Our Daily Bread
By Jacob Anderson, management consultant and freelance writer on public policy, culture and the Church.
“Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.” Genesis 3: 17-19.
For workers at Gail's Bakery, the curse of Eden is only half the story, as they sweat for bread which is thrown out after a few hours to maintain their strict food hygiene standards. That is only one case of the bakery behaving badly; a recent piece of investigative journalism from Vittles, a Substack-based food newsletter, documents a series of militant working practices in Gail’s Bakery.
The chain’s richly laden display-counters of simple sourdough loaves are framed by a minimal typeface menu and you may even find a Wendell Berry quote on the wall, which enamoured this writer at least, because Gail’s Bakery communicates a human touch in the age of the faceless Machine, Paul Kingsnorth’s term for the force hollowing out humanity in the name of progress. [1]
Two British Israelis with resumés in hospitality and finance founded Gail’s with the vision of selling genuinely good bread, the kind you could only get in high-end restaurants. Gail’s used to pay well above minimum wage and demonstrated sincere generosity towards its workers, before rapid scaling compromised its more artisanal values. The Machine’s ultimate victory has been co-opting the romantic charm of neighbourhood bakeries, a refuge from the worst excesses of technology, and ruthlessly commercialising it.
At Gail’s it is reported that workers rise in ghost hours to chant matins of recipes they must memorise that day, before an influx of commuters absorbs them. Work is unrelenting, until the tide eases to a trickle, whereupon workers may be dismissed early with a corresponding paycut). To validate sick leave, employees have been asked to show their faces at work - in a suitably ‘not-fit-to-show-up’ state - to validate their sickness. A blend of CCTV, over-eager management and sophisticated data modelling is used to manage efficiency at each individual store, in order that outliers in the wrong direction are duly flagged. All of these are signs of the Machine’s pervasive influence, in a place which ought to have been human.
This has largely occurred since Gail’s takeover by Bain Capital, where Gail’s has followed the narrative of sweeping cuts, incremental efficiency gains and major speculative investment in new locations, deftly managed by a faceless horde of business analysts. [2]
It feels inevitable that companies which scale quickly become victims of their own success, and nowhere more so than the hospitality sector. Rapid growth is followed by cuts or a decline in overall standards and the charm is lost. If that is the case though, it is remarkable how few people are willing to question the basic assumption that businesses should expand, even at the expense of putting down deep roots and building trusted relationships over a longer period: Michael Schluter’s Relational Proximity Framework compares family businesses who hold “the company in trust for future generations” with the economic modus operandi where there is “little sense of accountability, and even less loyalty, in the minds of either shareholders or directors”. [3]
There is a way of doing bread differently. The book of Ruth introduces us to another Jewish baker, Boaz, a wealthy landowner from Bethlehem, the house of bread. He is a man who gives to charity and honours God publicly, but he does not simply pay lip service to the LORD. By his deeds he is known, first amongst his workers and then in the way he treats Moabite outsider Ruth, who comes to gather the crumbs from the table of his plentiful fields. Boaz is a powerful man who chooses to notice one lowly individual.
His generosity is unwarranted - he is following the principle of Israelite charity in leaving the edges of his field unharvested for the sake of the poor (see Leviticus 19:9-10), and Ruth is simply another poor gatherer. Yet he delights in showing kindness to her, first by letting her gather more than is her due, then by welcoming her to eat at his table. He encourages her to take excess harvest back to mother-in-law, Naomi, then guarantees a place in his fields for the harvest season.
Without formal employment law and only a scant safety net for the poor, Boaz demonstrates how to use wealth for the sake of others. Evidently, this is not an economic model for London bakeries, but it can be a model for the tightness of our grip over finances and business dealings. Boaz operates on a different logic, where abundance is assumed; not because he lives through an economic boom or subscribes to a certain theory of resource allocation, but because he trusts in an abundant Lord, who exhibits abundant mercies to the children of earth. Where kingdom logic encounters business realities, the Church should think with a different economy to the world.
If we are cynical enough to believe that employers cannot be generous by definition, or that the purpose of a business is to make money and all else is a bonus, we have taken several steps down a path that does not honour our created humanity. If we as followers of Christ want to saturate ourselves in the wisdom of Scripture, there is scant Hayekian business ethics but a great emphasis on honouring the downtrodden.
The logic of capitalist profit-making is not as inevitable as some would believe. There can be such a thing as multiple bottom lines in business; of businesses which both make a profit and act for the good of employers and the wider community. It is precisely because Gail’s used to practise this that its current trajectory is depressing. If more of its decision-makers read the farmer and poet they quote in their cafes, Berry excoriates the logic which drives private equity firms like Bain Capital:
“The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health… The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.” [4]
I don’t want to be lazy and use Boaz’s Bethlehem to critique Gail’s current employment model, not least because Gail’s is unexceptional – it is one more company taking advantage of a skewed incentives structure. It is better when employers are not compelled by law to treat workers fairly, but until we remember how to cultivate virtue and practise it on an institutional level, law is the blunt instrument with which we are left.
Labour’s planned Employment Rights Bill addresses some of the loopholes in employment contracts, of which Gail’s and many other employers take full advantage. The suite of proposed policies includes better sick-pay provision and redundancy rights, a clampdown on zero-hour contracts, clarity over shift scheduling, and strengthened trade unions. It is a raft of protective measures in an economy skewed towards the flexibility of the gig economy and the influx of low-paid immigrant workers.
It risks stifling growth, through further regulations for businesses in an already near-stagnant economy, but the ambition is welcome.
However, there are more intractable problems in the modern economy, which the Employment Rights Bill will struggle to address. Most fundamental is a question of vision, of choosing nurture over exploitation and discerning how we live within our means while mitigating the risks of economic stagnation or degrowth. We are not helpless captives to the logic of efficiency gains. This vision will require a Biblical imagination, becoming Boaz’s who display deep generosity with the resources we have, but we need to ask a very different question to the one which we seem preoccupied with, namely: is it efficient? And then on what timescale, or to what end, is our efficiency directed?
In pursuing efficiency, humanity has created a peculiarly meaningless type of work in the 21st century. Labour’s bill affirms the dignity of work, but the reality is that jobs in contemporary society are often dull while we lack many of the wider social goods which made life meaningful historically. Until we reclaim a richer, more human notion of work, while acknowledging that our purpose is not only found in work, we will continue to trade human dignity for efficiency.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Jubilee Centre or its trustees.
[1] https://unherd.com/2025/09/paul-kingsnorth-how-to-fight-the-machine/
[3] Transforming Capitalism from within, Michael Schluter and Jonathan Rushworth, https://www.relationshipsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Transforming_Capitalism_Report.pdf, p.24
[4] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, https://kyl.neocities.org/books/[SOC%20BER]%20the%20unsettling%20of%20america.pdf, p.9.
