Alan Jenkins’ job plans for this summer did not go over well with his parents. They worried about him being away from home and even possibly being in danger. But what really bothered them was having their son work shoulder to shoulder with unions.
That just didn’t make sense to his parents–middle-income, politically conservative suburbanites in Atlanta, with deep doubts about unions.
But Jenkins, a first-year student at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, stuck to his plans.
“We are called upon to bring a sense of justice,” he told his parents in defense of his acceptance of organized labor’s invitation to come learn about its ways.
Jenkins was one of 25 summer interns, most Christian and Jewish seminary students, who this week began a novel weeklong training session at the Dominican Conference Center in River Forest meant to cement their roots with organized labor.
After a crash course in labor history and union issues, the group will scatter to communities across the U.S. for 10-week paid internships. From poultry factories in rural Arkansas to hospitals in Los Angeles, they will take part in union organizing drives as well as linking up religious and labor groups.
The program is run by the Chicago-based National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and the AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for organized labor.
As the group gathered for the first session Monday, Jenkins quickly discovered he was not the only one coming from an environment where unions were not warmly regarded.
“Unions were the next best thing to hell,” quipped a seminary student from western Texas.
But those feelings didn’t keep away the students.
The internship program is one more effort by organized labor to show that it not only remains relevant, but also is staging a comeback after years of declining membership and clout. Forming an alliance with religious leaders is not new for American unions. But the two drew apart over the years, and ties formed decades ago barely linger today.
One of those leading the training was Kim Bobo, head of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, who talked about a “lost generation” of clergy who have been distant from organized labor since the heyday of unions in the 1930s.
So, too, union leaders were less than enthusiastic about linking up with clergy when she first raised the concept four years ago.
But those attitudes have turned around among union leaders, she said, and Nancy Harvin, of the AFL-CIO’s summer programs effort, was on hand to attest to the level of union support.
“We had more requests from unions than there were bodies,” said Harvin, who also oversees the AFL-CIO’s four-year-old summer program that places about 200 people, most college students, in similar positions with unions.
As the group’s members, some of whom are not seminary students but are active in their religious communities, introduced themselves, many told about volunteer or full-time jobs on behalf of immigrants or the poor.
These were experiences, they explained, that they thought unions would be similarly involved in. Otherwise, few knew much beyond what they had read in the history books about organized labor.
But a few had encounters with unions that had assured them, they said, that they shared labor’s goals.
After taking part this year in demonstrations on behalf of hotel workers in the San Francisco area, Eva Creydt Schulte, 23, a student at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, Calif., decided that joining the summer program was the “appropriate thing to do.”
But as she looked back over her interests, she said she could see how the two summers she had spent working with a migrant health program in Iowa and the time she had spent with a women’s cooperative in Mexico had led the way to learning about union organizing.
Daniel Smokler, a 21-year-old Yale University student who intends to become a rabbi, said his mother was an organizer among migrant workers in Michigan in the 1960s. Other than that, however, Smokler said he didn’t hear much good about unions while growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Ann Arbor, Mich.
In that small world, unions were often referred to as “soulless, godless” groups, he said.
His thinking changed earlier this year, however, while immersed in a 17-day sit-in at Yale over its policies on university products made by workers in Third World factories.
Hours of discussing the issue with other students convinced him that the cause of sweatshop workers is very important. So, too, he felt, are unions. But he also felt the lengthy discussions held by activists about the sweatshops lacked something.
“It was faith,” he said.
And as someone who would help others, he decided that he needed to learn how to link faith with justice. Indeed, he completed his application for the summer program while in the midst of the student demonstration.
Unlike most of the others, James Hadley, another recent seminary graduate, had deep union roots. His father was a union carpenter, and his family’s tree in Decatur, Ill., stretches back to Irish-American immigrants, who started out as railroad workers and union members.
“The union was the savior of my family for generations,” he resolutely said.
That kind of support was not what he heard recently, he recounted, when he spoke at his family’s church in Downstate O’Fallon about his summer plans. The negative reaction surprised him, but, he added, it didn’t deter him.
“The union allowed my father to feed his family, and it helped him speak out,” he said.
