AFL-CIO, Interfaith Worker Justice Enter New Partnership

by James Parks, Dec 12, 2006

The AFL-CIO’s ongoing efforts to promote justice in the workplace for the nation’s most  vulnerable workers now include a new national partnership agreement with Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), the largest faith-based network serving low-wage, often immigrant workers.

In August, the AFL-CIO Executive Council approved formal ties with the worker centers that have sprung up across the country to help low-wage workers and joined in a historic partnership with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), paving the way for completion of the partnership with IWJ today.

Workers in the IWJ network are not union members under this agreement, but it does provide a framework for state federations and central labor councils to work jointly with faith-based worker centers across the country to ensure workers’ rights.

In some communities, IWJ worker centers and unions already are working together, lobbying state legislatures, mayors and city councils for living wage ordinances, working to defeat local anti-immigrant ordinances and spotlighting unscrupulous employers for workplace abuses.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:

The core values that drive both our movements are the same: equality, fair treatment, dignity and respect. Too often, the religious and labor communities have worked in isolation from one another. It’s time we rediscover our common bonds and bring our organizations closer together.

IWJ Executive Director Kim Bobo says the partnership with the AFL-CIO reflects the values of all major religions:

All religious traditions believe that those who work should be paid for their labor and treated with respect and dignity. Workers’ centers put that belief into practice.

IWJ established its worker centers network in 2004 to educate and organize low-wage and immigrant workers and to build power for workers in both their workplaces and the broader community. Currently, there are 14 worker centers in the IWJ network.

Although workers’ issues vary from place to place, centers in the IWJ network educate workers about their basic rights in the workplaces, such as the right to a minimum wage and overtime, the right to healthy and safe work conditions and the right to organize for a better life.

The two groups will work together to do what they have always done: address workplace discrimination, advance civil rights as well as workplace rights for low-wage workers and building and construction trade workers. They also will work together for comprehensive immigration reform that supports workplace rights and includes a path to citizenship and political equality for immigrant workers.

The IWJ and the AFL-CIO have a long history of joining forces to protect workers’ rights. The two groups jointly sponsor the annual Labor in the Pulpits program, which sends workers into religious congregations to speak on workers’ rights during the Labor Day weekend.

Religious leaders, many of them members of IWJ, are often on the frontlines of worker struggles across the country, including fighting for poultry workers in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, construction workers in the Southwest and exploited workers in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Bobo also has written a guide for unions on how to build coalitions with religious groups.