This preview is available at the website below until the end of February 2011.
At the River I Stand chronicles the tumultuous events that unfolded over two fateful months in 1968. It began as a local strike by African American sanitation workers for human dignity and a living wage . The story eventually captured national attention and drew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, along with the assassin who would kill him. The results marked a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement and the national struggle for racial and economic justice.
via At the River I stand Preview.
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This assault on public workers is happening in one state after another around the country.“This is a concerted, deep attack on public employees and public workers,” Gerald W. McEntee, president of the 1.6-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees AFSCME, told the Washington Post last month.
via The Cynical War on Public Sector Workers | The Progressive.
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The liberal-fundamentalist debate still rages in urban America. Likewise, the working class still suffers from the same instability that plagued them a century ago. As fewer and fewer working class employees are needed by industries because of mechanization and recession, economic struggles will increase for these families. Seminary-trained pastors look to the suburban populations of the America to build and fill the churches of the 1990s and (among many other urban populations) the working class neighborhood is largely ignored.
As conservative seminaries debate what constitutes evangelism – soul-winning or social reform – decades worth of urban souls are lost due to suburban wealth, indecision, and complacency. As urban problems snowball, it is imperative that Christians decide that evangelism does indeed constitute both soul-winning and social reform. This will ultimately require agonizing self-sacrifice on the part of wealthy middle class Christians. Evangelists and evangelicals must agree that these two aspects of evangelism are not mutually exclusive.
Finally, as American industries migrate to the Third World to recreate the conditions they imposed on urban America a century ago, Christian evangelicals must not repeat the mistakes of the past. If we fail to heed the lessons that American urban industrialization has left of us, our millions of dollars and hours of overseas missionary work will be in vain. Our evangelization efforts might leave behind a number of churches and believers but we will also leave behind the exploited and confused victims of a capitalistic society, numb and properly inoculated against the gospel of Christ.
via Urban Pilgrims and Pioneers: Industry, Unions, Jesus and the Blue Collar Worker – Articles – God’s Word – Urbana.org.
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Here was a man of deep conviction. How, I wondered, had John Sweeney developed his convictions? What influenced him to take the journey from his Irish Catholic roots in the parochial Bronx to cosmopolitan Washington, D.C., as president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.? Who challenged and inspired him along the way? What ideas, organizations and people fueled his desire to be of service to others? What, in short, led Sweeney to stand with the N.Y.U. graduate students that day?
via America Magazine – The Making of a Catholic Labor Leader.
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No one needs to tell America’s families that unemployment and underemployment are at crisis levels. We need jobs—and we need them now.
Wall Street has gotten its bailouts. Now it’s time for Main Street to get some immediate help.
The AFL-CIO is calling on Congress and the Obama administration to take five steps now to care for jobless workers and put America back to work.
1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems.
3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
4. Put people to work doing work that needs to be done.
5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.
America’s jobs situation would be even more dire without the economic stimulus program President Obama and Congress enacted, which has saved or created 1 million jobs. But the depth of this crisis demands that we do more—and that we do it now, before more people lose their jobs, their homes, their health care and their hope.
Read the details at Good Jobs Now: AFL-CIO Jobs Agenda.
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This group was intiated by the Eastern Worker Cooperative Conference and transferred to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives in 2008. Its mission is to work towad the visio of a worker driven cooperative economy, with workplace and economic democracy for all. the primary focus is building bridges between the cooperative and labor movements, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
via Unions and Coops | Grassroots Economic Organizing.
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This is a very interesting historical site about life in a “company” coal mining town, McIntyre, PA.
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I am currently reading “Less Than Forever: the Rise and Decline of Union Solidarity in Western Pennsylvania, 1914-1948 by Carl I. Meyerhuber,Jr. it has a great chapter on “the Black Valley” the Alle-Kiski Valley and its opposition to unions. It has the best information I have read about local labor hero Fannie Sellins, whose grave is about 1/2 mile from our house here in New Kensington.
Very interesting reading about the Valley and local labor and industry.
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