PHOENIX, AZ — Faith leaders from the Arizona Faith Network (AFN), an interfaith organization representing over 4,000 Arizona faith leaders and faith communities, united together to urge their U.S. Senators to take bold action to stand up for Arizonan workers and pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.
Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Quaker faith leaders believe it is time for Senator Sinema and Senator Kelly to take action against the inequalities that fuel wage disparities between workers and CEOs throughout Arizona.
“Our faiths tell us that God, as understood in each of our faith traditions, is concerned with the well-being of all persons regardless of employment status, job title, or economic standing and call us to be concerned with each person – to care for – to love our neighbor,” said AFN Executive Director Rev. Katie Sexton-Wood. “As people of faith, we cannot stand idly by as growing inequality sews injustice in our communities. That is why today, we stand up with our neighbors who we name as workers and demand the passage of the PRO Act,” Sexton-Wood continued.
“The idea that we can find solutions to income inequality working within a framework of competition and greed is seriously mistaken. We can accomplish this by a multi-dimensional approach utilizing a broad array of mechanisms based on spiritual, social, institutional, and legal dynamics. Wages are an earned right, not a charity and; as Prophet (pbuh) had stated ‘Pay the worker his/her/their earned (not as if it is charity), promptly disbursed dues before the sweat has dried up,” said Mustafa Bahar, Executive Director of the Sema Foundation. “We should stand firmly for justice and stand in solidarity with those fighting for, just as we do on Friday prayers, shoulder to shoulder regardless of our backgrounds.”
“In Buddhism, compassion is a fundamental principle. Compassion in practice calls us to the ‘Engaged Buddhism,’ composed of Buddhists seeking ways to apply Buddhist ethics, said Shuru Vasu Bandhu of the Dhammapada Zen Buddhist Community. “From a Zen Buddhist perspective, Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which teaches us to promote the well-being of all and not exploit others for personal gain. As the prosperity of working people continues to dwindle in the face of rising corporate inequality, we are motivated by a moral urgency to support the PRO Act.”
Workers in America today are not getting a fair shake. Our basic labor law, which is supposed to protect the rights of workers to form a union and bargain collectively, is broken. In recent decades, employers have been able to violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) with impunity. An entire union-busting industry now works nonstop to block working people from exercising our rights. Today, in more than 40% of all union organizing elections, employers are charged with breaking the law. They lie. They threaten and coerce. And they routinely fire union supporters. Workers are forced to attend mandatory meetings with one item on the agenda: union-bashing. These messages of fear and intimidation come from the very people who control our paychecks, how much time we can spend with our families, and whether we will have a job tomorrow. And the penalties for employers who engage in this illegal behavior are inconsequential.
We need the PRO Act to ensure good jobs for all working people. Historically, unions have turned bad jobs into good jobs in one industry after another. All working people need and deserve the collective power of a union to help achieve decent pay, secure benefits, flexible schedules, fair treatment, and basic respect and dignity at work.
We also need the PRO Act to address inequality. The latest research shows that the rapid growth of unions in the 20th century dramatically reduced inequality by extending the union advantage to more workers, particularly lower-income workers and Black workers, while at the same time raising standards for non-union workers across entire industries. Growing today’s labor movement is the only policy that has the scale necessary to take us off our current trajectory of ever-growing inequality. Without it, achieving broadly shared prosperity that extends to most working people has virtually no chance.
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