German labor history has some tips on how the US could reduce its workweek.
The 40-hour workweek in the US will turn 84 this June, making it older than most human beings alive today. But unlike humans, who are always changing and adapting, today’s standard workweek has spent its 84 years frozen in time.
The last time federal law reduced the workweek was in 1940. An amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) dropped the threshold of hours after which workers qualify for overtime pay from 44 to 40, capping off a steady decline in average working hours that began back around 1830. And then — nothing.
Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–VT) introduced a bill that would pick the trend back up, cutting the workweek down to 32 hours over the course of four years. The bill would use the same mechanism as the FLSA: lowering the overtime pay threshold to 32 hours, which would drive employers of hourly or non-exempt salaried workers to treat 32 hours as “full-time.” To prevent wages from falling accordingly, the bill forbids employers from cutting pay to go along with the shorter hours.
For many white-collar workers shifting into a four-day, 32-hour week — say, journalists at Vox — the expectation would be that we produce roughly the same amount of work more efficiently (by cutting out pointless meetings and benefiting from less stress and burnout). For workers who can’t just cut out meetings to become more efficient, like those doing physical labor, the bill would essentially grant them a 20 percent raise since they’d be doing eight hours of work less for the same pay.
During a hearing by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (which Sanders chairs), Sanders and Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, pointed out that since 1940, worker productivity has risen more than 400 percent, all while the standard workweek hasn’t budged. They argue that’s because the decline of workers’ bargaining power has left the gains in productivity to benefit the wealthy, not workers. Despite widespread support among employees and even some growing interest among employers, the bill will almost certainly not reach the Senate floor for a vote, let alone clear the Republican-led House and wind up on President Biden’s desk.
Critics like Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–LA) argue that while a 32-hour week sounds nice on the surface, it would wind up hurting workers it’s meant to benefit by incentivizing employers to raise prices, automate jobs, or send them overseas, rather than dishing out 20 percent raises.
One of the biggest obstacles to making progress on shorter workweeks is that federal legislation can be a blunt tool, and a top-down approach could fail to allow for the fine-tuning that would make it fit across different industries and worker preferences. Roger King, a labor relations attorney, commented during the committee hearing that suggests a way forward on delivering shorter weeks to workers who want them: “If Mr. Fain’s union can negotiate with the auto companies in this country to do a 32-hour workweek, so be it,” said King.
Conservatives and progressives alike can agree that labor and industry representatives should be free to bargain with each other. That’s how some of the biggest changes to the economy have come in the past: Collective bargaining agreements between unions and bosses secured and adapted changes like the eight-hour day to their particular industries, hashing out best practices on the ground and paving the way for federal legislation to spread them across the rest of the economy. Bills like Sanders’s can help ignite conversation and set agendas, but actual progress on achieving a shorter workweek is more likely to come from below.
To secure such a major change to economic life, American workers will need more bargaining power than they have today. While union activity seems to be coming back after being dismantled over decades, and wages are rising fastest for workers who make the least, we’re still far from the kind of power needed to pick up the old thread of reducing the workweek.
History, though, offers an excellent example of how workers, once sufficiently empowered, can drive changes of that magnitude. Consider the rise of codetermination — a practice now common throughout Western Europe where workers have a voice in business decisions by holding voting seats on corporate boards — across Germany in the 20th century.
Codetermination was once seen as a major change that would chart a path toward a “new economy,” but it didn’t arise via federal law. At least, not at first. It took decades of unionized workers building enough leverage to negotiate for smaller codetermination arrangements in their own industries, from coal miners to electrical engineers, all before there was enough consensus to pass federal legislation that extended codetermination rights across the German economy.
“Federal legislation that sets minimum standards and collective bargaining are complementary,” said Ewan McGaughey, a professor of law and economic history at King’s College in London. “You don’t want one without the other.”
If shorter working weeks are going to return as a real possibility in the 21st century, the US will first need more than a couple advocates in the Senate, and the country will need a labor movement powerful enough to bargain for them.
How collective bargaining paved the way for national codetermination in Germany
Codetermination in Germany began, believe it or not, with a benevolent boss.
The basic idea behind codetermination is that employers should not have total control over the business — workers should have a voice in company decisions, too. As McGaughey explains in his 2015 paper on The Codetermination Bargains, the sentiment first arose among those sympathetic to the growing plight of workers toiling in miserable conditions stemming from the Industrial Revolution. If labor could “co-determine” the economy alongside bosses, they could help bend the arc of economic development toward their benefit, not just that of capital.
In 1848, a Saxon textile factory owner named Carl Degenkolb was elected to the newly formed Frankfurt Parliament, which arose in response to the ongoing German Revolutions expressing discontent with autocratic rule. The parliament aimed to unify the German states into a single national government based on parliamentary democracy.
Ultimately, it failed. Degenkolb, however, had come to the belief that worker participation in guiding economic activity was as important as political participation. He pitched his belief to the rest of the parliament, proposing the idea of having councils in every business district. One-third of these councils would be elected by workers, the other two-thirds by employers, and the workers could reach binding decisions about the workplace, from drafting factory ordinances (including pension scheme administration) to child care and health care.
While Degenkolb didn’t convince a majority of members, he released an unofficial draft of his ideas anyway. He convinced three fellow industrialists to implement the practices in their own factories. Historians could find no records of how the experiment played out but believe the practices remained in place until Degenkolb died in 1862.
The idea of worker participation then began to spread across Germany, garnering labor’s support — and capital’s ire. But it wasn’t until the end of World War I that the balance of bargaining power leaned far enough in workers’ favor to get federal laws passed in what had become the Weimar Republic. The costs of war and the sanctions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles decimated German business interests, leaving them uniquely vulnerable to labor demands.
In November 1918, Germany’s three largest unions met with the employers’ federations to negotiate the Stinnes-Legien Agreement, a bargain that would set the course for the post-war economy. The agreement secured all workers the freedom to associate (basically, to form bargaining organizations like unions), and guaranteed work councils in all companies with more than 50 employees. Workdays were capped at eight hours, and working conditions were regulated in each trade via collective agreements bargained by their relevant unions.
After four years of these agreements spreading across industries, the Supervisory Council Act of 1922 codified them as national law. It also went one step further, requiring that all German corporations with supervisory boards grant employee representatives up to two seats on the board, giving workers direct voting rights on company decisions.
That gave codetermination a foothold in the boardroom. At first, it was weak in practice. Worker representatives made up a minority of the board, meaning they could never win head-to-head votes against management. And businesses quickly adapted, curbing the influence of worker voice by reducing the number of decisions supervisory boards were tasked to make, having fewer meetings, and bypassing the boards altogether by having shareholders delegate tasks to sub-committees.
The aftermath of World War II opened another opportunity for bargaining power to secure stronger legislation. German businesses were decimated after the war. Their alignment with the Nazi regime had undermined their moral authority, and thus political power, in the nascent post-war order.
In response, unions pressed the advantage. In 1947, unions representing coal and steel workers struck a deal through a series of conferences with steel employers. Seats of the supervisory boards in their industries would be shared equally by workers and employers, effective immediately.
Movements for further codetermination spread across the four zones of Allied occupation in what then became West Germany, from the railways of the French-occupied zone to copper smelters in Duisburg. But as businesses began to recover from the economic ruins of the war, opposition to codetermination started to mount. Konrad Adenauer, the first elected chancellor of West Germany, responded by passing the Mining Codetermination Act of 1951, securing the coal and steel workers’ agreement as federal law.
A year later, Adenauer’s government passed the Work Constitution Act, spreading the right to one-third supervisory board representation to workers across all German industries. “The codetermination bargains forged a social consensus,” writes McGaughey. And in 1976, the commitment to codetermination was deepened by raising worker representation to one-half of the board for all companies with more than 2,000 employees. “This consensus was codified into law.”
The Goldilocks conditions for big policy change
Codetermination represented a major change to the German economy. It restructured the power dynamics that decide how the economy directs and invests its resources.
McGaughey believes it was only possible thanks to what he calls the two Goldilocks conditions: rare moments of organized labor experiencing relatively equal bargaining power to employers, and a labor movement united around a shared objective.
Imagining a similar Goldilocks-style bargaining-first approach to shorter workweeks today doesn’t require all that much of an imaginative leap, at least in theory. It’s how we got the workweek down to 40 hours in the first place here in the States.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, which gave us the 40-hour week in 1940, was itself built upon existing collective bargaining agreements that organized workers won for eight-hour days.
Whether it’s the International Typographical Union that went on strike before securing eight-hour days in 1906, or the railroad industry unions threatening a nationwide strike that won the same rights through the Adamson Act in 1916, this basic pattern was behind both codetermination’s rise in Germany and the eight-hour day in the US: First, collective bargaining paves the way, then federal legislation codifies it.
Today, while the labor movement has seen some of its first signs of a return to power in decades, union membership is still hovering around 10 percent, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting this data in 1983. The US is a long way from that first Goldilocks condition of equal bargaining power with employers, but some unions are making strides. A municipal employees union in San Juan County, Washington, secured a 32-hour week last August, joining other unions that have bargained for 32-hour weeks at companies like Kickstarter and organizations like Local Progress.
Just last month, the largest union at Boeing (representing over 32,000 factory workers in the state of Washington) announced that they’re seeking a seat on the company board — that’s codetermination — after doors and wheels have been flying off their airplanes.
To change the structure of an entire economy, though, you need more than isolated unions bargaining with individual employers.
McGaughey explained that ideally, you want mandates from federal law, states, collective bargaining agreements, and individual workplace contracts all stacked like a pyramid, each building on the last to fine-tune policy to better fit with industry contexts and worker preferences.
Federal mandates should set the basic parameters, like minimum wages or maximum workweeks, which act as the baseline of what’s considered acceptable no matter one’s industry or preferences. States can go further, like setting higher minimum wages than what comes from the federal level. “Louis Brandeis, who became a US Supreme Court Justice [he served from 1916 to 1939], talks about states being the laboratories of democracy,” said McGaughey. “There’s no reason you couldn’t have a working time act in every Democratic legislature, starting with Vermont.”
Next, collective bargaining agreements can set standards across industries. Here, the US labor movement lags far behind peer countries in Western Europe, where sectoral bargaining is common. But again, there are glimmers of progress emerging. The idea of sectoral bargaining has been gaining traction for years in the US. In 2016, a report from the Center for American Progress argued that the future of worker voice and power lies in “transforming unions from individual firm-level bargaining units into organizations or structures … that negotiate for higher wages and benefits across an entire industry or sector.”
And in September, California was home to one of the US’s first sectoral bargaining agreements in decades. Labor unions secured a deal with fast food companies to establish a $20 minimum wage across the industry. The bill also established a form of codetermination, creating a nine-member council split between representatives for workers and employers. The council will vote on minimum standards across the industry moving forward, including wages, hours, and conditions.
The question that remains is whether any of these efforts will reach the top of the pyramid and drive higher-level legislation. In addition to Sanders’s federal 32-hour bill, states like Massachusetts, Maryland, and California have 32-hour bills floating around. Both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have their own codetermination bills out, too.
But if any bills are actually going to gain ground on making shorter weeks a reality for those who want them, it’s probably going to be ones like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which could restore and protect workers’ right to organize and make it easier to form larger and larger bargaining units. Or more worker-friendly social policies like the fully refundable child tax credit, portable benefits (like health insurance and retirement accounts) that employees can transfer between employers, beefed-up unemployment insurance, or the Ghent System of running unemployment through unions (which helps to build membership).
These, in turn, would send more power back down to workers and bargaining units on the ground, feeding efforts that could send pressure upward while smoothing the way for federal legislation to codify whatever objectives empowered workers are already negotiating with industry representatives.
During the UAW union’s high-profile, strike-driven negotiation with auto manufacturers last year, a 32-hour week began as one of their demands. It was quickly shot down by automakers over the same concerns heard at Sanders’s recent hearing (instead, they won 25 percent wage increases over four and a half years). Fain’s appearance alongside Sanders indicates that more unions could be returning to the demand for shorter weeks, which served as the historical foundation for the American labor movement.
“A number of unions that represent low-wage workers are becoming interested in this,” said Vishal Reddy, executive director of the four-day-focused nonprofit, WorkFour. Now, as we’re beginning to navigate a century of adaptation to climate change, AI, shifting geopolitical landscapes, and everything else on the growing list of world-shaping forces, the question is whether workers might gain enough power to make shorter hours not just a utopian longing of the past, but a part of our future, too.
The documentary details the abuse of Nickelodeon’s child actors in the ’90s and aughts. It’s a far bigger problem.
Quiet on Set, a new docuseries from Investigation Discovery, tells the harrowing story of sexual assault and toxic behavior that took place behind the scenes on some of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows.
“I will warn you, if you were a child of the ’90s, this is going to ruin that for you,” a commenter notes grimly in the series opening.
Indeed, the documentary will make it impossible to look at many of the network’s beloved programs — from All That to Zoey 101 to The Amanda Show — in the same way.
Across four episodes, which are now available to stream on Max, the documentary details the horrific sexual assault Nickelodeon star Drake Bell endured at the hands of a crew member, and the hostile and sexist work environment that showrunner Dan Schneider oversaw. A fifth episode, which will include more interviews with former child stars, airs on April 7.
In chronicling these allegations, the docuseries makes clear how vulnerable child actors are to abuse, and how powerful Hollywood creators can normalize harassment. Currently, there is no federal law that protects child actors, so labor policies and safeguards against sexual predators are inconsistent across states. On top of that, there are also gaps in how state laws are enforced, diluting what limited impact they have.
Nickelodeon has said it “investigates all formal complaints” and has “adopted numerous safeguards over the years,” in response to the allegations in the documentary. Schneider, who was dropped by Nickelodeon in 2018 after some of these allegations initially came to light, has also expressed regret about aspects of his past behavior. “I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology,” Schneider said in an interview with BooG!e, an actor from the show iCarly. (Former child actors have critiqued Nickelodeon and Schneider’s responses as “empty” and a failure to take real responsibility for the harm caused.)
Beyond calling out the specific issues on Nickelodeon programs, the series also highlights how these problems are systemic, and how they go beyond any one show, any one director, or even any one studio.
“It shows that there are not enough protections in place to keep even convicted sexual predators off of kids’ TV shows,” Kate Taylor, a Business Insider reporter whose investigation of the network inspired the documentary, says in one clip.
The allegations detailed in the docuseries, explained
The allegations described in Quiet on Set include harrowing instances of sexual misconduct, pervasive harassment, and troubling plotlines that sexualize children:
Sexual assault
On repeated occasions, sexual predators at Nickelodeon capitalized on their roles to abuse kids.
- Brian Peck: Peck, a dialogue coach on shows including The Amanda Show and All That, was convicted of sexually abusing a minor in 2004. At the time, the child’s identity was kept private and records were sealed. In this documentary, Nickelodeon actor Drake Bell speaks publicly about the assault, and his experience enduring it, for the first time.
Peck was charged with 11 counts of abuse, and convicted of engaging in a lewd act with a minor and of oral copulation with a minor. Following this conviction, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison and forced to register as a sex offender.
Bell, who was roughly 15 at the time of the abuse, describes the trauma of Peck’s actions, and how he used his position on set to embed himself in Bell’s life. Because Peck lived closer to the set than Bell’s mother, he’d often drive the actor to work and let him crash at his place. Bell says the first instance of assault occurred when he was sleeping on Peck’s couch and woke up to being violated. “The abuse was extensive and it got pretty brutal,” Bell said in the documentary, noting that he was afraid to speak out due to Peck’s position and fears of endangering his own job.
After Bell told his mother about the assaults, Peck eventually confessed to his actions, which led to his arrest. A number of powerful figures in Hollywood including actors James Marsden and Alan Thicke, as well as Nickelodeon directors Beth and Rich Correll, wrote character letters in support of Peck. (The Corrells have since apologized.) Many of these letters vouched for Peck, and some suggested that Bell acted as a temptation to him. In another shocking turn, Peck was hired to do voiceover work on the Disney show The Suite Life of Zack and Cody after he got out of prison and was already a convicted sex offender.
- Jason Handy: Handy, a production assistant on shows like All That and The Amanda Show pleaded “no contest” to lewd acts on a child and the distribution of sexually explicit material in 2004, both counts tied to his actions toward girls on Nickelodeon shows. Handy served six years in prison, registered as a convicted sex offender, and was charged again with new offenses a few years after his release.
In the documentary, a mother named MJ describes how Handy sent a photo of himself masturbating to her 11-year-old daughter Brandi, whom he met on a Nickelodeon set. Handy also assaulted another girl he met at Nickelodeon who was acting on the show Cousin Skeeter.
In a raid of Handy’s home, law enforcement found hundreds of sexually explicit photos of young girls, as well as ziplock bags with different girls’ names on them that included individual mementos. In his journal, Handy also described himself as a “pedophile” and said he had difficulty controlling his urges around kids.
- Ezel Channel: Channel, a freelance animator at Nickelodeon, was accused of bringing multiple teenage boys to his workplace, molesting them, and showing them pornography. He was convicted of lewd acts on a minor and of showing a minor pornography in 2009 and had already been a convicted sex offender when he began work at Nickelodeon, a sign of how little scrutiny there was on people’s records.
A hostile work environment
Schneider, a producer on multiple Nickelodeon juggernauts, including All That, The Amanda Show, Drake and Josh, Sam & Cat, and iCarly, is also accused of creating a hostile work environment that was rampant with sexual harassment and racism.
- Sexism: Multiple women who worked on these shows, including two writers and a costumer, described a pattern of sexist behavior on set.
Schneider would regularly demand that women give him massages and show pornography to the staff, they said. Two of the early women writers hired for The Amanda Show — Christy Stratton and Jenny Kilgen — also said they were asked to split a salary, and that they were the subject of inappropriate jokes and scenarios in a predominantly male writer’s room. In one instance, one of the writers was asked if she had ever done phone sex for work, and in another, a writer was asked to pitch an idea while acting like she was being sodomized.
Schneider has denied underpaying women writers and apologized for his inappropriate comments to writers. “It was wrong that I put anybody in that position,” he said, regarding the massages he requested.
The documentary also scrutinizes how close Schneider was to young girls on set, including his frequent massaging of child actors, and the revealing wardrobe he often had them wear for shows. Jennette McCurdy, a former child actor on the Nickelodeon shows iCarly and Sam & Cat, previously wrote about an anonymous showrunner, nicknamed The Creator, who is thought to be Schneider, engaging in similar acts.
- Racism: Two Black actors noted that they were tokenized on the shows that they were on and subject to plotlines that relied on racial profiling. Actor Bryan Hearne also expressed concerns about retaliation because his mom spoke up against the racism he experienced.
- Abuse and berating: A number of people interviewed in the documentary note that Schneider could be unpredictable and temperamental, including berating and undermining people for their work. Following a Nickelodeon investigation, which did not find evidence of sexual misconduct, but did find proof of abusive behavior, Schneider was dropped by the network in 2018.
Inappropriate, sexualized plot points
Another chief issue in the documentary is how Schneider repeatedly sexualized kids, putting them in scenarios and making them do jokes that were completely inappropriate.
Some of the examples it highlights include a scene in Zoey 101 when a tube of goo squirts all over Jamie Lynn Spears’s face. “We heard the boys saying, ‘It’s a cum shot,’” says Alexa Nikolas, a fellow actor on the show. Other disturbing scenes include ones in Victorious that show Ariana Grande massaging a potato, sucking on her toes, and pouring water all over herself. Jokes that involved a girl asking another if she wanted to get hit in the face with a sausage and frequent zoom-ins on kids’ feet were troubling, too.
In addition to putting child actors in uncomfortable situations, these scenes also exposed millions of kids who watched them to sexual scenarios and innuendos in a problematic way. “This is a show for kids, so who is sexual innuendo for on a kids show?” asked Scaachi Koul, a former BuzzFeed News culture writer and consultant for the docuseries.
Schneider has said that executives at the company broadly approved these scenes and that he’d be open to removing offensive ones from streaming versions.
The documentary stresses how vulnerable child actors are — and how they need more protections
Notably, Quiet on Set raises issues that have plagued the industry for some time.
While Nickelodeon is its focal point, the problems it describes are far from limited to one network. “I know a lot of kids that grew up in the industry,” Evan Rachel Wood, a former child actor, says in a 2020 documentary called Showbiz Kids. “And what surprised me when I got older was finding out that pretty much all of the young men were abused in some way sexually.”
Child actors are omitted from federal laws overseeing issues like hours and overtime because acting was not viewed as “oppressive child labor” when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, HuffPost reported.
As a result, any labor protections for child actors are left up to the states, 17 of which have opted not to implement any at all.
Even when states do have laws, however, they continue to struggle with proper enforcement.
Take California: Overall, the state’s laws on child actors are seen as some of the strongest in the country, and they include limits on the hours a kid can work each day, the need to obtain a permit to become a child actor, and mandatory meals and rest breaks. These policies also require a parent to be on set, and within sightline of a child under 16. And they set aside mandatory time each day for schooling, and call on the on-set teacher to serve as another guardian for a child’s well-being and safety.
Two other California laws are also dedicated to protecting children’s earnings, and screening people who work with child actors. The latter, AB 1660, requires certain professionals who work with children to pass an FBI background check and obtain a permit.
These laws have limited utility if not properly enforced, however. “Whatever laws you have, they have to be enforced, and whoever has to enforce them has to have the resources to do it,” New York University adjunct law professor Day Krolik, who previously worked in the entertainment industry, told Vox. Such enforcement could come from state Labor Departments and take the form of financial penalties or other ramifications if a network violates these laws.
As Deadline found in a 2018 investigation, for example, AB 1660 was rarely enforced, meaning there were few, if any, consequences if a professional it applied to hadn’t gotten a background check.
Many former child actors and parents are now calling for new laws that fill in current gaps and bolster protections for kids.
Krolik notes that a federal law standardizing labor policy could help address inconsistencies across states and guarantee these protections no matter where a child works. Advocates have called, too, for laws that bar the use of nondisclosure agreements in instances of sexual misconduct or harassment. And Alyson Stoner, a former Disney Channel star, is among those who have emphasized the importance of a law requiring a mental health professional to be present on set, so children have someone to talk to if they’re struggling.
With kids increasingly being used to help parents generate income in social media content and YouTube videos, advocates note that existing laws should also be expanded to include and shield these young creators as well.
As Quiet on Set makes evident, stricter policies and follow-through are vital to ensure that the issues it documents don’t continue.
A spiritual atheist’s journey to helping death row inmates.
When you hear the word “chaplain,” you probably think of a priest or an Imam or some other kind of traditional clergyperson — that’s what springs to my mind in any case. Which is why I was surprised when I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times magazine from earlier this year about an “atheist chaplain” working on death row in an Oklahoma prison.
The piece is about a convicted killer, Phillip Hancock, who didn’t believe in God but wanted a spiritual adviser with him as he approached his execution. The chaplain is a man named Devin Moss, who spent a year in daily conversation with Hancock and eventually traveled from Brooklyn to Oklahoma to be with him in his final hours.
The whole notion of an atheist chaplain is interesting, of course, but even more interesting are the deeper questions here about what spiritual care looks like without religion and what it means to confront our death without God or a belief in the afterlife.
I wouldn’t call myself a religious person, but I do take the spiritual life seriously and, whether you’re a believer or a non-believer, it seems important to understand what religion offers to people and what it would mean to offer something similar in a secular context.
Which is why I invited Moss onto The Gray Area to talk about what being a humanist chaplain (he prefers that term over “atheist”) means to him and what his experience on death row taught him about religion and the universal struggle to face death with dignity.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
Sean Illing
You did your residency as a chaplain at Bellevue Hospital in New York City during the pandemic. What was that like?
Devin Moss
It was intense and full of people in acute moments of crisis, at that hospital in particular. But I cannot imagine a better place to learn what it means to be spiritual. Because I came into this incredibly insecure about spirituality in general and what kind of spiritual care I can provide to people when I’m a non-theist. How can I do this without God? It was scary as hell and it was profound as hell at the same time.
Sean Illing
Were you a different person coming out of that?
Devin Moss
Absolutely. And even on a daily basis, my shift hours were from 2 to 8 or 9, and around 1 I’d be like, Ugh, I can’t believe I got to go back and do this today, but when I’d leave at night, I’d be like, Wow, I could never have imagined that would happen today, I learned so much! I felt like a different person leaving at night than when I got there in the morning and that was a repetitive cycle over and over again.
Sean Illing
We’re talking because I happened upon this article about your experience on death row. I guess I’m curious how you found yourself there in the first place. How does a humanist chaplain from Brooklyn end up on death row in Oklahoma?
Devin Moss
Soon after I finished my residency at Bellevue, the American Humanist Association sent me an email saying that there are some attorneys that represent this man on death row named Phillip Hancock in Oklahoma, and he’s looking for a non-theist chaplain and they wanted to know if I was interested. I said I was absolutely interested. And on reflection, to be candid, I felt called to do that from a spiritual care perspective, but I also was very much intrigued by the story.
So I wrote Phil a letter, introduced myself, left my phone number in it and said, If you find that I am the right person to represent you or be by your side in such a important time, I would love to do so, and then we talked and hit it off and started a journey of almost a year.
Sean Illing
Did you have strong feelings about the death penalty before you went to Oklahoma? Did the experience change your views one way or the other?
Devin Moss
I did not have strong opinions. I’d describe my views going in this way: If there was a chance for anybody innocent to be executed, then I’m not for it.
And yet, knowing that there are monsters among us, I still had this hypothetical scenario in my head, and it’s the one that everybody who’s pro-capital punishment will use: If it was your daughter (and it’s always the daughter, no one says if it were your son), and she was murdered and raped, that should be the litmus test of how we think of capital punishment. That’s the argument that the state legislators in Oklahoma use and I don’t know where I got it, but that was also in my head prior to working with Phil. And in the case of such a heinous violent crime, then yeah, I would be okay with capital punishment. That’s how I came into it.
Those are real feelings. If a parent had to go through that horrible, horrible scenario, they have every right to feel that. And I’m not advocating that anybody can’t feel those very strong and real emotions but what I didn’t realize until I was actually in the soup is that there are a lot of externalities. The ripples of who it affects, they’re significant.
The legislators make the laws, the judicial branch of the state does the sentencing, but guess who does the executions? None of them are doing the executions, none of the family of the victims are doing the executions, it is everyday people. It’s people like me, it is the corrections officers in the small towns where this is more than likely the only employment opportunity they have and we are the ones that are doing this.
I spoke with a man named Adam Luck, who was the former chair of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board before the execution, and he said, Everybody that has a hand in doing the execution itself, part of them dies in some way. Although that sounds like a dramatic statement, it’s absolutely 100 percent true. The warden isn’t for it, the corrections officers aren’t for it, and so with all of the externalities and all the pain, it creates a karmic ripple that is multigenerational.
Sean Illing
The last words Phillip heard were yours — what did you say?
Devin Moss
The whole thing was surreal. The whole day was surreal. Even that morning, the morning of the execution, the governor still hadn’t made a decision whether to grant clemency. The execution was scheduled for 10 am, so it was postponed an hour and a half and Phil is strapped to the gurney for an extra hour-plus, which is horrible to think about. And the night before, they messed up his last meal, I can’t even express to this day how angry that makes me and I can imagine what it does to the spirit of someone that just cannot get any demonstration of humanity on any level.
Normally, the spiritual care adviser generally gets 30 to 45 minutes with the person that’s going to be executed, but because the governor had delayed, the press corps had already made it through security, and I was just trying to maintain my poise and not get frazzled. And we went through this maze where the head chaplain then left me in this sally port and the corrections officers escorted me up to the front door of the execution chamber.
It was there that the masked corrections officer who would be in the room with us greeted me because the corrections officers that are in the room need to be anonymous. And then I could see in his face that he was nervous and that he was scared and that he was also affected by this moment. It was in that moment that I realized that part of my role is just to bring as much calmness and peace into that space as I possibly could.
Earlier that morning, I had written an invocation, a prayer of sorts, that I knew needed to be said and I did it immediately because I wanted to claim that space for Phil so that we could make it sacred and not let any time go by without making sure that he felt that this was his time.
Sean Illing
Do you remember the prayer that you wrote?
Devin Moss
When I originally wrote it, I wrote something about “I call into the space the spirit of the divine” and then I crossed that out and instead I just wrote “I call into the space the spirit of our humanity” because it was very clear to me that this was a human problem and not a theological issue. And I had the answer to the Philippians riddle, Show me something real, tell me something true. I seeded that within the prayer, I wanted him to know that he was loved and that I was a conduit to that love and that he was not alone. And then I also invoked the spirit of grace, of strength, of surrender, and, interestingly, I ended it with an amen just because it felt right.
I also understood too that there were other people in that room, besides Phil and I, that I think needed to hear these words and so I claimed that space for him. And then I followed it up with telling him how our relationship affected me and what it meant to me and that he is a loved human. He died well, with grace. I made sure that he knew that he was loved and he was not alone. And so, in this weird moment of an execution, which is weird to say, there was peace.
Sean Illing
Part of what interests me about your story is this question about whether we need religion, or something like religion. The fact that you felt called to do this work speaks to this. Do you feel like there’s a God-shaped hole in the modern world that needs to be filled by something even if that’s something isn’t supernaturalism or religion in a conventional sense?
Devin Moss
I do believe that. I do believe that there is a God-shaped hole in all of us and I do not feel that it needs to be filled with dogma. The question that I get asked a lot in this regard is, “How do you prepare someone who’s dying, who doesn’t believe that there’s something next?” The answer is in the reframing of the question.
If there is something next and if that’s what you believe, fine. And if we’re wrong, then great. But what’s more important is everything that you’re doing before that moment — that’s the most important, not after. What happens after is after, but it’s the transition that’s important and how you get there and all these micro-steps tracking back throughout your life.
So do we need spirituality as individuals? Yes, I think so. And I would also say, as a culture, whether it’s a collective consciousness or a resonance that connects us to each other and connects us out to something bigger, there’s something real there and we need to make sure those points are connected.
Sean Illing
I’ve really come to be annoyed with a certain kind of atheist that can only approach religion as a set of epistemological claims, as though scanning the Bible for bogus claims about biology or history will amount to some death blow for religion. And I understand where that comes from. This has always been tricky for me because I do think religion has done immense damage in the world. I think it has caused a lot of needless suffering in the world. I think it still causes a lot of needless suffering in the world.
There are people in this country who want to create a theocracy here, who want to chain women to their reproductive cycles because of their religious beliefs, and those people are enemies of liberal democracy in my opinion. It’s important to say all of that. But it’s also important to recognize that religion, at its best, is a near-universal expression of this human need for connection and ritual and meaning and it’s a mistake to not grapple seriously with the implications of that, especially if you’re a non-believer.
Devin Moss
I see spirituality and theology as two completely different animals. I see religion as an expression of the spiritualities. Because the way it works now is that spirituality is an expression of religion, but I say flip it. I’m a huge proponent of rites of passage rituals, I’m a huge proponent of even making rituals throughout your day and you can develop them for yourself, you can be as syncretic as you need to be just to make sure that it is bringing intention throughout your day.
The expression of spirituality can be your lived religion and we can see what that looks like. Even if it’s Sunday mornings, we’re going to sweep up the sidewalks in Brooklyn and have coffee and cake, that’s an important spiritual expression and can be considered religion without the pomp and the history and all of those things.
Sean Illing
A humanist chaplain may not be able to offer the solace that comes with belief in the afterlife, but what kind of solace can you offer someone as they approach the end?
Devin Moss
Death is hard for everybody and it’s hard because we avoid it personally and we most definitely avoid it as a culture. How a culture dies is a direct reflection of how they live and we do not die well in modern America. I would probably take out the border between faith and non-faith when it comes to how to die well and I would just say that dying well requires work that is to be done while you’re still very much alive, whether you have faith in a supernatural power or not.
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