A delegation of Bay Area African-American clergy and community leaders - many from Oakland - is on the ground in Phoenix right now! They're marching with thousands from across the country against Arizona's harsh new anti-immigrant law, SB1070. The law will damage public safety and unleash a wave of racial profiling and harassment.
What inspired these clergy leaders to raise their voices?
Pastor Brian Woodson of Oakland's Bay Area Christian Connection and the Interfaith Committe for Worker Justice told KGO Channel 7: "We don't need laws that separate us. We don't need laws that federalize out police forces, making all of our communities less safe. What we need to do is to come together and find reasonable solutions to very real problems." The pastors held a blessing ceremony and send
off for the delegation at Woodson's chuch on Thursday.
Rev. Phil Lawson of Oakland's East Bay Housing Organizations - and co-founder of the Black Alliance for a Just Immigration - said: "SB1070 harkens back to the worst times in our nation's history. This law targets Latinos, but who will be next? The same legislature that passed SB1070 also passed a law requiring President Obama to show his birth certificate to be on the ballot in 2012; and we cannot forget that Arizona long refused to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I firmly believe the Black and Latino quest for liberty and justice is one, and that's why, just as we rode to the south so many decades ago, I'm proud to go to Arizona."
In a text message update this morning, Pastor Woodson reported that the California contingent has been joined by three former freedom summer organizers, and that veterans of the Mississippi freedom summer are hosting a reception for Arizona organizers tonight.
Participants include: Rev. Lawson, Pastor Woodson, Rev. Gregory Brown of Miracles of Faith Community Church in Oakland, Rev. Jethroe Moore, President of NAACP's San Jose/Silicon Valley Chapter; Gerald Lenoir, Executive Director, BAJI; Linda Burnham, activist and writer.
If Toyota closes Fremont’s NUMMI plant next month, the economic devastation
will reverberate throughout California, with some 50,000 workers joining the
army of the unemployed. But a growing movement of workers, union leaders, and elected
officials is pushing
to avert the closure or mitigate its impact. To turn the tide, support from
faith communities will be crucial. EBASE’s Interfaith Committee for Worker
Justice is proud to join this critical campaign.
You might be thinking - isn’t Toyota dead set on closing NUMMI? What can be
done?
But as Mason Cooley reminds us, "events
are called inevitable only after they have occurred."
What’s at stake?
The closure would be another major hit to California's already shaky economy.
It would:
affect 1,000 suppliers and
50,000 workers through the state
erase 5,000 family-supporting
jobs
drain $500 million that the
NUMMI plant generates in wages and benefits from the California economy
Each city and county will feel the effect of hundreds of people in their
communities losing jobs, health care, homes and futures.
Is Toyota going the way of Wal-Mart?
Toyota:
was #1 in retail sales last
year, selling one of out of every four cars to Californians
has never closed a plant in
the company's 73 year history
is investing billions of
dollars into building new plants in Texas and Mississippi, and intends to
shift production of other popular models to Canada and Japan
Sounds contradictory, right? The company had been known for its
commitment to its workforce, but we fear that Toyota has gone the way of
Wal-Mart and Wall Street, allowing greed and self interest to win the day.
Keeping hope alive
The faith community and members of the Interfaith Committee
for Worker Justice firmly believe that when people or companies lose their way,
they can be called back to fairness.
To support NUMMI workers, area faith leaders will
meet
impacted workers at a series of briefings this week
These
workers will be embarking on a pilgrimage from Fremont, to the Central Valley
to Los Angeles and finally to Japan. The group will visit and bring attention
to many of the communities that would be devastated by the plant closure.
To get involved or learn more, please contact Rev. Carol Been at 831-239-1254
or email Kim Carter.
Last week, over 75 faith leaders gathered at First Congregational Church in Oakland to cry out against the fear and intolerance that have dominated our national healthcare and immigration debates. The event was an interfaith ritual of healing, transformation, and action sponsored by the East Bay Interfaith Immigration Coalition.
The ceremony - which included dance, song, and poetry - began with contemplative music and a slideshow, and congregants performed a ceremony to lament the hateful tone of the debates. We then put forward a vision of hope and promise, reclaiming our values of inclusion, justice, and love for all. We ended the ceremony with cries to keep families together and enact legislative solutions that embody our cherished values.
Photographer Giovanna Borgna captured the event in a multimedia slideshow. If you couldn't make it to the event itself, check out the slideshow!
This Labor Day
weekend, EBASE's Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice partnered with the
Black Alliance for a Just Immigration, the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and East Bay Housing Organizations to
organize our annual "Labor in the pulpit" program. This year, East
Bay Pastors invited mostly Latino immigrant workers into over a dozen
predominantly African-American churches. The workers took to the pulpits in 16
congregations and shared poignant stories of exploitative conditions and
shattered families. Pastors described how reform would move all forward together in the face of economic crisis and reflect core religious values like the biblical call to "welcome the stranger."
The stories
weren’t just shared with the congregations that we visited, though – several leading local
news outlets covered the event and further lifted up the workers’ stories. To read some of the workers’
stories, check out the media coverage of Labor in the Pulpits 2009.
Contra Costa Times (Front Page), Oakland Tribune (Page 3), San Jose Mercury (on-line) KPIX - CBS Ch. 5: 11:00 PM News; KBCW-TV (sister station): 10:00 PM News KPFA Radio: Sun., Sept 6, 6:00 PM News Minute 18:43 - 23:46 Univision Ch. 14: Sat. Sept 5, 6:00pm News; Sun, Sept 6, 6:00 pm Lindsay Wasserberger, OaklandNorth.net Elton Huang, World Journal (Chinese Press) page B4
Servant Woodson wowed us all with his fabulous speech. Here's an excerpt: "A prophetic call for a moral economy is a dangerous thing to organize around because we can not deconstruct the religion of capitalism without disempowering her high priests." Intrigued? You can download a copy of his speech.
On Thursday, April 2nd, join us for an event at the Graduate Theological Union, sponsored by Seminarians for Worker Justice and the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. The speakers will include labor policy specialist Steven Pitts
of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and Inese Radzins, PSR assistant
professor of theology and Dorothea Harvey Professor of Swedenborgian
Studies. This event will be held at Starr King School for the Ministry from 5-7pm.
She is a nationally known author and interfaith organizer, and is the founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice. Her newest book, Wage Theft in America,
"is an incisive handbook for organizers,
workers, and concerned citizens on how to prevent the flagrant
exploitation of America's working people. In the book, Bobo describes
how billions of dollars worth of wages are stolen from millions of
workers in the United States every year. The scope of these abuses is
as staggering as it is wrong-paying employees far less than the legal
minimum wage, purposefully misclassifying employees as independent
contractors, illegally denying workers overtime pay-and only now are
people beginning to take notice. Bobo offers an insightful analysis of
the crisis as well as concrete solutions, with special attention to
what the new presidential administration should do."
If you've never heard Kim speak before, you're in for a treat. She's an inspiration to all, and a committed advocate for workers' rights and a more just economy. She is the founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, which is a national network that engages the religious community on issues affecting low-wage workers. She's also the author of Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing and the co-author of Organizing for Social Change, the most widely-used manual on progressive activism in the country.
The event starts at 12:00 PM on February 12th. Here's the location: University Lutheran Chapel
2425 College Ave. (at Haste Street)
Berkeley, CA (2 blocks from the UCB Labor Center)
For more information, contact Andrea Buffa at andreabuffa[at]berkeley.edu or or 510-642-6371. The site is fully accessible. Metered
street parking is available or you can park at the public lot on Haste Street, between
Telegraph and Bowditch.
The Marin Interfaith
Committee joined forces with the United Farm Workers to stand up for the rights
of farm workers yesterday evening. They went to the BevMo store in San Rafael to distribute flyers and ask the manager to support
the boycott of Charles Krug-Mondovi wines.
This summer, Napa valley farm workers at Charles Krug-Mondovi’s vineyards
were fired all on the same day. Their contract expired, and instead of
renegotiating with the UFW, Krug-Mondovi fired all of their workers, despite a
warning from the state of California. In September, EBASE and
the East Bay Interfaith Committee went to the BevMo store in Jack London Square to support these workers.
Despite these actions and others like them, the workers still have not gotten
their jobs back.
BevMo is one of the largest
distributors of Charles Krug-Mondovi wines in California. The Marin Interfaith Committee asked that BevMo stop
selling these wines until the dispute can be resolved. After praying with
workers, the manager at BevMo agreed to recommend that people buy other wines.
The Interfaith Committee then stood outside the store to speak to customers and
they held signs to tell passing cars about the boycott.
Please help with the fight
to get these workers’ jobs back! You can get more information and send an email
to Krug-Mondovi at the
UFW site. Or you can call Charles Krug-Mondovi CEO, Peter Mondovi, at
800-682-KRUG. Thanks for your help!
To stand up for ABC Security guards, clergy from all over
the state of California joined with workers and community at the Port of San
Francisco today, to part the Red Sea to lead the Port of San Francisco to the
Promised Land. 90 protesters, including clergy, workers, and community members,
picketed outside the Port building while a delegation of clergy went inside to
ask the Port to stop contracting with ABC Security – a non-union company – and
switch to a union security firm.
ABC Security guards have been organizing to join SEIU Local
24/7, the union that represents security guards and janitors, but ABC refuses
to recognize the union. The EastBay
and Marin Interfaith Committees have been contacting clients of ABC to urge
them to switch to a responsible security company in order to put pressure on
ABC to recognize the union. The Port of Oakland and the Port of San Francisco
both employ non-union ABC Security guards, so when clergy from around the state
were gathered in San Francisco for the Clergy and Laity United for Economic
Justice California (CLUE-CA) conference, they decided to take a stand together
to support these workers.
The clergy followed the actions of Moses, who led his people
out of bondage in Egypt
to the Promised Land. Rev. Eric Lee spoke to the gathered crowd, telling them
how the Red Sea was the only thing standing between
Moses and his people and the Promised Land. Just as Moses parted the Red
Sea to lead his people to the Promised Land, the gathered clergy
then parted a model Red Sea, which represented the only
thing standing between the workers of ABC and justice. Clergy and workers
walked arm-in-arm through the parted Red Sea to lead the
Port of San Francisco
to the Promised Land where there is justice for workers.
This morning, a group of about 60 clergy, workers, and community gathered at the First Congregational Church in Oakland
for the East Bay Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice Breakfast.
During a program led by Pastor Ricky Jenkins, those present learned
about the work that the Interfaith Committee does, the victories it has
won, and the campaigns that it is working on right now.
Participants
celebrated the Interfaith Committee’s successes from the past year,
highlighting the victory for Claremont Hotel workers after 5 years of
struggling for a fair contract and the right to organize. Additionally,
security guards organizing with SEIU 24-7 and airport passenger service
workers organizing with SEIU 1877 described the struggles they face to
organize a union and why the Interfaith Committee's support was so
critical to their campaigns. Finally, a member of Mujeres Unidas y
Activas described their campaign to win legislation that will protect
the rights of household workers like nannies and housekeepers and asked
for support from the faith and union leaders present. (Click here to send a postcard to urge the governor to sign a bill to protect these workers.)
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