Labor & Employment Law

Labor Day: Recommit to Full Employment

By admin

By the Rev. Jim Sessions

The Rev. Jim Sessions is the president of the Working America Education Fund and is former director of the AFL-CIO Union Community Fund. He reminds us of the need for the union movement and religious communities to recommit to the joint fight for justice.

The labor movement is the largest and most powerful economic justice organization in the world. From its beginning, the union movement and some parts of the religious community have worked together to help bring justice to our society. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1909 recognized this connection by designating the Sunday before Labor Day as Labor Sunday, a day dedicated to the spiritual and educational dimensions of the labor movement.

Labor organizers have often drawn from the deep wells of religious imagery to lead struggles for economic justice. As scholar and author Perry Bush points out, ?They have been able to do so because a great mass of U.S. workers have held religious convictions that were not easily stripped away or transmuted into mindless obeisance to the power of the wealthy.?

Labor Day and Labor Sunday are times for the religious community and the labor movement to not only celebrate working people and their contributions to society. It also is a time to remember the struggles that workers endured to achieve the many benefits we now enjoy but take for granted. Benefits such as the eight-hour day, workers? compensation, overtime pay, pensions, health and safety laws, Social Security, Medicare, vacation days, unemployment compensation, family medical leave, restrictions on child labor, a minimum wage and the freedom to form unions for collective bargaining. These benefits helped to humanize the workplace and to provide a safety net for millions.

This Labor Day and Labor Sunday, we need to recommit ourselves to the principles that have energized the labor movement over the centuries. For example, in this richest country in the world, more than 2 million full-time workers live below the poverty line, struggling to pay for necessities like food, housing, health care, transportation and child care.

If America?s economy is going to recover, we need paychecks that can fuel consumption. And it would be unconscionable to allow profitable companies to use the recession to drive America?s middle class out of existence.

With record long-term unemployment and communities losing vital public services, it is time to put full and fair employment and a massive federal works program back on the national agenda. Anybody who wants to work should be able to find a job, and not just any job but a job with justice.

Big Business is sitting on record cash reserves. Rather than put America back to work, they?re spending that money opposing jobs and fair taxes. The labor movement and the religious community must combine their power and mobilize to achieve full and fair employment. We must push hard for Congress to pass legislation like the Local Jobs for America Act, which would save or create 1 million jobs. We must continue funding the emergency Temporary Assistance to Needy Families subsidized jobs program and again extend emergency unemployment compensation. To rein in Wall Street, Congress must pass a financial speculation tax.

After the Labor Day weekend is over, we can keep raising our voices. Labor, religious and community coalitions across the country are organizing to address the jobs emergency in many ways, including actions on Sept. 15, organizing local Unemployed Workers Councils and building for the ?One Nation Working Together? march on Washington on Oct. 2. Now is the time to make sure that we use our political and moral power once again to make life better for working Americans.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 06, 2010 (boomark / email).