Unions

Kim Bobo 10-17-2008

[continued from part 1]

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, we need a secretary of labor who thinks and acts like Frances Perkins.

Kim Bobo 8-28-2008

Labor Day weekend is often a slow time for congregations. Members are attending family gatherings. Parents are getting children ready for school. Neglected summer projects are undertaken or (like my garden) abandoned until next summer. Aside from the occasional Labor Day parade, few Labor Day activities seem to have anything to do with honoring labor. Labor Day weekend nonetheless offers congregations an opportunity to lift up the values of work and reflect on our religious [...]

Onleilove Alston 7-11-2008

During this BBQ season we have to carefully consider what products are apart of our seasonal celebrations. Recently I attended the DC campaign kick-off for the Justice at Smithfield Campaign. "Smithfield Foods is the largest pork processor and producer in the world, the fourth largest turkey processor and fifth largest beef processor in the U.S." In the early 1990's Smithfield opened its Tar Heel, North Carolina plant, with [...]

Ted Parks 9-01-2007

A black-and-white movie about the bleakness of life in Watts, California—shot for $10,000 about 30 years ago and never intended for theaters—doesn't exactly fit the Hollywood formula.

Kim Bobo 7-01-2007
Religious leaders are backing the Employee Free Choice Act.
Singing the songs of a bygone world.
Rose Marie Berger 5-01-2007
A Bethlehem factory produces fair trade clothing by unionizing workers.

Beginning with churches near the coalfields, more than 750 local and national religious leaders have put forth “A Call for Justice at Peabody Energy” that backs miners seeking to organi

Bumper stickers found in many college dormitories and church parking lots during the recent boycott of Taco Bell featured a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua—playing off the chain’s ads—turning down the fast- food chow to demand a penny more per pound for tomato pickers.

Heading the campaign was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farm worker-led organization based in Immokalee, Florida, with more than 2,500 members, most of whom are Latinos, Haitians, and Mayan Indians. The nearly four-year boycott put worker concerns—low wages, poor working conditions, and discrimination—in front of many consumers and led to an agreement with Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company.

The campaign is one of several recent examples of tapping into the power of consumers. Through education, boycotts, and other methods, farm workers can make those who eat the products they grow and pick aware of the conditions they experience—and ask for their help in changing those conditions.

“The life of an agricultural worker is one of exploitation,” said Lucas Benitez, a worker and organizer with the coalition who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager. Farm laborers work long hours, with no benefits, health care, or overtime pay, he said. “The imbalance of power is tremendous.”

The agreement reached by the coalition and Yum! Brands established important precedents of increasing wages coming down the supply chain and involving workers in the monitoring of conditions in the fields, said Brigitte Gynther, an organizer with the coalition. The change for workers has been immediate, Benitez said, after more than 20 years of receiving the same salary. Each week, he said, “depending on how much they harvest, they receive between $15 and $40 more.” Also essential, Gynther said, are the safeguards against what the coalition believes to be inhumane working conditions the pickers have suffered.

Dee Dee Risher 4-01-2006

When the Sago mine explosion trapped 13 West Virginia miners 250 feet below ground in January, I was deep into Kettle Bottom, a stunning collection of poetry by Diane Gilliam Fisher that i

Ohio State University head football coach John Cooper put himself in a pickle when he agreed to endorse a company that the Farm Labor Organizing Committee AFL-CIO (FLOC) says engages in unfair la

Julie Polter 9-01-1998

This morning's Washington Post said it is a "workers' market." A booming U.S.

Jane Slaughter 9-01-1998
Only the rank and file can bring real and lasting change.
Jane Samuels 9-01-1998
Even church institutions can lose sight of human needs.
Rose Marie Berger 9-01-1998

Despite anti-union violence, the United Farm Workers persevere in organizing strawberry pickers.