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

1. U.S. Poverties and Religious Resources: Movement Context

17   1 U.S. Poverties and Religious Resources Movement Context Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn Pharaoh’s army got drowned Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Oh Worker, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn Oh Worker, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn Pharaoh’s army got drowned Oh Worker, don’t you weep. Oh Pharaoh, don’t you know what you do Oh Pharaoh, don’t you know what you do Pharaoh’s army got drowned. Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Woe to the powerful, justice will prevail Woe to the powerful, justice will prevail Pharaoh’s army got drowned. Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Oh Council, won’t you pay a living wage Oh Council, won’t you pay a living wage Pharaoh’s army got drowned Oh Mary, don’t you weep. When I get to Heaven goin’ to put on my shoes Run about glory and tell all the news Pharaoh’s army got drowned Oh Mary, don’t you weep.1 18  U.S. Poverties and Religious Resources Through an African rhythm, an oppressor’s folly, and justice’s triumph, a new version of a familiar spiritual declares the presence of a growing social movement. This recent adaptation of “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep,” while echoing old labor hymns, has several novel features that reflect the living wage movement.2 First, the activists singing these songs are on the lines of a burgeoning frontier in the labor struggle—municipal living wage ordinances. They are not just singing to factory bosses but to city councils and county commissioners, who, in an era of privatization, are contributing to lower wage work in America. Second, this song is found in Interfaith Worker Justice’s Rally Song Book, circa 2005, not the Little Red Song Book of the International Workers of the World (or the “Wobblies”) of 1904. Interfaith Worker Justice, founded in 1996, serves as an innovative movement halfway house for the support, coordination, and integration of religion and labor activism in the United States.3 Third, this song appears in a rally book that includes numerous African spirituals, Appalachian hymns, and Spanish folk songs. The compilation represents the diversity of contemporary work in the United States and labor and religious organization’s efforts to deal with these changes. Finally, a religious laywoman, Kim Bobo, the founder of Interfaith Worker Justice, composed the hymn’s new verses. She is just one of the hundreds of women of faith who play a primary role in leading this movement, a movement whose primary beneficiaries are most often women living in poverty. Religious activism has been absent from much of social movement theorists’ analyses of the living wage movement. However, progressive religious coalitions are fundamental to the new labor activism rising in the United States. As the political scientist Richard Wood recognized in his analysis of faith-based community organizing, religious community organizing is “second in size only to the labor movement among drives for social justice among low-income Americans today.”4 At a time when the media and academia still focus regularly on the strength of the “religious right” at the federal level, the success of the living wage movement demonstrates the underrecognized power of progressive religious activists in cities around the nation. The 1994 coalition of Baltimore churches provided the impetus for that city’s living wage ordinance. While often cited as the first living wage ordinance in the nation, Baltimore’s ordinance was not really the first. In 1988, the city of Des Moines, Iowa, set a minimum compensation package for its economic development projects, and Gary, Indiana, implemented U.S. Poverties and Religious Resources  19 a similar measure in 1991. But Baltimore’s ordinance was the first to be prompted by a grassroots campaign.5 Moreover, Baltimore activists articulated the failures of the minimum wage program and reintroduced the term “living wage” while developing a new successful model for building local economic political power.6 In Andy Merrifield’s assessment, these new living wage campaigns offered “progressives everywhere a new big idea at a time when we’re not supposed to need big ideas anymore: the working class is getting back on the offensive, reorganizing in the workplace , [and] seeking allies.”7 These campaigns breathed new life...