Faith and Workers Rights

by: Mae Singerman

Tue Dec 15, 2009 at 13:52:42 PM EST

Recently, the service learning team had a training and I learned about Uri L’Tzedek. Uri L’Tzedek is a social justice organization that brings workers, restaurant owners and community members together to create just workplaces in kosher restaurants.

I love this idea and am so excited to see how it develops. This work reminds me of an organization I’ve been working with for a few years called Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida (IA). IA works with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to improve sub-poverty wages and end modern-day slavery and human rights abuses in the fields.

IA brings the spiritual resources of diverse faith traditions and the moral weight of faith-based voices in society to their work in collaboration with farmworkers for justice in the fields. IA is currently working to push Publix, a large Florida-based supermarket chain to take responsibility for slavery and abuse in their supply chain. They recently participated in a 500-person march and prayer vigil in Publix’s hometown of Lakeland, Florida. (Publix should take a lesson from all the other corporations—Sign the agreement and move on, because the CIW does not mess around!)

I’m excited to see a rise of faith-based organizations working within their denominations and in coalition with other people of faith to take on social justice issues. As, Uri L’Tzedek writes, “for Orthodoxy to remain a relevant and a transformative force, it must speak to the souls of American Jews. Jews, today more than ever, are seeking to make meaning of their contemporary identities and to be engaged in modern society in more complex and nuanced ways. The Torah must be an enabler, not an inhibitor, in guiding a sophisticated and moral discourse and call to action.” To learn more about IA go to www.interfaithact.org. To learn more about Uri L’Tzedek, go to http://www.jewishideas.org/tsufit-daniel/torah-and-social-justice-work-uri-ltzedek