The last week of July was a wild one at my church.
At our church, which used to be pretty quiet during the
week, about three hundred people streamed in and out at all hours of the day
and night, from late July through early August.
And then again, some three weeks later.
As recently as three years ago, our church lay fallow for
most of the hours between Sunday coffee hour and the following Sunday’s worship
on any given week. Then there was a merger, and a new mission of “building hope
and proclaiming peace on the Troost Corridor.”
Our first real test of the integrity of that mission came a few months
later, when we were asked to provide a home for Occupy Kansas City over the
winter. We said yes and coughed up a
large office on our third floor. Thus
began our relationship with what is now the Midwest Center for Equality and
Democracy. MCED formed the Worker’s
Organizing Campaign of Kansas City, and that’s how we found ourselves at the
center of a labor rights movement unlike any seen in decades—the campaign to
alleviate some of the pain of low wage workers.
The recession has been good for fast food
restaurants. Theirs is the segment of
the industry which has grown since 2007.
According to Bloomberg, McDonald’s saw its profit rise 135% between 2007
and 2011. It’s CEO made $8.75 million
last year. None of that largesse has
trickled down to workers, alas. The
median salary for a fast food worker was $18,564 in 2012.[1] Nearly all of them start at minimum wage, and
raises are slow and difficult to come by.
There are lots of moving parts to this campaign, but the its
primary thrust has been provided by a pair of nationwide strikes meant to
highlight the plight of workers making poverty wages. In Kansas City, the strikes meant a whole lot
of people in our church building. And
out. And back in. We began at six a.m. on the strike days, and
went into the evening, layering actions at fast food restaurants with rallies
and even a bar-b-que. Then the
walk-backs begin. For days after, the
workers were accompanied by teams of community leaders—elected officials,
organizers, faith leaders—as they returned to work. It was the job of the walk-back team to let
managers know that their workers had been part of a legal job action, and that
any retaliation would be unlawful.
Then we watched and waited. When workers were threatened, phone calls
ensued. It
is still too soon to know how effective the movement has been so far. We know that some workers have actually seen
an improvement in working conditions and hours.
There is still a mountain of work ahead to ensure a just and living wage
for the workers, most of whom are over twenty years old, and many of whom are
supporting families. But we are proud of
the movement so far.
And I am proud of St. Mark Hope and Peace Lutheran
Church. It is not easy to host a labor
movement. The day it rained, our floors
looked pretty awful. There were many
bags of trash and boxes of recycling. It
was hot and humid, so our electric bill wasn’t pretty. And we didn’t pay attention to the folks
going in and out of the fridge, so we didn’t notice until Sunday that some
hungry body ate the communion bread. We
used a hot dog bun a member brought from Chubby’s Diner after a frantic phone
call from the communion assistant. I
hope we never have to do that again, but I wonder if it wasn’t rather
appropriate. A simple, even pedestrian representation
of Christ’s body, on a week when we simply walked alongside the least of our
siblings in Christ. A wild week in which
God gave us so much more than we gave away, and in which we were indeed
building hope and proclaiming peace.
