Honesty, wages and the second mile: how members apply Christ's message at work

In the late 1960s Larry Miller ran the parts department at Main Motors, a Salt Lake dealer in snowmobiles, motorcycles and trucks. Wikipedia's account of his early career, drawn from his memoir, has the terms: $650 a month plus a bonus equal to 10 percent of the department's profit. He turned the department around, came across a financial statement proving it was profitable, and the owner refused to pay. Miller quit. He moved to Colorado, was promised things again at Burt Chevrolet-Toyota, and left there too after a compensation dispute in 1970. The lesson he drew was commercial rather than pious: treating workers well could be a competitive advantage. When he bought Toyota of Murray in 1979, the sellers stripped the inventory by selling cars at cost to friends before closing. Miller had expected it and had new stock waiting off site. The dealership sold 172 cars in its first month against a previous average of 30.

That is the shape of most stories in this essay. A member of the Church gets cheated, or is tempted to cheat, and the teaching he was raised on turns out to be a business rule. The teaching is worth reading in its own words before we look at the executives, because the executives quote it back.

The Church's Gospel Topics entry on honesty is one sentence long where it matters: "To be honest means to be sincere, truthful, and without deceit at all times." The rest of the teaching sits in general conference talks, which are dated, transcribed and searchable, so you can check them. Four are useful for anyone who employs people, and one scripture sits underneath all of them.

Stapley's talk is the bluntest of the set. He asked members who run companies whether they are honest with their employees and whether the rules apply to everyone or only to some. He asked employees whether they give an honest day's work or fudge the lunch hour. And he asked anyone in business whether they "pad the bill" on the theory that nobody will ever know. Clarke, speaking eleven years later as a counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, quoted an old pioneer motto, "A Full Day's Work for a Full Day's Pay," and put the obligation on both sides of the wage. The employer owes the hire. The employee owes the day. Faust, in the priesthood session of October 1996, went further and tied it to standing in the Church: "Any moral dishonesty is inconsistent with exercising the priesthood of God."

Paying people is the part of the teaching that leaves a paper trail, and the Marriott family left the longest one. J. Willard Marriott opened a nine-stool root beer stand in Washington on May 20, 1927, and by his death in 1985 the company had 154,600 employees and $4.5 billion in annual revenue. The stories that survive about him are split evenly between his temper and his attention to hourly workers. He inspected kitchens at a half-run, checked cutlery drawers for dust and vowed to visit every property at least four times a year. His son Bill, quoted on the founder's Wikipedia page, described the other half: "When they were sick, he went to see them. When they were in trouble, he got them out of trouble." The founder's own line, from a videotaped segment, is the one the company still prints: "You've got to make your employees happy. If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy." Under Bill Marriott the sentiment got infrastructure. A 1997 Deseret News profile described an associate resource line, an 800 number staffed in 15 languages, that handled childcare, elder care, spousal abuse and substance abuse, and the company reported lower turnover and absenteeism as the return on it. The Salt Lake Tribune's 2013 profile, written around his book Without Reservations, recorded that during a 1980s round of layoffs affecting 1,000 workers the company paid for resume help and placement, and that 90 percent found new jobs. The company's current core values page reduces all of this to nine words: "Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers." A smaller, sharper example comes from David Neeleman, who founded JetBlue. His 2002 salary as chief executive was $200,000 with a $90,000 bonus, and he gave the whole of it to the JetBlue Crewmember Crisis Fund, set up for employees who had fallen on hard times. None of these men cited Clarke's 1982 talk. They did not need to. The motto about a full day's pay was in the water they grew up in.

The second mile comes from the Sermon on the Mount. A Roman soldier could compel a civilian to carry his pack for a mile; Jesus told his listeners to carry it two. Members hear the phrase from childhood, and the Church's Young Men general president, Timothy L. Farnes, built a commencement address around it at BYU-Idaho on December 18, 2025, before 3,331 graduates. His distinction was between first-mile obedience, which is duty, and the second mile, which is something else: "In the second mile, we obey God out of love, with a pure heart and real intent."

Applied to work, the phrase gets used two ways, and you should notice which one you are hearing. In the first, the boss goes the second mile for the worker: the resume help during a layoff, the sick visit, the salary handed to a crisis fund. In the second, the worker is asked to go the second mile for the boss, which is where a religious idea can shade into unpaid overtime. Faust's 1996 list of dishonesties is interesting because it cuts both ways. Stealing time from an employer is on it. So is stealing from the government through false tax claims, which is a sin an owner commits more easily than a clerk.

The Marriott founder's biography reads like a catalogue of second miles walked before he owned anything. At 13 he planted lettuce on fallow acres of the family farm near Ogden and handed the $2,000 harvest to his father. At 14 his father put him on a train with 3,000 sheep and no escort and told him to sell them in San Francisco. At 19 he went to New England for two years as a missionary, and on the way home in the summer of 1921 he stood in the heat in Washington watching lemonade carts sell out, which is where the root beer stand came from six years later. None of that is doctrine. It is what a boy does when the household treats extra effort as normal.

The honest reading is that the doctrine says nothing about who should walk the extra mile. It says the person compelled should. In a company, that is usually the person with less power, and the executives who come out well in this essay are the ones who noticed that and walked it themselves.

Four verses before the second mile, the same sermon deals with contracts: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Stapley's 1971 questions are a plain-English version of that verse for a firm, and they hold up as an audit checklist.

• Employers: are you honest with your employees, and do the rules apply to all, or are there exceptions?
• Employees: are you giving an honest day's work, or running errands on the clock under false pretense?
• Anyone in business: do you pad the bill for a benefit you are not entitled to, assuming nobody will know?
• Anyone at all, from Faust in 1996: are you stealing time, money or merchandise from the people who pay you?

The people in our profiles did not all pass. Kevin Rollins, chief executive of Dell from 2004 to 2007, was among current and former Dell executives charged by the SEC in a 2010 accounting case, which settled with Rollins reportedly paying $4 million. Gary Crittenden settled SEC claims of disclosure errors in 2010, without admitting wrongdoing, over Citigroup's subprime exposure while he was its chief financial officer. Edwin Catmull was implicated in the Silicon Valley no-poaching case, and Disney and its subsidiaries, Pixar included, paid $100 million to settle. These are one-sentence facts, not a section, but a page about honesty that left them out would be padding the bill.

The teaching is short. The proof is mostly anecdote.

Jeff Benedict's 2007 book The Mormon Way of Doing Business profiled eight executives, Neeleman, Rollins and Crittenden among them, and concluded that their conduct came from obeying Church teachings and letting gospel values govern their time. That is the standard claim, and you will find it repeated on this site. It is not the same as evidence. Nobody has run a study comparing invoice padding by religion, and the men who cite the second mile are mostly quoting it about themselves, in their own books, decades later. Rollins told the Deseret News in March 2006 that "the notion of being a Mormon, and what a Mormon means globally, is amazingly well-understood," which is a claim about reputation, not about audited behaviour.

So here is what can be verified. The talks exist and carry dates. The Marriott resource line existed in 1997. Neeleman's 2002 salary went to the fund. And in late 1978, a year before he bought his first dealership, Larry Miller told his wife to start paying tithing on their gross income rather than their net. The first bill he chose to pay in full was to the Church. The dealers who had shorted him were still in business.