NEWS FEATURE: Religious activists _ doing the government’s job protecting workers

c. 1999 Religion News Service CHICAGO _ In a cluster of cubicles here, some well-trained functionaries are grinding out manuals on government regulations in the workplace and monitoring conditions in sweatshops. But this isn’t a branch of the U.S. Department of Labor or some other regulatory agency. And the people staring at the computer screens […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

CHICAGO _ In a cluster of cubicles here, some well-trained functionaries are grinding out manuals on government regulations in the workplace and monitoring conditions in sweatshops.

But this isn’t a branch of the U.S. Department of Labor or some other regulatory agency. And the people staring at the computer screens aren’t government bureaucrats. They’re religious activists who have enlisted in a crusade to uplift working conditions.


The fourth-floor offices, in a former Presbyterian parsonage, are home to the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and its local affiliate. The organization was formed three years ago to ignite a movement of religion and labor together.

Unexpectedly, the national committee and its growing band of affiliates around the country have found themselves doing the government’s job of enforcing the labyrinth of laws protecting workers.

Over the past few years, religious activists expended energy trying to get government agencies to produce easy-to-read materials about rights in the workplace, said Kim Bobo, executive director of the national committee. They made scarce headway.”We just said, `Phew! We’ll do it ourselves,'”said Bobo, a former church anti-hunger advocate who speaks around the country to churches and synagogues. She overseas a lean, eight-member staff here at the national office.”These are not user-friendly agencies,”she said, referring to the various government agencies responsible for enforcing the laws.”They’re not known for being out there and protecting workers.” The Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues has issued what U.S. Labor Department officials here acknowledge is a rarity _ a comprehensive guide to workplace rights.

The committee produced the 56-page manual because there was no uniform guide to rights such as minimum wage and overtime compensation, health and safety standards, freedom from discrimination in the workplace, and the right to organize and bargain collectively. No single government agency has oversight of all the laws explained in the document.

The manual has been published in English, Spanish and Polish, and editions in Chinese and Korean are in preparation.

The Chicago committee has distributed close to 1,500 copies, partly through training sessions on worker rights, said spokeswoman Kristi Sanford. The workshops are taking place in churches as well as homeless shelters housing day laborers who can’t afford rent.

A year ago, Ana Rodriguez was able to lay her hands on an early draft version of the manual. At the time, she and her co-workers were rising up against what they viewed as sweatshop conditions at Milton Industries, a Chicago auto-parts plant where they worked.


Her pastor, the Rev. Kevin Feeney of St. Sylvester Catholic Church on the city’s Northwest Side, had linked her up with the local interfaith network in support of worker rights.

She recalled using the manual to help win back pay _ a few hundred dollars for each employee _ and also lift the morale of her co-workers, most of them Latino immigrant women, like herself.”I told them they didn’t have to put up with this,”Rodriguez said in an interview at the rectory, with translation help from Feeney.

Reached by telephone, company president John Santina would neither confirm nor deny this account.”I’m sorry, I don’t give interviews over the phone,”he said, adding that neither did anyone else at the company. He also refused to grant an in-person interview or answer questions in writing.

Bobo said her dream is to raise an army of ministers, priests and rabbis who would serve as volunteer inspectors of sweatshops, perhaps starting with Southern poultry plants.

For now, together with affiliates in Georgia and North Carolina, the national interfaith committee is getting ready to disseminate freshly produced manuals specifically for chicken-plant workers in those states. A similar publication for Arkansas is in the works.

Several”poultry justice”organizations are part of the national interfaith committee’s widening network. When it surfaced in early 1996, the organization counted a dozen local and regional interfaith coalitions dedicated to issues of labor and workplace justice. Now there are more than four times as many, all affiliated with the national committee.


Bobo said religious activists have targeted the poultry industry because of rough conditions in that sector. In some cases, plant workers”can’t get off the line to go to the bathroom. They wear pads, so if they pee in their pants, they won’t soil the clothes. It’s really not pleasant stuff,”she said, noting federal law gives workers the right to restroom breaks.

Different government officials have different reactions to these and other religious forays into the workplace. A lot seems to depend on whose regulatory ox is being gored.

Nancy Chen, regional administrator of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department in Chicago, praised the”Workers’ Rights Manual”published by the local interfaith committee.”It’s a first of its kind, at least in Chicago, and probably in the country,”said Chen. Indeed, the Women’s Bureau kicked in $1,000 for production of the manual.

When asked about complaints the Labor Department hasn’t adequately enforced the laws, Chen simply replied,”Not my agency.”She pointed out that the job of the Women’s Bureau is education, not enforcement, and referred the question to the department’s Wage and Hour Division.

Brad Mitchell, a spokesman for the division’s regional branch here, was less at ease in talking about the religious intervention.”I don’t know of any case in which we didn’t make our best effort to resolve a problem”in the workplace, he said.”I don’t know what more we can do.” One thing Bobo and others wanted the Labor Department to do was draw up a simple form that workers can fill out when they have complaints about labor-law violations. She and her staff wound up doing it themselves.

Mitchell said a complaint sheet isn’t necessary.”It seems to me to be a little easier just to dial the phone and tell us about the problem,”he said.


But Bobo said it’s actually pretty hard. She recalled that when church and community leaders began complaining about the return of sweatshops in Chicago, the Department of Labor told them little could be done without workers filing a complaint.

So they decided to help workers file complaints. First, she asked for a complaint form that the interfaith committee could distribute through congregations. There was no such form.

Next, she followed the formal instructions to contact the Wage and Hour Division listed in the telephone directory under”U.S. Government, Labor Department.”In the Chicago directory under the Department of Labor, there were six listings, none of which were the Wage and Hour Division, she said. As it turned out, the right listing was”Farm Labor Compliance,”which she thought an improbable place to call about urban sweatshop abuses.

Those who do call that number get a voice mail message (in English) asking for a daytime phone number. But as Bobo noted, sweatshop workers aren’t eager to leave a phone number so their bosses could get a call from the Labor Department. She noted workers can stop by the downtown office, but it’s open only between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., not a convenient time for most workers.

After running down these trails last year, the local interfaith committee decided to draw up a simple form that workers can fill out and mail, fax or deliver to the Labor Department.”We now have the only complaint form in the country,”said Bobo, partly amused and partly amazed, adding that the national committee is now working with officials in Washington to devise a standard form for use nationwide.

Regional officials of the Wage and Hour Division have agreed to use the one-page fliers, but what exactly they’ll do with them is not yet clear. In any event, the interfaith group plans this fall to begin spreading copies of the form widely among low-wage workers here.


DEA END BOLE

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