How Faith-Based Labor Movements Plan to Stop Corporate America's Billion-Dollar Theft

By Nancy Maclean, Boston Review. Posted June 13, 2009.

Gender equity fared even worse, as Alice Kessler-Harris hauntingly reveals in In Pursuit of Equity. Perkins was a feminist in many ways, but like most contemporary reformers, she assumed a world of male breadwinners. Mid-century liberalism built gender discrimination into all of the nation’s major social policies in a way that helps explain the dire poverty of so many female-headed households in America today.

The country has changed radically since Perkins’s time. Massive African-American and Latino civil rights efforts have ended formal segregation and opened opportunities to all as never before. Women make up almost half of today’s labor force and union membership. And a new wave of immigration since 1965 has made the nation more diverse than ever. Solis has the motivation, and the historical opportunity, to help remodel U.S. labor policy, to make it equitable, inclusive, and up-to-date.

Not that she has an easy job. Already, business lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce and right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute are rallying to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act, the principal legislative goal of labor and allies like Bobo. The Republican bloc in Congress is likely to hold solid against labor and peel off centrist and vulnerable Democrats. Moreover, the new administration’s economic appointments have arguably been its most conservative. No one should underestimate the power of the right in shaping the terms of debate in this vital arena -- or how hard its member groups will work to prevent change.

Still, President Obama pledged that "labor will always have a seat at the table" in his administration. He told the nation unequivocally that "we cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement" and proposed a $1.5 billion increase in discretionary funding for the Department of Labor by 2010. But it remains to be seen how hard he will fight for the Employee Free Choice Act. Just as Roosevelt depended on popular demand for the original right to organize, so Obama will likely need determined counter-pressure to make him do what he knows is the right thing--something his economic and corporate advisors may otherwise resist.


In such a tough contest, people of faith may well play an essential role in pressuring Congress to support the Obama administration and the Solis Department of Labor in their efforts to improve conditions for low-wage workers. Bobo understands that the ranks of those who might embrace a social-gospel message have grown dramatically and could be mobilized for economic justice. Untold numbers of Catholics and mainstream Protestants and Jews never gave up the social gospel; they were just eclipsed in public debate by the religious right. The Rabbi Robert J. Marx, for example, who marched with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in Alabama, founded and led the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and the Council for Metropolitan Open Communities before helping Bobo launch IWJ. Today, in the name of the Torah’s justice teaching, he speaks out in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.


Even evangelicals, more than a quarter of the U.S. population, are soul-searching today. The Southern Baptist Convention, widely recognized as the nation’s most conservative major denomination, now has a president, Frank Page, who described his 2006 election as "a clear sign" that rank-and-file church members felt the "conservative ascendancy has gone far enough" and it was time to say "what we are for." The Reverend Bill Hybels, head of the vast Willow Creek Association, says that "progressive evangelicals . . . are one stirring away from a real awakening." In 2007 he told The New York Times Magazine: 


The Indians are saying to the chiefs, ‘We are interested in more than your two or three issues. We are interested in the poor, in racial reconciliation, in global poverty and AIDS, in the plight of women in the developing world.’


Supporting union organizing, let alone striking workers, would be more of a stretch for evangelicals, whose economics can be as individualistic as their relationships with Jesus. Still, progressive prophetic evangelism has a powerful history in America: think of the abolitionists, Knights of Labor, Peoples’s Party, and the Southern mass strikes of the Depression era. King was himself a Baptist, and the most faithful African Americans remain among the likeliest Democratic voters. Evangelicals study the Bible, and as the distinguished religious scholar Randall Balmer points out, the Bible features about two thousand mentions of the poor and of believers’ obligation to them. (No mentions of abortion.) In his delightful survey of the nation’s religious history, Hellfire Nation, James Morone notes a pattern in which American politics change "when rich sinners replace poor ones" as the scourge demanding attention from believers.


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Nancy MacLean is Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent publications are Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace and, with Donald Critchlow, Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1945 to the Present.

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