c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ This Labor Day weekend, David Klein will have more on his mind than a backyard barbecue. Klein, a stagehand at a Chicago opera company, is cooking up a sermon he plans to preach in a local church Sunday (Sept. 6).

Klein is among the hundreds of workers and union leaders around the country expected to climb into pulpits this weekend to deliver talks on today’s labor struggles and the”sanctity”of work.”I’m just a rank-and-file guy in a small union. I usually don’t stand up and talk in front of people,”said Klein, who is Jewish but has been invited to preach to Catholic parishioners.”I’m not a very religious person. I don’t wind up in places of worship very often.” Congregations in some 30 cities across the nation have signed up for the preaching program, dubbed”Labor in the Pulpits,”said Kim Bobo, executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice (NICWJ).

The Chicago-based NICWJ hopes to renew the historic ties between religion and labor at a time when unions are organizing low-wage workers in hotels, nursing homes, poultry factories and other workplaces.

For the second consecutive year, the Chicago Federation of Labor has called off its traditional Labor Day parade to work overtime on the weekend worship services, said federation president Don Turner.”There is a natural connection between religion and labor,”said Turner, whose organization is helping to pair union leaders and congregations and promote other interfaith events.”There’s a common set of values. We talk about the dignity of work and just wages and the ethical obligation to help the poorest in society.” In the largest effort of any city, more than 100 Chicago-area churches, synagogues and mosques are planning to tailor their services to the labor theme, said the Rev. Richard Bundy, director of the Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues.

John Sweeney, president of the national AFL-CIO in Washington, is scheduled to speak from the pulpits of Bundy’s New Faith Baptist Church in Matteson, Ill., to Holy Name Cathedral, the seat of Chicago’s Catholic archdiocese.

Bundy said he hopes observances in black churches such as his own will mark the beginning of a”redemptive dialogue”between unions and the African-American community.”There’s been a history of exclusion”of African Americans from certain sectors of the trade union movement, he said.

According to Turner of the labor federation, most unions in the Chicago building trades are laboring under court-ordered desegregation plans, and are carrying out those orders by recruiting minorities for apprenticeship programs.

In Los Angeles, more than 50 congregations are planning Labor Day weekend services featuring sermons by hotel maids, farm workers and others involved in union organizing campaigns, said Linda Lotz of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, an interfaith group.

The labor message will go out to congregations in some of the Los Angeles area’s poorest sections, as well as the richest, including Beverly Hills, Lotz said.

In Siler City, N.C., poultry workers will tell at least 10 congregations of their struggles for decent wages and working conditions, according to Jerry Taylor, a minister in the Churches of Christ, a loosely organized evangelical denomination, and director of the North Carolina Poultry Justice Alliance.

In its second year,”Labor in the Pulpits”is unabashedly pro-union. But that doesn’t worry business leaders in at least one big city.”It makes perfect sense,”said M.J. Carlson, communications director of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, speaking diplomatically of the labor sermons.”Chicago is a very large union town.” Asked if the chamber plans to request equal time in the pulpits, Carlson said”it would be interesting if business leaders were involved as equals.” Not a chance, said the NICWJ’s Bobo, which coordinates”Labor in the Pulpits”with the national AFL-CIO.

From her perspective, business does well enough on its own.”Their story, frankly, is getting out a lot more than the labor story. There are business pages in newspapers, not labor pages,”Bobo said.

Echoing the sentiment, Chicago’s Bundy said low-wage workers in particular”need to have their story told. The church is one place where they can do that.”He added,”You hear a lot about high-skilled, college-educated workers. But there are a lot of blue-collar workers who are struggling and on the margins.” James Carter, whose job is to organize some of those workers, said he will stick to the Scriptures when he preaches to his fellow parishioners at Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American congregation on Chicago’s South Side.”It’s just biblical common sense: Do unto others the way you’d want them to do unto you,”said Carter, a former grocery store clerk who is now organizing coordinator of Local 881 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.”That means treating people right in the workplace and paying them enough to live on.”

IR END BOLE