I really like the second paragraph of this press release from our friends at Interfaith Worker Justice. There’s a tendency for any critic of our country’s and world’s terrible inequalities and injustices to say that “the system” has never got better, it’s just as unequal as it was 200 years ago, just as brutal. Well, in many ways it is. But whenever I hear blanket condemnations of American society, I remember all the struggles and heroes, all the many victories, all the ways that I and millions of others have led a much happier life because of the incredible work against the odds that our forebears undertook. If you disagree, check out the list in the second paragraph below. Yes, people are always trying to gut these ways that our community has found to look after its own, ways that we look after each other and become more of one people, one family. We can lose these ways of caring. And they can be bureaucratized and underfunded so they don’t feel like caring. So let’s celebrate them, in sheer gratitude and as inspiration to preserve and extend them, and why not in churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams and any religious spaces this labor Day: where better to do so?

Lifting up Workers on Labor Day Weekend – Religious and Labor Leaders Voice Shared Concerns through Labor in the Pulpits. In the richest country in the world, more than two million full-time workers live below the poverty line, struggling to pay for necessities like food, housing, healthcare, transportation, and childcare. In the face of this scandal, Interfaith Worker Justice provides a prophetic voice.

Labor Day is a time for the religious community and the labor movement not only to celebrate working people and their contributions to society but to remember the struggles that workers endured to achieve the many benefits we now enjoy but take for granted: the eight-hour day, workers’ compensation, overtime pay, pensions, health and safety laws, Social Security, Medicare, vacation days, unemployment compensation, family medical leave, a restriction on child labor, a minimum wage and the right to organize for collective bargaining. These benefits helped to humanize the workplace and to provide a safety net for millions.

For the last 15 years, thousands of congregations have focused their Labor Day weekend services on the injustices facing low-wage workers and the religious community’s efforts to support those workers’ struggles for living wages and family-sustaining benefits.

This Labor Day weekend, over 1,000 Labor in the Pulpits/on the Bimah/in the Minbar services will be held across the country.

“Labor in the Pulpits expresses in a very clear way the bonds between religion and labor,” says Interfaith Worker Justice Executive Director Kim Bobo. Those bonds are even stronger this year, says Bobo, “as we stand poised to bring about real change in our country, from reforming health care to stopping wage theft and making our workplaces more democratic.”

Labor in the Pulpits offers a series of litanies, responsive readings, reflections, and interfaith prayer service guides. New materials added this year include a Muslim worship aid, a Jewish reflection, Christian prayers and readings on the rights of workers.

Here is one of the prayers from the Labor in the Pulpits/on the Bimah/in the Minbar website:

Loving, Working God,

On this Labor Sunday we ask your special blessing on all people who labor, either for pay or as volunteers, in jobs or at school, in the workplace or at home, in the U.S. and around the world.

We especially pray for your blessings on workers who do not have jobs and for those whose inadequate pay does not allow them to live the full life you intend for each of us.

Creator God, help us to build a new world in the midst of the old.

A world where all workers are valued.

A world where those who clean houses are also able to buy houses to live in.

A world where those who grow food can also afford to eat their fill.

We pray for the coming of a world where all workers everywhere share in the abundance that you have given us.

We ask these things knowing that you give us the courage and strength to live out our faith in the workplace and the marketplace, as well as in the sanctuary.

Amen.

Written by Edie Rasell, Minister for Economic Justice of the United Church of Christ. She is also Vice-President of Interfaith Worker Justice.