Mothers Fighting Poverty: Lupe Gonzalo, Immokalee, Florida

Leading up to Mother’s Day, the NCC Poverty Initiative is sharing a series of stories lifting up, celebrating, and praying for mothers who are fighting poverty and alleviating suffering in their communities.

Prayer for Lupe: Dios, gracias for expressing your love through Lupe to farmworkers. Thank you for filling her heart with solidarity and love of her fellow workers. When times get tough, fill her with your grace and courage. Bless and strengthen her family and her work for Fair Food. In good times and bad, let her life overflow with the deepest joy that only You can give. Amen.

Recognized by: Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida

One of the farmworker leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), Lupe is a powerful voice for dignified wages and working conditions in the fields of Florida. Originally from Guatemala, Lupe spent over a decade in Immokalee, FL harvesting vegetables, often under some of the harshest conditions.

Today, because of the tireless work of mothers and workers like Lupe, we are witnessing a transformation of human rights the US agricultural industry, as a twenty-year struggle gives birth to the  Fair Food Program, a unique partnership between workers, growers and corporate buyers. Just last month, the Fair Food Program was lifted up by the White House as “one of the most successful and innovative programs” in the fight to uncover — and prevent — modern day slavery.

These days, when not caring for her family, Lupe works full time educating other workers on their newly won rights, chief among them the right to work free of sexual harassment.

While the struggle continues with intransigent corporate buyers like Publix and Wendy’s, we give thanks for the remarkable leadership and strength of such mothers and luchadoras (fighters), knowing that so long as they’re leading, the historic shift underway in Florida will only continue to grow.

What do YOU need? Minimum Wage Campaign Survey

This summer, the NCC Poverty Initiative will raise awareness about the role of the minimum wage in lifting people out of poverty. We’d like to know what you’d find helpful. Will you take a moment to fill out our survey some time before the end of April?

Fill it out here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WZRJ79C

How are jobs created?

Reblogged from Faith and Public Policy:

In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, there's been a lot of bad economics floating around. Perhaps none is more prevalent in certain circles than the idea that rich people are job-creators; after all, when was the last time a poor person offered you a job? This entirely misunderstands our modern economic system. To see why, I'll start with a simple example of a job I used to have at Target.

Read more… 718 more words

Thoughts on job creation and wages from our new summer intern Nate Kratzer. Follow his blog: http://faithandpublicpolicy.wordpress.com

The Faith Community’s 2012 Year-End Jobless Statement

2012 Year-End Jobless Statement from the Interreligious Working Group on Domestic Human Needs

January 15, 2013

Reflecting on 2012, we give prayerful thought to the 12.2 million Americans who found themselves without a job at the end of the year. As people of faith, we continue to be concerned about our country’s slow economic recovery. While we are encouraged by the steady growth we have seen over the past year, we still remain particularly concerned for those individuals often left on the margins of the conversation about economic recovery. We also recognize how vulnerable this growth is to the decisions currently being made by Congress in regards to budgetary spending and deficit reduction.

We began the year with a jobless rate of 8.3%, and ended the year with a decreased rate of 7.8%. The average unemployment rate for 2012 was 8.1%. Still, we continue to be deeply concerned about the long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), of which there were 4.8 million last month alone— 39.1% of the unemployed population. We were encouraged in December to see that Congress extended unemployment insurance through the end of the year, since this program is such a crucial resource for the millions of people who are experiencing long-term unemployment. Among specific worker groups the average unemployment rate in 2012 for adult men was 7.5%, adult women 7.4%, whites 7.2%, blacks 13.8%, Hispanics 10.3%, and Asians 6.0%. Charts with a month-by-month analysis of unemployment among specific worker groups can be found at the end of this statement.

2012 was a year of steady growth, yet Congress still failed to pass any major piece of legislation that created jobs in a large-scale manner. Mixed with the potential threats of massive program and budget cuts, our economy still struggles with the danger of a double-dip recession. While steady growth in encouraging, until we start to see a significant change in the number of new jobs being created each month—especially those focused on vulnerable communities— the faith community still remains cautiously optimistic about the job situation.

As Congress negotiates the second phase of a deficit reduction deal it is paramount that in order to continue the steady job growth that we saw in 2012, that funding is protected for programs that provide job training (including the Workforce Reinvestment Act), education, and safety-net for the unemployed, especially unemployment insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) and the Emergency Food and Shelter Program.

It is also critical that Congress and the White House introduce a serious and comprehensive job proposal that helps Americans get back to work, in both the public and private sector. Another year should not go by while Congress waits to pass real job creation legislation. A particular emphasis should be made in providing training and jobs in growth industries such as home healthcare, technology, education, and construction. In addition, any new jobs created through federal legislation must generate sustainable employment that pays fair wages and provides opportunities for advancement. A new jobs program must address the immediate needs while also creating a long-term path to economic security for both workers and employers.

Our faiths inspire our deep commitment to unemployed workers and their families. We are now looking to Congress to ensure that the federal government continues to work with our faith communities in this effort. To this end, we will keep you abreast on the monthly unemployment situation, sharing stories and information on struggling families who often fall under the radar.

As we reflect on our economy’s health during the past year and look towards a 2013 with prayers of progress in the job market, we remind our elected officials that they must act soon to aid those who have suffered unemployment far too long. As scripture tells us, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Proverbs 31:8-9

You can find DHN’s Jobs Statement of Principles at http://domestichumanneeds.org/uploads/DHN-Jobs-Statement-of-Principles.pdf.

American Friends Service Committee
Bread for the World
Church of the Brethren
Friends Committee on National Legislation
Interfaith Worker Justice
Islamic Society of North America
Jewish Council for Public Affairs
The Jewish Federations of North America
Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office
National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd
National Council of Churches
National Council of Jewish Women
NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby
The Office of Social Justice of the Christian Reformed Church
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, Institute Justice Team
Union for Reform Judaism
The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
United Church of Christ
The United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society

PDF of the Statement including monthly graphs

Livingston to Leave NCC to Work for Interfaith Worker Justice

I share this press release about my coming departure from the National Council of Churches with a sense of deep gratitude for the opportunity I have had to work with you to end poverty. I see my new work at Interfaith Worker Justice as an extension of this work and hope that you will be, or already are, an ally of IWJ in the ministry of good work and fair pay for the people of God.

Shantha Ready Alonso, who has worked with the Poverty Initiative for two years as an advocacy and outreach specialist will carry our work forward as Interim Poverty Initiative Coordinator starting at the beginning of September. You can click here to read her bio and you can reach her at shantha@nccendpoverty.org.

Grace and Peace,

Michael Livingston

Director, National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative

We’re on and  @nccendpoverty … Check us out!

The NCC Poverty Initiative’s role in raising the awareness and will of Christians to act to reduce poverty is more crucial than ever. Please consider how God might be calling you and your church to join together with the NCC in the work to end poverty. May our voices grow louder and stronger as we amplify God’s call for justice and righteousness.

LIVINGSTON TO LEAVE NCC STAFF TO WORK FOR INTERFAITH WORKER JUSTICE

Washington, August 14, 2012 – The Rev. Michael Livingston, a former president of the National Council of Churches and now leader of the Council’s Poverty Initiative, has resigned that position effective August 31.

Livingston said he will be joining the staff of Interfaith Worker Justice, a Chicago based group that mobilizes persons of faith to support economic justice and worker rights at the local, state and national levels.

“Words are insufficient to the task of conveying my deep appreciation for the opportunity to labor among the people of God in the several forms of ministry through which it has been my joy and honor to serve,” Livingston said in a letter to NCC President Kathryn Lohre and NCC Transitional General Secretary Peg Birk.

“Michael has been an invaluable addition to the public witness work that we have done on behalf of vulnerable populations,” said Cassandra Carmichael, Director of the NCC Washington Office. “I know that his passion and expertise will be a continued blessing for those living in poverty as he transitions to his new role with Interfaith Worker Justice.”

“I have been especially blessed by the work of our Poverty Initiative and the effort to lift the concerns of the most vulnerable among us in the halls of power and in the hearts of the people of our member communions,” Livingston said. “I pray this work will continue and be strengthened as a priority of the Council.”

As director of the Poverty Initiative, Livingston worked on many fronts to keep the issue of poverty before the public.

In July 2011, he was one of a dozen leaders from the faith community who were arrested for kneeling to pray in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to Congressional efforts to slash the budgets of essential poverty programs.

“Congress is paralyzed by toxic partisan politics while people suffer,” Livingston said at the time. “Our elected officials are protecting corporations and wealthy individuals while shredding the safety net for millions of the most vulnerable people in our nation and abroad. Our faith won’t allow us to passively watch this travesty unfold. We’ve written letters, talked with and prayed for our elected officials, and prayed together daily in interreligious community. Today, we ‘offer our bodies as a living sacrifice’ to say to congress ‘Raise revenue, protect the vulnerable and those living in poverty.’”

Last March Livingston joined farm workers in a Lenten fast in Florida to put pressure on the Publix corporation to join the Fair Food Campaign to raise the wages of the workers and to dramatically improve deplorable working conditions in the fields.

“I do not regard this fast as a hardship on my part,” Livingston said in a message to NCC communions and congregations. “By God’s grace I can offer the luxury of my time to brothers and sisters whose humanity I value as much as my own. I count it a privilege, as the season of Lent begins, to, as Paul asks of us in Romans 12:1: ‘present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’”

Livingston, who also served as executive director of the International Council of Community Churches, served the NCC as a board member, officer and staff for nearly twelve years.

As NCC President from 2006 to 2007, Livingston traveled to the Middle East and other world trouble spots to represent the council’s witness for peace and justice. Last May, he represented the National Council of Churches on an interfaith delegation to Vietnam to study the residual effects of the defoliant Agent Orange used by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.

Livingston served as President-Elect of the NCC from 2004 until the end of 2005 and he has been a member of the NCC’s Governing Board and General Assembly since 1999. In 2003 he was a member of the NCC’s Peace Delegation to Paris that attempted to delay or prevent the war in Iraq.

Livingston was ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) on July 27, 1975 and he has been a member of the New Brunswick, N.J., Presbytery since 1985. He was pastor of Presbyterian churches in Los Angeles and New York until 1985 when he returned to his alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary, as director of admissions and later as campus pastor and director of the chapel.

He served from 1999 to 2010 as executive director of the International Council of Community Churches, headquartered in Frankfort, Ill. The ICCC describes itself as a “fellowship of ecumenically-minded, freedom-loving churches cooperating in fulfilling the mission of the Church in the world.”

Like many members of Baby Boom generation, Livingston entered college with a desire to serve people in a just cause. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1971 before switching his emphasis to theology at the Princeton seminary. He earned a master of divinity degree in 1974 and a masters in theology in Pastoral Care and Counseling that was awarded in 1991.

His other ecumenical responsibilities have included the U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches, the editorial board of Liberation and Unity, the National Workshop on Christian Unity, and the Presbyterian General Assembly Special Committee on Churches of Christ Uniting, which he chaired. For fourteen years he served as the editor of Liberation and Unity, a Lenten guide for meditation and study jointly sponsored by the COCU and the AME, AMEZ, and CME churches.

See www.nccendpoverty.org  

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Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for shared ecumenical witness among Christians in the United States. The NCC’s 37 member communions — from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches — include 40 million persons in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the nation.

NCC News contact:  Philip E. Jenks, 646-853-4212 (cell), pjenks@ncccusa.org

Why Food Stamps Matter: A Profile of Vernell Livingston

By Rev. Michael Livingston, Director, NCC Poverty Initiative

Vernell Livingston thanks God for getting up every morning “with a portion of good health.” She’s had the blessings of marriage and motherhood and she is in good health, though she is a diabetic, as she lives a life of modest contentment as a senior citizen.

Mrs. Livingston participated in the Food Stamp Challenge that launched the Fighting Poverty With Faith Mobilization last fall responding graciously to our invitation to her to guide congressional legislators on Capitol Hill and religious leaders on a shopping trip on the weekly allotment given to SNAP recipients ($31.50). The coincidence of our last names (we are not related) created a bond between us and she welcomed an opportunity to share more of her story.

The second eldest of 12 siblings, Mrs. Livingston has had a life of hard work for very little compensation. She was picking cotton and tobacco in South Carolina alongside her sharecropping father when she was 12 years old. She never went to college, indeed, she wasn’t able to finish high school so that she could help the family make ends meet and assist her mother with the raising of their large clan.

When her father suffered a stroke, her fate was sealed. She did back breaking work as a day laborer picking cotton and was exposed to toxic chemicals picking tobacco until she was eighteen or nineteen years old. The young Vernell moved north to Washington, DC with an aunt and cared for the aunt’s son for a few years before returning to South Carolina where she married a logger and gave birth to a daughter.

In the following years she worked several extremely low-paying jobs and after returning to Washington DC she spent most of her adult years working as a maid in the hotel industry.

Her last eight years working were as a floor manager for a motel chain. Chronic knee pain led to a full disability and eventually to two knee replacement operations on the same knee. She received disability checks until she began receiving Social Security benefits in 1991. In all her working years she never had an employer supplied pension plan and her low wages insured that her Social Security benefits would be meager.

When I asked Mrs. Livingston how much her monthly Social Security checks amounted to, she lowered her head sheepishly, paused, and said, “Reverend Livingston, I get $885 a month.”

I cannot say precisely how she felt, but any and all shame should be the province of a society that has not taken good care of those who have labored long and hard and been denied access to opportunities by familial necessity and the structural inequalities, racial and economic, so prevalent in our society.

Mrs. Livingston, many years a widow now, lives on $885 a month plus what she receives in SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Those benefits were cut, without explanation, from about $200 per month at the end of 2011 to $33 a month in January of this year.

Before the cut in SNAP benefits she had an annual income of $13,020; her income in 2012, after the cut, will be just over $11,000. She pays $181 a month in rent in a government subsidized senior housing complex and has a car note. After rent and car expenses, Vernell has about $500 per month for everything else. SNAP is a lifeline. She’s thankful for what she has so far received and worried about the recent cut and the awful possibility that more cuts could be coming.

The NCC’s Poverty Initiative works with other ecumenical and interfaith partners to ensure that programs that are lifelines for vulnerable people like Vernell Livingston. We are working to make certain people like Vernell are not further victimized as a result of the critical budget and tax decisions that will be made in the months to come and especially in the “Lame Duck” session of congress at the end of this year.

Your support for our work, your work really, is essential to the witness of people of faith in the 37 member communions of the National Council of Churches.

I wrote earlier that I was not related to Mrs. Livingston, though we share the same last name. To tell the whole truth, we are related, to each other and to you, through our belonging to the human family. We are all God’s family, make in God’s image, each one of us. I hope you will remember Vernell Livingston in your prayers and in your giving. (Click here to make a contribution to the Poverty Initiative of the NCC.)

Fighting Poverty with Faith is an annual mobilization of faith communities across the United States in common actions against poverty. Co-chaired by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Catholic Charities, and the National Council of Churches, the mission of Fighting Poverty with Faith is to educate the public and build political will to participate in the goal to cut U.S. poverty in half from 2010-2020.

Click here to sign up for more information and get involved in the Nov. 18-28, 2012 mobilization.

Join us for a Food Justice Webinar Thursday March 15 at 1:00pm ET

Last week, I was fortunate to have been invited to fast for six days with farmworkers seeking a decent wage and livable working conditions. It is a scandal that the very workers who pick 80 percent of the tomatoes consumed in the United States often have difficulty feeding their own families.

Please join World Council of Churches North American president Rev. Bernice Powell Jackson and me, along with Fast for Fair Food organizers Rev. Noelle Damico of the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Gerardo Silva of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, for an opportunity to interact live and for free on a webinar.

“From Harvest to Home: Farmworkers, Food Justice, and Hunger.”

March 15th – Thursday afternoon – 1:00pm EST

We’ll share information about the fast and ways you can get involved in next steps during the first half hour, then open up the second half hour to answer your questions.

Click here to register for the webinar.

Please register early, as space is limited. Members of the press are welcome for this webinar. Please spread the word.

I look forward to seeing you online!

Grace and Peace,

Michael Livingston

Director, National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative

Fast for Fair Food Lenten Reflection by Bernice Powell Jackson of the World Council of Churches

“As we begin the season of Lent…

…it’s easy in our increasingly secular world to ignore it or in the world of superficial piety to privatize it. But the word from God spoken by the prophet Isaiah brings a different message. Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? In fact, God warns those who are fasting and tearing their clothes to shreds that God is not impressed with all that. Only when the people stop oppressing their workers, blaming each other for their problems and breaking relationships within their own families will God respond to their prayers.

It’s not a difficult jump to get from Isaiah to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Publix. A few weeks ago Trader Joe’s signed an agreement with CIW, only a few days before opening its first Florida store. So it’s still about Publix. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like my Publix store. I like the politeness of its workers. I like the cleanliness of the stores and the variety of the items they stock. I like their Buy One, Get One Free sales.

What I don’t like is the arrogance of their leadership (they never responded to our letter and thousands of dollars of cash register receipts) and their unwillingness to even sit down and talk with the CIW leaders. In every situation that the workers of CIW have encountered for a decade now, when they are able to sit down and talk with the heads of fast food conglomerates, tomato grower associations and food supply companies, they were able to see each other’s humanity and dignity and to find a place of agreement. Yet Publix leadership refuses to sit down or to talk, which only says to me they know that theirs is a morally indefensible position and they can’t look the workers in the eye.

In my sermons over the past months, I have focused on the difference between chronos time and kairos time. The old ways of chronos time are quickly disappearing and kairos time, God’s time, is upon us. The kin-dom is at hand. We can see that as old marriage inequality laws fall to the wayside, as old religious understandings of impurity disappear, as old oppressive political regimes and laws melt away. The unwillingness of Publix to sign with the CIW is the last vestige of the old agricultural order in the South which relied on slave labor and then share-cropping and segregation to support it. This too shall pass. The question for them is do they wish to be on the side of justice or oppression, the past or the future.

During the week of March 5-10 many of the leaders and workers of the CIW will be on a fast at the Publix headquarters in Lakeland. We are invited to join them throughout the week and on Saturday, when they end the fast. I will join them to lead their religious vigil the evening of Wednesday, March 7.

Rev. Bernice Powell Jackson of the First United Church of Tampa, and President of the World Council of Churches in North America since 2004.

I invite you to join me there or join us in prayer that evening.

Perhaps our Lenten discipline this year might be to pray every day that the hearts of the leaders of Publix might be softened, that they might sit down with CIW and sign an agreement which gives the workers just one penny per pound more for their labor. Remember Isaiah…

In Peace and Love,

Pastor Bernice

Publix: Listen to women like Sylvia on International Women’s Day.

Click here to ask Publix to sign the Fair Food Agreement.

It’s Day 4 of the Fair Food Fast and today is International Women’s Day. In our time of morning prayer the farmworkers recognized the strong women among them who are pillars of the farmworker community.

Sylvia Perez waits for hours each morning, unpaid, until tomato growers pick her and other workers up for a day of work. Meanwhile, her two children are at home without her.

Meet Sylvia Perez: Sylvia is a leader in the Coalition of Immokolee Workers. She’s been a part of the CIW’s egalitarian staff since 2008. Before that Sylvia was a farmworker with many years in the tomato fields around Immokolee and throughout Florida. A typical day would begin with waiting for hours to be picked up
early in the morning, and then driven by truck (sometimes a closed “box” truck, or bus for two hours to a farm for a hard day of work in the hot Florida heat.

The hours spent waiting and riding the bus is unpaid time. It is also time away from her family. Sylvia has two children: her oldest a girl named Candice is eighteen, and her son, Leias, is seven years old.

Sylvia has harvested not only tomatoes but also cucumbers and blueberries as far north as Delaware, and tobacco in the Carolinas. She has seen, and experienced herself, abuses that are typical for women working in the fields. “If you’re a woman there is a general lack of respect and you can be taken advantage of…and you can’t do anything about it. If you speak up you will lose your job.”  Breaks are so rare as to be nearly non-existent and no shade is provided for even a moment’s relief from the heat. The buckets for the tomatoes must be filled well beyond the top rim and to the fickle satisfaction of the “contractors” who oversee the workers. There have been ligated cases of forced labor and farmworkers are subject to gross instances of wage theft and physical abuse in the fields.

But all of that is changing since the institution of the Fair Food Program and the principles to which growers and buyers like Burger King, McDonald’s, and Aramark have agreed. Wages were raised by a penny a pound resulting in about a 60 percent increase in pay and workers need no longer fear losing their jobs if they report abuses, indeed, abuses have dramatically declined.

Ten corporations in all have signed the agreement. The categories of corporations that have signed are fast food restaurants and food service providers. What’s missing is significant participation of supermarkets. Publix is a leader in the southeast, especially in Immokalee, Florida, where 80% of the tomatoes we consume in the U.S. are harvested.

Sixty farmworkers and allies are fasting for fair food. Publix continues to ignore our presence and our desire to dialogue with them.

Publix, please hear the words of the fasters like Sylvia, who says she fasts now “…for my children’s better future, not only my own but the entire generation. So they might not have to go through what we’ve gone through now.”

Click here to ask Publix to sign the Fair Food Agreement.

A brief encounter with a Publix store manager

Click here to ask Publix to talk with the farmworkers and sign the Fair Food Agreement.

“Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you.” (Romans 15:7)

Fasters outside the Publix grocery store at a Wednesday night vigil wait for the interfaith delegation to emerge and share whether they succeeded in speaking with the manager.

That short verse from Romans came to me last night after the Candlelight Vigil that closed Day Three of the Fair Food Fast in Lakeland, FL, corporate home of Publix.  We were gathered on the corner of the street where a Publix grocery stores sits in a comfortable shopping center. (We were prohibited from standing on the private property of the shopping center).

Rabbi Brian Schuldenfrei of Bet Shira in Miami had offered words of encouragement to those of us fasting. He shared the story of Esther and the powerful witness her fast made in ancient Judah. After our vigil, Rabbi Schuldenfrei suggested we take the “light” to the Publix store and express the hope that the manager would convey our collective desire for conversation with corporate executives at Publix about the legitimate concerns of the farmworkers.

A small interfaith delegation led by the Rabbi walked to the entrance of Publix and was met by the store manager and several other Publix employees. We were not allowed to enter the store. The Rabbi extended his hand and introduced himself to a Publix employee, not the manager, who had assumed control of the encounter and he refused to shake the Rabbi’s hand or offer his name. He interrupted the conversation and ordered us to leave the grounds.

Students sing and bring joy to fasters, while also offering a musical message to Publix.

To be accurate, it was not a conversation.  No one from Publix said anything to us after the manager identified himself by name.

It was a chilling encounter. While our visit was spontaneous, it was in good spirit, encouraged as we were by our time of prayer and singing. The Coalition of Immokolee Workers has been trying to engage Publix in conversation since 2007 by letter and since 2009 by a variety of public actions. This week-long fast is the latest attempt to stir the conscience of Publix toward conversation about fair wages and the Fair Food Program. After last night’s encounter I understand much better what a long hard road the farmworkers have traveled.

Click here to ask Publix to talk with the farmworkers and sign the Fair Food Agreement.

I’ll send another update tomorrow.

Grace and Peace,

Michael Livingston

Director, National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative