Dear Friends,
If I wait until next week, Labor Day will be over and we
will not have talked about it.
So let’s bring it up in our consciousness this week, not as
the official end of the summer season in upstate New
York , but for what it was in its origin more that 110
years ago. It came out of the struggle of working people to be treated with
respect and dignity. If we are at all aware of the stories that make up global
news, the struggle of workers is a work in progress.
I remember as a child, watching as my father participated in
one particularly significant strike. Dad was a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel
in Lackawanna .
He and his coworkers plugged along through World War II in less than
satisfactory conditions. That was part of the American sacrifice that was made
during those profoundly cohesive years. But after the war, they would take no
more. The struggle for justice that took up most of the winter of 1945-46 was
long-remembered in Lackawanna ,
but it paid off in the health, safety and security benefits won by the workers.
The labor union had been at its best in those years.
Since then, labor has struggled all over our country and
world so that people might live with
adequate wages and benefits. : farm workers, mine-workers, teachers in our
land, the shipyard workers of Poland ,
the sweatshops of Asia .
Today, hold these people close:
·
Workers who face dangerous conditions or hazards
without sufficient protection
·
All who face the conflicts of working and caring
for children without adequate support
·
Workers who cannot find work and for whom
unemployment assistance is unavailable
·
Women and children caught up in the sex trade
·
Workers displaced by technical change or global
pressure to relocate jobs
·
Children whose childhood is cut short because
they are forced to work
·
All who face discrimination in getting work or
in the workplace itself because of race,
gender, sexual orientation, or physical disabilities
·
Workers whose work is taken for granted, is
unappreciated or lacks meaning.
Hold them close and pray to the son of the Carpenter of
Nazareth to remind all workers
( those named above, you and me, nameless others) that
God values human labor as sacred – a
reflection of the very work that God does.
Through work, we bring light, beauty and renewal to our world.
