In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 97 4 Religious Organizing for Worker Justice Workers’ basic rights are flagrantly violated on a daily basis in the United States. For example, a 2008 union campaign to organize car-wash workers in Los Angeles revealed that a group of laborers familiar to most Angelenos were working under horrible conditions. They were being paid $40 a day, well below the minimum wage, had no protection against exposure to hazardous cleaning chemicals, were denied rest breaks, and were constantly harassed on the job. “They are the most dispossessed workers in the formal economy!” declared Rev. Bridie Roberts, the program director for the CLUE affiliate in Los Angeles.1 As with these car-wash workers, it is frequently first-generation immigrant men and women who are being exploited. Many of them have risked their lives crossing through the desert to come to the United States in order to support their families back home. They come from countries whose domestic economies simply create far too few jobs to support all of their citizens. For some of the biggest immigrantsending countries, such as Mexico, El Salvador, and the Philippines, remittances sent home by their citizens working overseas are one of the largest sources of national income. As globalization weakened these countries’ domestic sources of income, the income received from their citizens working abroad has become a critical source of economic stability. “Migration helps pacify people,” says Romualdo Juan Gutiérrez Cortéz, a teacher in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and “poverty is a ticking time bomb, but as long as there is money coming in from family in the United States, there is peace. To curb migration our country must have a better employment plan.”2 The steady stream of income flowing from immigrants working in the United States is highly dependent on the ability of immigrants to send substantial portions of their earned income back home. Deep job losses resulting from the economic recession in 2008/09, along with increased workplace immigration raids and border enforcement, had immediate repercussions 98 | Religious Organizing for Worker Justice on the well-being of immigrants’ families in their home countries. By early 2009, there had been an estimated 13 percent decline in remittances to Latin America. Almost all the money sent home is spent on such basic necessities as food, clothes, utility bills, education, and health care.3 Declines in this income flow therefore not only pose hardships for individual families in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but they could also become a source of violence and political unrest back home, thus only increasing the number of people seeking to leave. Immigrant workers who lack U.S. citizenship or legal visa documents, and who have limited English language skills also have limited job options outside of the low-wage sectors of the labor market where employment is often informal. Unscrupulous employers routinely violate existing labor laws by paying less than the minimum hourly wage, failing to pay overtime, and providing minimal break times, while violating all manner of workplace safety regulations. Yet, attempts at collective organizing or protest are met with swift retaliation, including cases of employers reporting the presence of undocumented workers to federal and state authorities. Prophetic workerjustice activism has emerged in reaction to globalization’s exacerbation of low-wage workers’ exploitation in the United States. According to Rev. James Lawson, who is regarded as one of the nation’s most prominent veterans of nonviolent social change and a founder of an interfaith worker-justice organization in Los Angeles: What historians of the Civil Rights Movement seem not to understand is that the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike was operating on ending the economic injustice that resulted from slavery. I see economic injustice as a human rights—as a civil rights issue, but that alone is too narrow of a gauge. More critically, it entails the ability of people to create healthy communities where they are able to raise their children.4 Here, Lawson is framing justice for low-wage workers not only as a matter of rights but, understood through a religious lens, as a matter of building shalom , of building a sustainable community in which peace will reign. By 2009, there were forty-nine local interfaith worker-justice groups, six student groups, and twenty-one interfaith workers’ centers spread across the United States. These centers represent a small portion of a still much larger number of workers’ centers, some of which are affiliated with other nonreligious networks. Here, religious activism is...

Share