Worker Justice

Worker Justice

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Victory at Republic Windows & Glass [12-13-08]

"Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the rights of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked" - Psalm 82:3-4 (NRSV)
Interfaith Worker Justice congratulates the United Electrical Workers Local 1110 for a historic victory that ended a six-day occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. Last night, the company's workers voted to accept a $1.75 million settlement.

The Republic workers would have been forgotten if they hadn't stood up -- by sitting down and occupying their factory. They captured the attention and the support of people of faith, and sent shock waves through corporate board rooms across the nation.

This is a victory to be celebrated by the thousands of people who stood in solidarity with the workers: people like you who took the time to send messages to Bank of America and rallied at banks across the country. The Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues, an IWJ affiliate, has been working closely with Local 1110 since day one. On Tuesday of this week, IWJ members from around the country rallied alongside Chicago Interfaith Committee in supporting workers.

Both the Republic Windows victory and this week's news of Wal-Mart's $54 million settlement of a class-action suit over unpaid wages highlight wage theft, a national crisis on which IWJ and its national network of workers centers are playing a leading role in tackling.

IWJ Executive Director Kim Bobo has written the first book to deal with this issue. In a happy coincidence, her Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid-And What We Can Do About It, was published this week, during the Republic sit-in.

While we celebrate the Republic victory, we are going to see hundreds of factory closings in the coming months, and the question is: will workers be paid what they're owed? And while the Wal-Mart settlement is welcome news, 60 additional wage theft lawsuits remain pending, cases involving billions of dollars that have been stolen from and are owed to millions of workers.

IWJ is leading national efforts against wage theft. We need your help to move this work forward. Please consider making a contribution to IWJ or visit our website to learn more about how you can get involved.

Interfaith Worker Justice offers good perspective on the effects of the California wildfires, and on two critiques of progressive Christian activism [10-31-07]

Kim Bobo, the Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice, recently sent this email note.

Dear Friend,

When nature's calamities strike, like they did last week in California, we know that those hardest hit are poor families.

Despite the media coverage of the burning of mansions, those who live in modest homes or even shacks will suffer the most. Please pray for California workers and their families hit by the fires.

Bad news and good news: the bad news is that the October 16th Wall Street Journal carried an article that criticized Interfaith Worker Justice; the good news is that not only was IWJ discussed in a high-profile newspaper read by millions of people, but most of the discussion was neutral, and accurately described a good deal of what we do (before going on to disparage us). The article, titled "The Rise of the Religious Left," was authored by Steve Malanga, a Senior Fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. (It's no longer available on the Wall Street Journal's website but can be found on the Manhattan Institute's website.)

The piece was in fact adapted from a longer essay that appears in the Autumn issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal under the title "The Religious Left, Reborn."

Below is my response to the article. (The Wall Street Journal published it, but makes it available online to subscribers only. We have posted it online on IWJ's new blog.)

Steven Malanga's "The Rise of the Religious Left" (October 16, 2007) ignores the depth of religious concern for and teaching about hunger and poverty. Ending poverty is a faith question--witness the thousands of congregations that provide food and shelter for poor people. The new emergence of a faith-led effort around raising wages, benefits and working conditions reflects the maturity and sophistication of the religious community's fight against poverty. This is not a left-wing matter. This is a faith matter.

Although I greatly respect the philosophers mentioned in the article, Minister Rauschenbusch and Monsignor Ryan, most religious leaders are not involved because of them, but rather because of the reading and understanding of their own sacred texts and teachings and their concrete experiences with low-income families in their congregations.

The religious leaders I know do not "blindly refuse to acknowledge" academic research on rising wages, but rather understand that those who oppose raising wages and benefits for low-wage workers have historically trotted out studies to "prove" that we would all be better off accepting poverty-wage jobs. Over 80 percent of the American public, including most people of faith, supported raising the minimum wage.

The October 21st New York Times Book Review carried an essay by Alan Wolfe titled "Mobilizing the Religious Left."

It's a review of Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church, a new volume celebrating and reflecting on Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), a book that inspired Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Bishop Desmond Tutu. It was good to see this book reviewed in such a prominent forum. In his essay, however, Wolfe made a dubious claim: "In a democracy, the people choose the questions they want to discuss, and in our time more of them want the religious spirit to concern itself with abortion and homosexuality rather than race relations or a just wage." I wrote the following response:

In his essay "Mobilizing the Religious Left," Alan Wolfe ignores the breadth of religious activism fighting poverty and economic disparity by offering unsubstantiated claims of what issues people care about and broad critiques of the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Wolfe boldly and wrongly claims, "In a democracy, the people choose the questions they want to discuss, and in our time more of them want the religious spirit to concern itself with abortion and homosexuality rather than race relations or a just wage." He's flat out wrong.

An October 2005 Pew Research Center survey found that almost half (48 percent) of Americans believe that American society is divided between the "haves" and the "have-nots." In another Pew survey in July 2006, asking about what social issues churchgoers hear about from the pulpit, by far the top issue was hunger and poverty. A whopping 92 percent of churchgoers have heard their pastors speak out against hunger and poverty from the pulpit. Over 80 percent of Americans, including all major Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations, supported an increase in the minimum wage. These same religious bodies at the local level have led the 100 plus local living wage campaigns and are leading local efforts to challenge janitorial firms, laundry firms, poultry plants, waste companies and dozens of other industry leaders to pay living wages and family benefits.

As important as Rauschenbusch is to social thought, I daresay that few religious leaders are engaged in just wage issues either because of what he said or didn't say. People of faith are engaged in challenging economic injustice because all our faith traditions' sacred texts condemn greed and advocate just treatment of workers. The teachings, combined with their own faith journeys of seeing poverty in their congregations, propel their actions.

The New York Times hasn't published the letter, but you can find it, too, on IWJ's blog.

Although I must admit I'm not all that enamored by blogs and online conversations, my twin teenage sons are convincing me of the importance of engaging in them. Our work is so important. We can't let biased commentators and inaccurate claims undermine it.

Interfaith Worker Justice calls upon our religious values in order to educate, organize, and mobilize the religious community in the U.S. on issues and campaigns that will improve wages, benefits and working conditions for workers, especially workers in low-wage jobs.

Interfaith Worker Justice relies on contributions to support its work. Your tax-deductible gift will be strategically used to further justice for workers throughout the United States.

Thank you and Blessings,

Kim Bobo, Executive Director
Interfaith Worker Justice