Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia’s video recording of this sermon.
The Christian apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “Now to the one who works, the wages are not credited as a favor, but as what is due,”(from Romans 4:4 NASB). But for too long and by too many, workers are not respected as people but are considered simply a necessity of production to be acquired and used as cheaply as possible.
In my blurb for next Sunday, I noted that in Florida, from where I have moved, recently banned jurisdictions from mandating water breaks for outdoor workers. In April of this year E&E News for Politico reported that “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis… signed into law a ban on local heat protections for outdoor workers, a change sought by business groups after Miami-Dade County considered mandating shade and water breaks.
“The new law, H.B. 433, forbids cities and counties from requiring employers to limit workers’ exposure to heat, or requiring them to offer water, shade, rest breaks or training for how people who work outdoors can protect themselves from heat. It also blocks local governments from establishing protections for workers who report excessive heat, or from requiring government contractors — such as companies that landscape public property — to have heat protections as part of the bidding process.
“The move makes Florida and Texas among the only states in the country with heat protection bans. Texas last year passed a law blocking Dallas and Austin from requiring heat breaks for construction workers. A state court declared the law, nicknamed the ‘Death Star’ bill by opponents, unconstitutional, but it remains in effect while litigation continues,” (from “DeSantis signs bill banning water, shade breaks for laborers” – E&E News by POLITICO (eenews.net).
Too often, from our colonial past to our present day, owners, businesses and those in government aligned with them have done all they can to make the workplace as unwelcoming as possible. If a worker is just a cog in the machine of production, what does it matter if some die? There are plenty to replace them.
It is only when workers unite and find their own power that they can press for the workplace to be more welcoming.
We have already heard a bit about one of the co-founders of the United Farm Workers, Dolores Huerta, in our Time for All Ages story today.
Huerta was spurred to action by what she saw in her classroom. Her co-founder Cesar Chavez was sought out and recruited. An article in The Nation in March of 2016 told the story. On the evening of June 9, 1952, a stranger named Fred Ross showed up at Chavez’s front door. Gabriel Thompson of The Nation wrote, “At the time, Chavez lived in an East Side neighborhood called Sal Si Puedes, or ‘get out if you can’ in Spanish. And there was plenty to get away from. Many streets were without lights, sidewalks, or sewers. A nearby packinghouse dumped refuse into a creek, and when it rained the creek overflowed, flooding the neighborhood with toxins. Two years earlier, residents had gathered signatures asking the city to pave the East Side’s dirt roads. Nothing had happened. Mexican immigrants were meant to pick and pack the valley’s fruits and vegetables and stay quiet…. (Fred) Ross was a curious presence in the barrio. White and wiry, with movie-star looks and a poor grasp of Spanish, he seemed in need of directions back to the freeway. But he wasn’t lost—he was an organizer looking for a way in, hoping to build a statewide movement of Mexican Americans. A local nurse had passed along Chavez’s name as a potential recruit, though Chavez was initially suspicious of ‘this gringo,’ as he later put it…. Two hours later, Chavez’s skepticism had been transformed into wide-eyed enthusiasm. In his short life, Chavez had seen plenty that wasn’t right. His father had lost their ranch during the Depression, and much of Chavez’s boyhood was spent on the road, picking crops under a scorching sun. The problems seemed vast, the only solution to buckle down, work harder, and rise above. But that night, Ross presented another option: Mexican Americans rising together. And he somehow made progress feel not just possible, but inevitable,” (from “Meet the Long-Forgotten Organizer Who Inspired Cesar Chavez to Become an Activist” | The Nation).
United Farm Workers. United is a very important word in that name. There is a long history of owners and bosses purposely dividing workers. Unions too have sometimes bought into those divisions, but when they work best, they know the power of being a union, a united people. When workers are divided, they cannot win the victories needed to make the workplace a safer, more welcoming place.
Dividing workers from one another goes far back in America. Dorothy Roberts, in her essay on “Race” for The 1619 Project, writes, “In the early days of colonial America, the vast majority of people compelled to work for landowners were vagrant children, convicts, and indentured laborers imported from Europe. The wealthy settlers who benefited from their unfree labor did not at first distinguish between the status of European, African, and Indigenous servants. But as the slave trade mushroomed, Africans began to be subjected to a distinct kind of servitude: they alone were considered actual property of their enslavers…. Enslaved Black women gave birth to enslaveable children even if the fathers were white. In discarding English legal tradition (that children had the rights of their fathers), the colonists adopted the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem- ‘the offspring follows the belly ‘- used to determine the ownership of animals.”
By law, propertied white colonists created a race distinction that they could use to divide black and white workers and keep poor whites from joining with blacks in revolt.
Matthew Desmond, in his essay on “Capitalism” for The 1619 Project, writes, “During the decade leading up to the Civil War, Southern planters buoyed by the tide of rising cotton prices squeezed white yeomen off their farms to expand their landholdings and plant more of the lucrative crop. The former freeholders often found work as overseers on the planters’ ever-expanding estates, driving enslaved Black hands… The yeoman lost their farms but retained their whiteness as consolation. If liberty could not be materially secured through landholding, at least it could be somewhat felt. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage… It was a definition of freedom far too easily satisfied, a freedom ready with justifications and rationalizations as to why some were allowed to live like gods while others were cast into misery and poverty….”
Divide the workers and exploitation remains possible. The first two little United Methodist churches I served when I was right out of seminary were in the Anthracite District of the United Methodist Church, coal country. Back then, in the 1980s, there, a mixed marriage meant a Protestant and a Catholic were marrying. There were many stories of grandmothers sneaking babies to the “right” church to be baptized. A friend gave me a book on the history of the region that explained some of this division.
When the German and British miners stood up to the mine owners demanding better pay and better working conditions, the owners did not give in to their demands. They went and recruited new miners desperate for work from Italy and Eastern Europe. The Germans and Brits were generally Protestant, the Italians and Eastern Europeans Catholic. The mine owners did all they could to keep the groups separate and in conflict with one another so that they might not unite against them.
To return again to Matthew Desmond’s essay “Capitalism,” he writes, “…a defining feature of American capitalism is the country’s relatively low level of labor power… Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could instead choose to buy people, rent them, contract indentured servants, take on apprentices, or hire children or prisoners. Within this environment, white workers formed labor unions and advocated for better pay, improved conditions, and shorter workdays. Yet nearly all those unions withheld membership from free Black workers…. By upholding racial segregation within their unions, white workers made their fears of being undercut by Black labor a foregone conclusion. Closing the door on Black people created a pool of available and desperate (people) who could be used to break strikes and quell unrest.”
Labor power grows when none are excluded. Dolores Huerta’s slogan for the United Farm Workers was “Sí, se puede” not”Sí, algunos de nosotros podemos”; “yes, we can,” not “yes, some of us can.”
In Southern Cultures, Terrell Orr has an article titled “Now We Work Just as One: The United Farm Workers in Florida Citrus, 1972-1977.” Orr writes, “As director of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Union in Florida, (Mack Lyons) had worked tirelessly for the last two-and-a-half years. Driving an aging 1968 Ford station wagon across the state, from swampy South Florida to the capital of Tallahassee, he gave countless speeches in churches, at local unions, and at political rallies; and, with his wife Diana Lyons and a small team of volunteers, planned, negotiated, and administered the first farmworkers’ collective bargaining agreement in Florida’s history. It was a contract between the Black, Mexican American, and white workers in Florida’s citrus groves and one of the most powerful companies in the world, Coca-Cola, which owned the Minute Maid groves and company houses where those workers lived and toiled… an understaffed crew of volunteers from California and local grove workers had forged an interracial union within a multiracial political coalition in the 1970s U.S. South.” (from “Now We Work Just as One” – Southern Cultures.)
Unions really cannot work if they exclude some workers. As long as some can continue to be exploited, the workplace will be less than welcoming for everyone.
Mack Lyons himself came into organizing interestingly. “He was born in 1941 near Dallas, to parents who worked in Texas cotton fields…. In Texas, he had been a farmworker inconsistently, and deliberately so. It was grueling work that he avoided as much as possible. Now in California and needing money, Mack and a few friends took a truck and went looking for a job in Delano’s sprawling grape fields. Mack said that until he pulled up to the edge of that DiGiorgio grape field in Delano, he ‘had never saw any grapes.’ But it was not the fruit that made a lasting impression on him. It was the picket line of people, primarily Mexicans and Mexican Americans, holding flags emblazoned with a striking black Aztec eagle against a bright red background, and signs that read, in all capital letters, HUELGA.
“Mack recalled that neither he nor any of the other Black farmworkers he was riding with knew any Spanish. Huelga is Spanish for ‘strike,’ and what Mack saw were the early days of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers striking in the Delano vineyards. Before the decade was over, everyone in California would know what “huelga” meant.
“Apprehensive but curious, Mack talked to the UFW members on the picket line. They likely explained to him that the strike began a year earlier, in 1965, initiated by the largely Filipino Agricultural Workers of California (AWOC) and followed by the largely Mexican American National Farm Workers of America (NFWA), led by Cesar Chavez, against the grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley. They likely explained that these growers cheated field workers out of wages, used state-subsidized labor in the Bracero Program as competition, exposed workers to harmful pesticides, and treated them as barely human. The growers attempted to break the unions’ strike by pulling in workers from elsewhere and having picket line demonstrators arrested. When Mack showed up looking for work that day, he himself had been an unwitting strikebreaker.” (from “Now We Work Just as One” – Southern Cultures).
My great-grandfather was a breaker boy in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. Being a breaker boy was hard and dangerous work. You sat on the coal chute and pulled pieces of slag out and discarded them from the coal. If as you leaned in to pick the slag from the coal you happened to fall into the chute that might be your end. My great-grandfather eventually became involved in working to unionize those who worked in the coal fields.
The first R-rated movie I ever saw was one that my mother took my brother, sister and me to see. It was “The Molly Maguires,” about Irish-American miners battling against their exploitation in 19th-century Carbon County, Pennsylvania.
I believe in the power or workers uniting.
In his sermon “Putting ‘Labor’ Back in Labor Day,” UU minister the Rev. Dr. David Breeden says of his family, “And so three generations after arriving in this nation, the family was starving in a two room shack. My father was one of thirteen children. Of that group, three eventually escaped poverty. How did three escape? My father was able to join a labor union. And two of my aunts married men who were able to join labor unions. The rest of those children died in the poverty they had been born into.” (from “Putting “Labor” Back in Labor Day” | WorshipWeb | UUA.org).
I end with words from United States President John F. Kennedy: “The labor movement is people. Our unions have brought millions of (people) together, made them members one of another, and given them common tools for common goals. Their goals are goals for all America – and their enemies are the enemies for progress. The two cannot be separated.” May we work together to make all workplaces more welcoming to all the workers.
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