While he waits, Graham talks with some of the 30,000 mostly Latino and African American men and women day laborers in Chicago, many of them homeless. He hears stories of discrimination and intimidation: dispatchers who prefer to send Latinos to job sites because they think they may not have green cards and are therefore easier to "control." Or about paychecks eaten away by employer deductions for transportation to the job—for those lucky enough to get a job. Then Graham talks to the workers about joining a union, saying, "You can't win one-on-one—you need to address employers as a group."

Spending weeks in the world of a day laborer is not what Graham, 26, imagined he would be doing as he was growing up 30 miles outside Chicago in suburban Lisle, Ill. "It was a different world," he says. "It wasn't until I was a teenager working alongside Latinos and African Americans who would come out to the suburbs to work did I find out what social injustice was."

Graham, a student at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, is working with the Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues and meeting with day laborers as part of Seminary Summer, an internship for future religious leaders launched this year by the AFL-CIO and the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. Expanding on the success of the AFL-CIO Union Summer program, Seminary Summer provides 23 seminarians, rabbinical students and other future religious leaders the chance to spend 10 weeks taking part in campaigns for workplace justice. After an initial one-week training in early June, the seminarians fanned out to 14 cities across the country to work with unions on organizing campaigns or first-contract efforts and to help build alliances among religious, community and union activists to support workers in their fight for a voice at work.

Seminary Summer could be key—along with the Labor in the Pulpits program, co-sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the NICWJ—to rebuilding the once strong links between religion and the union movement by creating opportunities for both sides to work together and to explore their common goals, says Kim Bobo, executive director of NICWJ. Those links were weakened in the 1960s and 1970s, creating an entire generation of religious leaders who have little contact with the union movement. But as the union leaders seek more community allies, they are finding that some religious groups are natural partners in the struggle for social justice. "Every religion talks about tying your faith to good works and your good works to faith," Bobo says, "and the movement for workplace justice is a perfect way to bring both of those pieces together."

The road to Seminary Summer

Many Seminary Summer participants have been active in workers' issues, such as the anti-sweatshop movement, that led them to union organizing. Daniel Smokler's mother was an organizer among migrant workers in Michigan in the 1960s. But the 21-year-old Yale student, who plans to become a rabbi, did not think about unions until he took part in a sit-in at Yale over the school's policies on university logo products made by workers in sweatshops in developing countries. He filled out his application for Seminary Summer during the demonstration.

Smokler's Seminary Summer project involves coalition-building with the New Haven religious community and the Community Labor Project, a coalition of HERE locals 34, 35 and 217 and SEIU District 1199. By taking part in the campaign to support workers at the Omni Hotel, Smokler says he now has the opportunity to blend his faith with his passion for justice.

Rachel Cornwell, 26, thought she knew about union organizing after working on Capitol Hill and being involved in international sweatshop issues. But organizing janitors with SEIU Local 82 at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., "is much more difficult than I expected. There are a lot of negative messages coming out of the university. The school is trying to shift the blame for what's happening to the union."

A majority of the university's janitors have signed union cards, but the university refuses to recognize the union or to negotiate. Cornwell is seeking to mobilize students, faculty and religious leaders during the summer so janitors will have a base of support when classes resume in the fall. Her days are filled with leafleting, visiting clergy, e-mailing students and faculty and sending postcards. Her evenings often are long as she and the SEIU organizers plan strategy. Even though it's hard work, Cornwell, a United Methodist Church member studying at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, says she enjoys it. "It's really exciting to see the workers get empowered. I think I might have a call to be an organizer."

The program also has raised participants' awareness of how hard it can be for workers to form a union and the role that congregations can play in helping workers gain justice. "It's not just about praying and preaching," says Brenita Mitchell, a Seminary Summer participant. Mitchell is working with AFSCME Local 3299 in Oakland, Calif., to organize workers at the University of California. "It's about making the commitment to do what needs to be done and having faith that, no matter how hard it gets, right will prevail."

Mitchell, 49, saw firsthand the potential power of a coalition of congregations and unions during a mediation session at a Monterey company at which five workers had asked for union help in dealing with an abusive manager.

The workers made their case, yet management still was unprepared to improve working conditions, she says. But when Mitchell spoke up near the end of the session about the need to heal wounds and come together, "it was like I represented the whole religious community—and they listened." A former social worker and community organizer who now is a student at New Brunswick (N.J.) Theological School, Mitchell says the experience showed her that unions can make a big difference.

Bringing religion back into the union fold

Seminary Summer participants say their experience has given them a new determination to create ways for the religious and union movements to bring about social justice together.

"When I look at the problems of the inner city, I see that all of them are related to poverty," says Mitchell. "And you ask yourself, ‘Where are the churches?'"

		From America@work, August 2001.

Antonio Nilson Camelo, a native of Brazil and a member of the Camboni Missionaries, hopes his summer spent organizing poultry workers with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2008 in Arkansas will teach him skills he can take home to help the poor.

"The church needs to have a dialogue with workers," says Camelo, 32, who chose to attend Catholic Theological Union in Chicago rather than follow his father into farming. "This work ought to be part of our ministry, because whatever we do to improve the lives of workers, I believe, is part of God's plan. It's important to struggle with those who need our help."

It all boils down to how one sees the role of organized religion, Graham says. "One of the day laborers took me to a prayer service at the homeless shelter where he lived," he says. "The minister there told the folks ‘You people are sinners and you need to repent before things will get better.' Then I went to an organizing meeting with some of the same people at the prayer service, and the message was one of empowerment and hope. Which is the most Godlike way of treating people?"