On the eve of Labor Day we come together, friends, family and congregants, at this magnificent church, with its proud tradition of social activism, located in the heart of a city that encompasses both incomprehensible wealth and equally incomprehensible suffering, to consider the meaning of work, and the struggle of working people for economic justice and personal fulfillment.
There are those who would tell us that, at least in this country, we have entered a time of plenty, where anyone willing to work hard can live a life free of deprivation. But we know better. We know that in this country someone can work full time and still only earn $10,000 a year, that countless mothers and fathers rarely see their own children because they are forced to work two or more jobs to pay basic bills, that millions of uninsured families are just one illness away from homelessness. And we know that life is even harder for many undocumented immigrant workers who, faced with the fear of deportation, are forced to work in near servitude.
But the nature of the oppression experienced by many working people goes beyond the fact that they must often toil for far too long for far too little recompense. As the words we heard earlier, from Gibran's "The Prophet," so beautifully describe it: Work should be, can be, a joyful thing, an expression and manifestation of love. There is a real sense in which we sustain ourselves, re-create ourselves, through our work, in interaction with each other and the bounty of our earthly home. But try telling that to someone who is treated more like a machine than a human being, someone forced to wreck their body on a sped-up assembly line in order to pay the rent, someone who performs stoop labor in a pesticide-laden strawberry field, or even someone who lovingly cares for the sick and elderly as a home attendant, but who cannot afford health care for themselves or their children. Rather than working together as a community to sustain ourselves, with love and cooperation, we are forced to sell our labor on the open market to brokers who far too often treat it as no more than a commodity, who far too often deny our humanity. Work may be an expression of love, but far too often it is also an expression of suffering, oppression and alienation.
Faced with the pain and suffering which too often characterize our lives, and the lives of our neighbors, near and far, we have a choice: We can abandon ourselves to despair. We can try to block out and deny this suffering. We can wait for a better world in the hereafter. Or we can actively engage the pain of this world. While the choice to engage the world's suffering, in all its varied forms, may seem an overwhelming undertaking, it need not be so. Working for social and economic justice is, after all, truly an example of labor as love. It can allow us to live amidst the pain of the world without this pain numbing our spirits. By reinforcing our bonds to one another and our shared hopes for the future, this work can engender strength and even joy.
Except for those who are so damaged that they cannot even conceive of a better world, we all believe that a better world is desirable. Who among us would oppose a world with less need, less suffering, more understanding, kindness and civility? However, some of us are jaded; we've become cynical; we no longer believe that a better world is possible.
Others of us believe that a better world is possible - but that it will arrive without our intervention, or even that our intervention is harmful. Among this group are the economic libertarians, who believe that cut-throat competition between individuals ultimately leads to the most good for the most people, and that it is an unavoidable side effect of this process that there will be casualties. But we must ask ourselves: Can a better world be built on a foundation of selfishness? Can we simply ignore those in need? Is it true that a world in which a few individuals, most often born to privilege, command the overwhelming share of the resources, really holds the most hope for improving the lives of most people?
As I see it, people are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. Being kind, cooperative and caring, however, does seem to lead to happier lives. It is often the poor, those with the smallest hordes to protect, who are the most generous. Those who are greedy and mean usually live in personal misery regardless of how much wealth they accumulate.
So, is a better world possible, or are we doomed to increased poverty, alienation, pollution and war? I have no answer to that question. But I do know this: Nothing stays the same. The world is dynamic, not static. If things do not get better, they will likely get worse. And we must believe that a better world is possible, and throw ourselves into the struggle to make this vision a reality, or else we doom ourselves to the alternative.
And, if we are to sustain ourselves in this struggle, we must find ways to maintain our hope in the face of the enormity of the challenges facing us. We must find ways to derive strength from our sense of community and common purpose. We must find ways to engage the suffering of the world, not with guilt, which while sometimes necessary and appropriate can be stunting and incapacitating, but with joy, ways to celebrate our great collective endeavor to remake the world.
Despite efforts to separate us, and ideologies that worship personal competition, we are social beings, members of communities. Through our interactions with and dependence on others they become part of us and we of them. By working together to improve the world, we move beyond ourselves and our own narrow circles, and we become more fully alive. The cooperative struggle for social justice is personally transformative. By uniting together, to re-create the world, we change ourselves, our communities, and the broader world. Even when we lose individual battles we gain strength by working together, building our communal bonds, discovering and nurturing that which unites us. And this prepares us for the battles to come, gives us the strength to continue the unending process of transforming ourselves, our communities and our world.
In my life as an organizer and activist I have many times seen people's lives changed by the hope, confidence, and sense of purpose engendered by their involvement in the labor movement and other movements for social change.
What role does the labor movement play, or can it play, in this process? Most of us know something of what the labor movement has achieved historically: The enactment of child labor laws, minimum wage and hours laws, the creation of minimal safety standards, the provision of health and retirement benefits for most unionized workers. Indeed, even those who claim that unions are no longer relevant will often acknowledge the important historical role played by the labor movement.
Those who claim that unions are no longer relevant raise a number of arguments in support of this claim. Ours is an affluent society, they assert, comprised largely of a vast middle class that enjoys an abundance of material goods and leisure time. The war on poverty has been won. The "class warfare" waged by unions is an antiquated and divisive notion inappropriate to this brave new world. In a time of plenty, unions hold back most workers, protecting the less ambitious and less capable while discouraging initiative. Further, legislation now exists to protect the poorest and most vulnerable from abuse.
My response to these claims, raised primarily by individuals who profit from the oppression of working people, is as follows. The idea that this is a middle class nation is a myth. The wealthy have had their wealth increase exponentially, while poverty has increased and the middle class has shrunk. America saw its lowest rate of poverty in 1973. Since then GDP has increased 85% in real terms, but overall the rate of poverty has also increased. Just last Monday, the New York Times reported that a smaller percentage of America's GDP went to wages last year, and a higher percentage to corporate profits, than at any time since these statistics were first collected 59 years ago. Despite America's vast wealth, which is more than sufficient to provide for the basic needs of all those who live here, according to UNICEF, 22% of children in the United States live in poverty - a figure that is 72% higher than the percentage of children living in poverty in Poland, 77% higher than in Greece, and 150% higher than in Hungary, countries whose per capita incomes are far lower than ours. According to statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest rate of unionization among industrialized democracies. It also, not coincidentally, has more poverty, greater income disparity and less social mobility. Class warfare is a reality - and the wealthiest among us, who claim we are being divisive when we challenge the vast inequities that exist in this nation, have been winning this war for far too long.
Further, the laws that protect workers and unions are weak and becoming weaker all the time. These laws were, for the most part, passed at a time when the labor movement was more powerful. As the labor movement has weakened, these laws have come under increasing assault. Often this assault involves lax enforcement rather than outright repeal. Violations of health and safety laws, as inadequate as they often are, are rampant, and penalties for violations so minimal that companies view the fines, when levied at all, as no more than a small additional cost of doing business. The minimum wage, ever decreasing in real terms, is nonetheless widely flouted.
And the laws that are supposed to protect the rights of labor unions and their members, weak to begin with, have been decimated. It has been common practice for years for managers to make illegal threats and to fire union supporters, knowing that by doing so they could defeat union-organizing drives and, even if ultimately found guilty years later, pay relatively small fines. These fines have been viewed as less costly than paying union wages. But, since the current administration in Washington took office, things have gone from bad to worse. The government is now actively aiding and abetting corporate managers in their campaigns to defeat the organizing efforts of their employees.
The National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, has the job of interpreting and enforcing the Labor-Management Relations Act, the federal statute that governs relations between unions and most private sector employers. In the last five years the NLRB, now dominated by presidential appointees who have spent their professional lives attacking unions, has stripped millions of workers of their right to unionize, including Graduate Assistants (like those at NYU), large numbers of disabled workers, nurses, workers employed through temporary agencies, and others. The NLRB has seized on virtually every opportunity to interpret existing laws in ways that weaken protections for workers. The NLRB is supposed to be a place where working people can go to vindicate their rights when they are violated. But things have gotten so bad that unions are now often reluctant to bring legitimate claims of labor-law violations, for fear that the NLRB will view these cases as opportunities to gut the few remaining protections.
One way to counter the growing economic inequities in this country, and the weakening of statutory protections, is to rebuild and strengthen the labor movement. The data shows that, even in a time when union's are often on the defensive, unionized workers in this country make an average of 33% more in wages and benefits than non-unionized workers with similar jobs. And, in addition to improving wages for union and non-union workers alike, a strengthened labor movement can lead the fight for laws that protect and support working people.
However, it must be acknowledged that the labor movement, comprised of many local and national unions, is far from perfect. The labor movement has too often sabotaged its own stated goal of uniting workers by fanning divisions between workers: between skilled and unskilled, foreign-born and native, black and white, women and men. Many unions have also failed to maintain basic democratic rights for their members, and others have succumbed to outright corruption and mob domination. During the cold war much of the labor movement was far too willing to be co-opted by the federal government - lending support to the Vietnam War, the coup in Chile, and witch hunts against progressive activists in this country.
Yet despite these historical failings, unions have also done more to improve the lot of poor black, women and immigrant workers than any other institution. And today the labor movement, newly invigorated, has overcome many of its past failings. Today the movement is assertively organizing new workers. It is also often on the front line of the struggle against racism and sexism. It is immersed in the important struggle for immigrant rights. And many unions now negotiate protections for lesbian and gay workers as well. The American labor movement is also now more willing to ally itself with the international working class even if this means building alliances with unions in other countries that oppose American policies. And most of the labor movement in this country has come out in opposition to the war in Iraq. In part as a result of these changes, last year American unions, somewhat remarkably, gained more new members than they lost, despite the outright assault being waged on labor.
In any movement as vast as the labor movement still is, there will be incidents of corruption and of anti-democratic practices. But what is the proper standard to judge the labor movement by? Overall, is it more or less corrupt than the corporations whose power it seeks to limit? Further, while there may be corruption, there are also heroic battles being waged within the labor movement against this corruption and for greater internal democracy. In the 16,000 member union representing NYC school bus and para-transit drivers, for example, a group of women and men whom I represent on a pro bono basis, some of whom are here with us today, are fearlessly battling to evict the Genovese crime family from the leadership of their union. Notwithstanding the mob's domination of this union, the dissidents are not against unions: Rather, they understand how much an honest union can improve their lives.
Unions, when progressive and democratic, continue to hold the potential of bringing together working people in the struggle to improve their own lives and the world around them. If the labor movement can improve the economic status of working families this will redound to the benefit of these families, and society, in countless ways. We all benefit - physically, mentally and spiritually - when there is greater access to decent housing, healthcare and education.
But the potential of a reinvigorated labor movement, united with other progressive movements, is greater still. By uniting people in the struggle for economic justice the labor movement holds the potential for overcoming the pervasive sense of powerlessness that pervades so much of our society. It holds the promise of helping people learn, through working together towards shared goals, that they are connected and that, connected and working for a common purpose, they can change the world for the better. On the eve of Labor Day I invite you to come, with joy in your hearts, and join this movement to change the world.
