a conjecture that the sanctity of work is implied here. It’s an understood proposition: God worked, therefore work is sacred. It’s an axiom that no one would have questioned. Work is responsible not only for the food on the table, but the table, and the chairs, and the house, not to mention the art on the walls. How could it not be sacred?

But the sanctity of rest? That had to be stated formally. And not only stated formally, but argued. It is [x] because [y]. This was a revelation, and a radical one, I suspect. A burgeoning civilization could not afford to dispense with work. But perhaps it could afford to dispense with rest. It’s always been tempting, hasn’t it? Like the teacher who constantly reminds the children of the ace up her sleeve: “Recess is a privilege,” she tells them. “It can be taken away.” But here, in what has become a foundational text for many societies, we have the principal warning the teachers: “Don’t you dare.”

To say that something is sacred is a warning: “Violate this at your peril.”

I worked service industry jobs for most of my career, up until very recently. My most formative professional experience came through 5 1/2 years with a behemoth, global corporation that fancies itself “a company with a soul.” At Starbucks, I followed a shift supervisor to assistant store manager to store manager track. It was there that I cultivated a passion for the craft of the barista, for excellence in work, and for a people-first culture in business. But not for rest. My Starbucks career was emblematic of a dilemma I have often confronted: the choice between less demanding work, with wages that ensure you live paycheck to paycheck, or higher, more secure wages that ensure you work as much as your employer needs. Salaried means “overtime-exempt,” which is a euphemism for, “you get paid the same every paycheck, whether you worked 40 hours or 80.” And precisely because the employer does not owe you any additional wages for overtime worked, “overtime-exempt” also translates to “your time belongs to us.” The dilemma is a choice of what you’d rather lack: money or time.

Except with respect to the pay, I loved being a shift supervisor for Starbucks. It was mostly working with coffee and people, with a sprinkling of business management. So I thought that by moving up into management, it would shift heavier into the business management side of course, but I’d still be engaged with the coffee and people aspects that I loved. To be fair, I understood that the time commitments would be heavy, especially in the first year or two while I was getting my footing. I guess what I did not anticipate is how much my whole being would rebel against the ruthless and always-shifting demands of the company and my bosses. In other words, it wasn’t just the amount of hours I was logging, but the discrepancy between where I wanted to invest time vs. where I was forced to.

At the time (the summer of 2016), Starbucks was experiencing a stock crisis. They, as much as any corporation, view the cost of payroll as a controllable expense, or in investor terminology, a “headwind.” If stocks are on a downward trend, cutting labor costs are how they press the panic button. One of the things that is so complex that it will probably always elude understanding among the general public is how meticulously a company like Starbucks fine-tunes the controls of their labor costs. Software tells each store how many payroll hours — measured all the way down to fifteen-minute increments — it is allotted for each day, week, month, and quarter. And each store manager is expected to meet those targets.

From the perspective of expenses, this makes perfect sense. But from the perspective of a store manager, these numbers are not just expenses but people. Your team. The people you’ve been trained to think of as the most important part of the company, as “family” even. Ask anyone who’s ever worked there; Starbucks is big on this kind of stuff. It’s every bit as much about culture as it is about coffee. The employees are called “partners.” The mission statement is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit.” Stated values include “connecting with transparency, dignity, and respect.” For a “partner” who truly latches on to the culture, it can be extraordinarily motivating. It’s all calculated to make you feel like you’re more than an employee.

But you are not more than an employee. What would that even mean? When executives decide to tighten payroll, and that decision translates to the store manager having to tell a barista who’s used to working 35 hours a week that they’ll only be scheduled for 20 next week, what does being “more than an employee” mean to anyone in that transaction?

I’ve been there. At a barista pay grade, that’s a difference between being able to pay the bare, essential bills or not. During one of the worst days of that summer, I vividly remember a phone call with my boss. I remember arguing that our store’s business was good, and that we needed the staffing, and that I couldn’t possibly cut hours any more than I already had. Her response was that I should be filling in staffing gaps where needed. With myself. As though I could clone myself, she wanted me to take hours away from baristas, and fill them in with my own (overtime, thus unpaid) labor. In that moment, I was less than an employee. I was free labor wherever they needed it. Treating me as just an employee would have been an improvement.

I didn’t stay in management very long. By the time I began looking for a new job, I had resolved that I preferred the lack of money over the demands of that sort of work. I had a very enjoyable stint heading up the wine department at a Cost Plus World Market outlet, until the effects of the pandemic on the economy led them to eliminate my position. Then a temporary job with the state, as part of a voter hotline created for the 2020 election, led to a permanent position with the same agency. This seems like a great fit for me right now. The pay is significantly less than what I made as a manager with Starbucks, but significantly more than I made as a shift supervisor or a wine department head. It’s salaried, but not overtime-exempt. No one expects me to be “more than an employee,” and I think there’s a lot to be said for that. There’s a large break room with a kitchen. I love that. Starbucks didn’t have break rooms.

Our building is in a plaza that has a couple of ponds in the middle of it. There are muscovy ducks that live there, and I’ve been feeding them and observing them everyday during my lunch breaks. It started by befriending one of them who was a bit of a loner, whom I named Floaty McFloatface. He would approach the bench I sat on during those cool days in October and November, and beg in his own gentle way. It was as though he was saying, “Hey, I see you have some food there. If you don’t feel like eating it all, I’ll just be right over here, okay?” He got bolder as I started giving him some scraps here and there. Eventually he took to flying up onto the back of the bench, peering right over my shoulder for a better view of my lunch. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about him, including the fact that he is quite the philanderer. He has sired ducklings twice now this year with one particularly fertile female.

I’ve done some research on muscovies to learn more about them. I was amused when I read one rather hostile invective that claimed that they were an invasive species. Maybe they are, but the animosity this one person had for them seemed personal, and she even referred to them as lazy. That was the part that amused me. I can perhaps see why she said it. Any time they are not hunting, mating, or fighting, they love to just lounge in the shade of a tree or bush. But I wonder what else she expected them to be doing with their down time? Working out? Cleaning up the pond? Stockpiling food for the winter? We can’t even let ducks off the hook, can we?

If you will excuse one more abrupt change of topic, I need to mention that I love to read, and that I’m currently reading a book on the political history of Victorian England. I was intrigued to learn that the first worker’s movement in the UK, the Chartist movement, was not about labor but about enfranchisement and representation in Parliament. The Chartists were largely unsuccessful in their day. The changes that they advocated for were instituted in England eventually, but it was decades after their organized activity had ceased. When their desired reforms failed to pass in Parliament, there is one word that the author of this book uses repeatedly that kept jumping out at me: unrest. The ideal of domestic life is rest. We call it unrest, fittingly, when domestic discontent spills over into the public square. When people do not feel represented, rest cannot be held sacred. That’s true in contexts of civics, employment, domestic life, and everything else I suppose.

We know that work is not dispensable, so we assume that rest is. I hear it all the time. In my current job working for the state, even the official policy documents take the time to remind you, saying, “We have to give you a lunch, but your two 15-minute breaks are a privilege.” (This is my paraphrase, but the word ‘privilege’ is used, much like the aforementioned elementary school teacher reminding her kids about recess.) To say it is a privilege is to say it isn’t sacred. The profaning of rest has permeated our consciousness. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” we say. We even corrupted an old biblical proverb to shape it more to our values. Originally, it was “no rest for the wicked.” More recently, we have corrupted it to “no rest for the weary.” In our view, it’s the weary who get no rest. In that case, rest doesn’t even exist then. Only the weary can possibly rest, but for some reason we’ve decided to deny it to them in our common idiom.

I often wonder to myself how we got here. As a Christian, I struggle to reconcile some internal conflict. Historically, the “Protestant work ethic” gets much of the credit for being an essential metal in the ore from which our nation was forged. And there is much in the Scriptures in praise of work, as well as some stark warnings against laziness. Take this one for example:

“A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest —
and poverty will come on you like a thief
and scarcity like an armed man.”

Proverbs 6:10–11

That indeed is some heavy adulation of work ethic. But no amount of such adulation should supersede the elemental and foundational principle established from the very start of creation: the sanctity of the Sabbath. Texts like the one quoted above apply to the “six days you shall work,” but they do not negate the “on the 7th day you shall rest.” In fact, the day of rest serves as a motivating factor for working enough during the other six to complete all that is necessary for the week. However, we face an uphill battle. The dials of our economy are fine-tuned to facilitate unfettered growth. Growth is good and necessary; unfettered growth can be carcinogenic to spiritual health. Unfettered growth is not sanctioned in Scripture; it is even condemned via the story of the Tower of Babel. Success and achievement must be checked by moral wisdom.

Under our cultural ethos of unfettered growth, it’s the most relentlessly ambitious whom we hoist up to positions of power. They, in turn, make the terrible (and terribly common) mistake of expecting the people under them to share their work ethic. How many bosses every week tell an employee (as my Starbucks boss once said to me), “If I’m working this many hours, so can you”? They thus cope with their stress by passing it on to their employees. In the world of labor, profaning rest is the original sin.

When I worked for World Market, I always tried to find a space I could be during breaks, a place to hide, where my status as “not working” would be held inviolable. Try as I might, it never happened. The beverage department was a one-man job, so if a customer had a question about wine, it was just so much easier for my co-workers to come find me and ask me, rather than trying to help the customer on their own. As I hope I’ve made clear, this was not a problem with these particular co-workers. It’s a pervasive problem throughout our culture. It is ingrained in us that it is selfish or absurd or impractical to treat rest as sacred. Our phones keep us constantly connected to pretty much everything at all times, including work. We take “working lunches” because apparently our job is too important to stop for 30 minutes. We welcome (or at least tolerate) bosses and co-workers calling us at home, or employees calling bosses during vacations because they can’t solve a problem on their own. It almost seems like an expected courtesy for a boss to say, “Call me if you need me,” rather than (what I would personally prefer to say if I were a boss) “pretend I’m in a coma.”

There are two trees that I pass under everyday on my way to the ponds. Some of their branches brush up against each other and create something simulating an arched gateway, so I refer to the spot where I pass under them as The Portal. When I pass through The Portal, on my journey to Two Ponds to feed Floaty and the other muscovies, I enter hallowed grounds. I am reminded of humanity’s first vocation — to take care of the garden and the animals — as well as humanity’s first sacred blessing: rest. Sometimes I sit on a bench and read. Sometimes in the mornings, before work starts, I do stretches while the sun rises over the trees, and the ducks stand around me patiently, hoping for more food than I’ve already given them. I finally found the inviolable space I couldn’t find in my previous jobs — a space adjacent to where I work, but seemingly a world apart. I hope I can persuade others to do whatever they need to do to find their Two Ponds.