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

3. “I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me”: Bridge Building and Political Engagement in Racialized Economies

  66 3 “I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me” Bridge Building and Political Engagement in Racialized Economies Leaders of the Mississippi Poultry Workers for Equality and Respect knew they had to overcome significant racial and ethnic barriers if they were to challenge the power of the poultry plant owners.1 Yet the plant owners had to be challenged. Conditions in the plants were atrocious —sweltering temperatures, a toxic environment—and the work was certainly low paying. But black and Latino workers viewed each other uneasily, fearfully, and sometimes disdainfully. In the midst of this tension, management could pit workers against each other for jobs, promotions, raises, and shifts. In an effort to cultivate “BlackBrown solidarity,” Poultry Workers leaders brought plant workers together in a series of workshops. They seated black and Latino workers alternately and asked them to introduce each other to the group by answering specific questions. Latino colleagues asked black co-workers , for instance, “What difference did the civil rights movement make in your life?” Black workers asked their immigrant Latino colleagues, “Why did you come to the United States to work?” Through these introductions, a dialogue developed: Latino immigrants were desperate for jobs to feed their families as work in Central America disappeared , while African Americans feared that their civil rights gains were eroding and that another immigrant group might be used against them. From this starting point, workers began to talk from and across their differences. What they shared helped them to work for greater justice in their workplaces and to resist the divide-and-conquer strategy of their bosses. “I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me”  67 Raising the wages of the working poor is, according to activists, a “decidedly raced issue.” Organizations ranging from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition endorse living wages as part of their efforts at racial and ethnic justice. They understand that stagnant wages disproportionately affect African American and Latino workers since full-time work no longer guarantees economic security for lowwage workers. Therefore, they see the political economy as a major battleground for dismantling institutionalized racism in the United States. In the midst of this racialized landscape, religious organizations are also major players in connecting economic and racial justice issues within the living wage movement. While Sunday morning (or Friday Prayer and Saturday Shabbat, for that matter) is still the most segregated time in America, Tuesday night council meetings present a different picture. The living wage movement is, overall, one of the more racially and ethnically diverse movements in recent social movement history, and religious organizations regularly take the lead in cultivating this diversity. Religious activists, their organizations, and their theological mandates provide a psychic and physical space for confronting and mediating racial and ethnic divisions that could conceivably divide this economic justice movement . Drawing on theologies grounded in a “preferential option for the poor,” “being reconcilers of humanity,” and “welcoming the stranger,” religious activists make racial economic justice one of their central organizing goals. To accomplish this goal, religious coalition organizations take on two major racialized functions within the living wage movement: bridgebuilding and political development.2 Through both these activities, religious activists build the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies by offering pathways for creating a collective identity across difference and by providing opportunities for more marginalized persons to cultivate key civic skills. Within living wage coalitions themselves, religious organizations regularly serve as “bridging organizations,” mediating the economic justice concerns of labor, immigrant, and black civil rights groups.3 Their mediation takes the form of ideology translation, relational repair, and inclusion monitoring. Ideology translation involves interpreting the frameworks, values, and strategies of one movement to another in order to foster better collaboration and respect for differences. Relational repair focuses on building trust and negotiating conflicts among organizations within the 68  “I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me” coalition. Inclusion monitoring entails advocating for inclusion within the coalition by asking regularly “Who is not at the table?” All of this work is central to forming and maintaining a coalition, and building agency for a sense of collective will and capacity. Many religious organizations also identify and cultivate the involvement of those who are regularly excluded from the key pathways of political engagement. As the political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry...