All You That Labor: Religion and Ethics in the Living Wage Movement

Introduction

1 Introduction At a southern university rally for living wages in 2005, a middleaged African American woman rose to introduce herself and speak to the crowd. Standing there in her uniform, she stated her name and job title (custodian), then paused before saying slowly and deliberately, “Everyone keeps telling me not to speak today. They say I’ll lose my job or not get my raises. But I’m telling you today that I’m not afraid. There’s nothing they can do to me, with God on my side.” In front of a hundred students, faculty, and other staff, she relayed her story of working two jobs, one of them full time, to feed her daughter and take care of an aging mother. She expressed her frustration at not having enough time with her family, with her seemingly ceaseless work. With strength and clarity in her voice, she ended by stating her hope for “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” Later that year, the local African American ministerial fellowship and an influential Unitarian Universalist church, joined by many university faculty and staff members, wrote to the university’s chancellor, strongly pressing the wealthy institution to understand living wages as a moral issue with significant related concerns for racial justice. As the campaign grew, faith leaders led rallies, supported workers who risked speaking publicly, and provided organizing space for meetings. By the end of the union contract negotiations, the workers had secured a guaranteed starting rate of 10 an hour by 2009. While religious persons and organizations were not the whole story in this campaign, every major actor in the coalition acknowledged religious activists’ role in its success. In fact, to ignore religious activists’ multiple contributions to the campaign would be to miss a major dimension of the campaign and its later influence on the rise of a faith-labor coalition for living wages, for city workers, those contracted through the metropolitan government, and other low-wage workers who sought their help. 2  Introduction Religious Foundations of the U.S. Living Wage Movement Whether the campaigns are at a university, business, city, or state level, persons of faith and religious organizations regularly play important, but generally under-analyzed, roles in the living wage movement in the United States. The contemporary living wage movement emerged in the early 1990s from the grassroots coalition of churches in Baltimore, Maryland. These churches, which provided social services to the poor in Baltimore during this time, noticed a disturbing trend. In spite of national rhetoric about growing prosperity and a booming stock market, more people were showing up at church soup kitchens, clothes closets, and rental assistance programs. And more of them had full-time jobs. Over spaghetti dinners in church basements, people talked about trying to survive and provide for their families on inadequate full-time wages. As stories accumulated and patterns emerged, a coalition of forty-six Baltimore churches decided they had seen enough. As members of Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a congregation-based community organizing network affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the churches activated their organizing model to address the pressing issue in their community of working poverty.1 Having identified the problem through one-on-one conversations and congregational leadership teams, they created a group to research the possible causes of “working poverty” in their city and to plan for action. What they found both confirmed their instincts and alarmed them: the city of Baltimore and its downtown redevelopment strategies were themselves responsible for the new low-wage jobs.2 Like many cities in the United States, Baltimore in the late 1980s and early 1990s sought to revitalize its downtown through a series of financial incentives and public subsidies to private firms in order to encourage investment in new office, hotel, and residential projects, which would remake the downtown district. In 1981, the newly elected President Reagan had cut seven billion dollars in aid to municipalities; as a result many cities were forced to cut budgets, and they turned to federally funded “urban renewal” programs, which offered interest-free grants for private redevelopment in targeted urban areas. When most of that federal funding ended in 1987, cities turned to alternate strategies in the form of tax incentives and subsidies for downtown redevelopment.3 Proponents argued that local government assistance would, in the long term, result in [18.117.196.184] Project MUSE (2024-04...