From Pittston to the Future

From Pittston to the Future

Once upon a time in America, men and women were required to work 60 or 70 hours a week. The economic structure of America offered no safety net for the elderly (i.e. Social Security), and children could be hired at slave wages and worked like adults, until the 1930s labor unions were the prophetic voice that called the nation to address these injustices.

Many of the union workers involved in this struggle were also active church members, and they left a rich legacy of religious involvement in the struggles of organized labor. A new chapter was added to this legacy with the 14-month strike by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against Pittston Coal, which ended this past Janu-ary.

The strike against Pittston was an authentic working-class movement for the right to adequate health care and secured pension funds for retired workers. It was led and fueled by the miners and their families in the mountains of southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky. But the religious community (both regional and national) played an integral role in what is considered by most labor observers to be the first major labor victory in more than a decade.

Cecil Roberts, vice-president of the UMWA, explains that the support of church people helped to bring national credibility to the strike and gave the mining community encouragement and prayer support. "When they looked at ministers, priests, nuns, and bishops standing up with them, they realized that they were morally right-legally incorrect but morally right," Roberts told Sojourners.

Once this coalition was formed between the church and the striking community around the central strike tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience (unlike the violent coal wars of the past), the movement seemed to be driven toward victory by a sense of its historical importance. The feeling of inevitable victory was grounded in the legacy of the civil rights movement andMartin Luther King Jr. "If the people have the faith, then God has the power," said Roberts, quoting King.

THE COALITION BETWEEN LABOR and the religious community in the Pittston strike is only one example of the recent revitalization of the labor-religion dialogue. There are other stories of battles for economic justice that were waged in part by church people: When the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) went on strike against Campbell tomatoes andVlasicpickles in 1978 over low wages and lack of benefits, the workers found little support from national union leaders. The large unions were con vinced that a multiparty contract could not be negotiated between the large companies, the small, autonomous growers working for those companies, and the laborers (the majority of whom were migrant workers).

FLOC turned to the religious community for support. And after a seven-year boycott and an eight-year strike, they achieved the first multiparty contract in U.S. labor history. FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez believes "it was the moral perspective of the religious community that made the difference."

In late 1988, Roman Catholic priest Gerry Conroy played an important role in a union representation campaign at a Catholic hospital in Paducah, Kentucky. Conroy, co-director of the Southeast Center for Justice in Atlanta, approached the hospital management and explained the impact their policies were having on the workers. The International Association of Machinists was later voted in by a large majority of the non-professional hospital workers.

Conroy was also involved with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in its campaign to acquire a first contract with the S.Lichtenburg & Co. plants (called "Samson and Delilah") in the Georgia towns of Waynesboro and Louisville. Now two years after the union was voted in, the company still refuses to recognize the union in violation of federal and state labor laws.

Mary Anne Bellinger, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, has been, as she says, "marching and speaking" for the Service Employees Inter-national Union's (SEIU) "Justice for Janitors" campaign in Atlanta. She wrote in the At-lanta Voice. "It's convenient to us for [janitors] to stay invisible. If we don't really take them into our consciousness, it's alright for them to be underpaid, overworked, and receive no benefits....Who cares about janitors, anyway?"

The Justice for Janitors campaign recently scored a major victory in Los Angeles. International Service Systems, the largest employer of janitors in the city, signed a contract with SEIU that includes a $5.50 per hour wage (up from $4.25), health insurance, and guarantees of 2,500 new union jobs.

Jim Sessions, a United Methodist miister and executive director of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, has worked with the labor community in the J.P. Stevens boycott and the Blue Diamond Mine strike in Stearns, Kentucky. And most recently, he was involved in the Pittston strike. (He was the only non-miner who took part in the three-day occupation of the Moss 3 coal preparation plant.) Sessions says his work is "building on church, community, and union solidarity to empower local communities to achieve economic justice and development."

Mike Szpak, also a United Methodist minister, has worked for three years with the AFL-CIO union in organizing religious support for the labor movement. Last year, Szpak coordinated a three-day dialogue between religious and labor leaders that was attended by 10 members of the AFL-CIO executive committee, nine international union presidents, six bishops from five denominations, and more than 200 other religious and labor leaders.

THESE EXAMPLES ILLUSTRATE A resurgence of religious involvement in labor-related issues. The question facing the church now is whether it will continue and even broaden its involvement into other labor struggles.

Union leaders such as Cecil Roberts are calling on the church to join labor in the continuing struggle for health care for the 28 million uninsured U.S. citizens; for job safety to reduce the number of workers who die each year from job-related diseases and accidents (estimated by the National Safe Workplace Institute to be 80,000 in 1990); for the right to strike without being fired or "permanently replaced"; and for a fair wage for the millions of people working at the current minimum wage and still living in poverty.

Roberts exclaimed at a UMWA victory celebration earlier this year that "when this struggle began, we called it a strike; but now it has become the people's movement!" A realization of this vision on behalf of working people at the national level depends on whether the church and labor are able to negotiate through differences that keep them apart.

Members in both communities still cling to negative stereotypes supported by the mainstream media, and many church people have been angered by the foreign policy positions of pro-intervention held by the AFL-CIO regarding Central and South American liberation struggles. In Southern California, a bitter dispute has erupted again between Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahoney and the local Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which he says coerced workers at 10 cemeteries operated by the archdiocese into voting for the union. Such illustrations point to the fact that the church and labor communities have a long way to go in building basic trust and a mutual com-mitment to social change.

Uncas McThenia, a law professor who became deeply involved in the Pittston strike, believes the ultimate force behind the religion-labor coalition is at the grassroots, not the institutional, level. "The kingdom of God is not going to come from inside the [Washington, D.C.] beltway," McThenia told Sojourners. "Middle-class, progressive Christ-ians must commit themselves to genuine servanthood and class suicide. Christians need to look into their own community and ask the local grocery store owner why he or she won't allow employees to work more than 30 hours a week [which would expand their benefits]."

McThenia believes it is easier for most progressive Christians to go to Central America and come home to protest than it is for them to walk the picket line or show public support for a union representation drive. Progressive Christians can "own" the national protest movement, he says, but they can't own the labor movement; so they don't get involved.

The labor movement also needs to allow for a sharing of power so that their issues become other people's issues. They need to listen to progressive Christians and honestly listen to the questions that they bring to the working-class struggle.

What is needed most is truthful dialogue. Conversion, servanthood, and community come about very slowly. But through such people as the Pittston strikers, Gerry Conroy, Mary Anne Bellinger, and Jim Sessions, the fruits of the process can be seen.

Ray Higgins Jr., a Sojourners intern when this article was published, worked with the United Mine Workers of America and the religious community during the Pittston strike in south-west Virginia.