Engaging the global city
One local struggle at a time
by Anna Olson

I got to know the airport awfully well during my first months of parish ministry in Inglewood, Calif. – bordered to the north and east by South Central Los Angeles and to the west by the mammoth Los Angeles Airport – and not because my job involved a lot of flying. I came to work at Holy Faith Church as a former union organizer, and upon arrival in L.A., began to poke around for ways to connect my former vocation with my current one. My first find was the "Respect at LAX" campaign: a multi-union effort to organize service and security workers at Los Angeles International Airport. When I joined the community committee in support of organizing airport workers the focus was on baggage handlers and security screeners employed by the Argenbright company. At the invitation of organizers and workers on the campaign, I began showing up for demonstrations, learning the ins and outs of the many terminals – which contractors had agreed to pay the living wage, which workers had a clean place to eat lunch, where the echo was best for making noise in protest, how long the airport police would allow a march to block traffic.

At a small gathering of clergy at my parish, I sat listening to one of the Argenbright workers talk about why he supported the organizing campaign. He was an African-American man in his early twenties who lived at home with his parents not far from my church. He earned slightly above the minimum wage. Health benefits, while offered through the job, were out of reach on his low salary. Sick days were only excused with a doctor’s note. While he recited these details at our request, the passion for organizing didn’t flare in his voice until he began to describe the atmosphere in which he worked. Over and over, he repeated, "There’s just no respect." No respect. No respect for the workers who represent the protection against weapons and terrorists that the traveling public depends on. No respect for this young man from the neighborhood working hard to make a future for himself and to do a good job at an important task. Most of the time his job was routine, but every now and then came a moment when risking his own safety to question a suspicious person could make the difference between tragedy and safety for hundreds of people. He was willing to take the risks, but discouraged by the humiliation, unfair discipline, arbitrary changes in work rules, questionable safety equipment and lack of training that characterized his job.

His story was in many ways a familiar one. As an organizer, I had spent countless house visits listening to the stories of non-union workers struggling to make a living in dangerous, low-wage jobs. The details differed, but the fundamental desire for fairness and respect was the same at the airport in Los Angeles as in the factories of Texas and Louisiana. What was different about this encounter was my perspective as a pastor to the youth of my parish. I saw sitting in front of me a good kid, just a few years older than the kids in my youth group. Here was one of the ones who had made it – finished high school, avoided the perils of the street, maintained a good relationship with his parents. He was intelligent, thoughtful, articulate: the embodiment of my hopes and the hopes of parents in my parish for our teenagers. But all this had won him a job with low pay, no healthcare and no respect. When asked about the future, his sigh was discouraged. He was a good kid who had done things right, and it had not produced much hope for the future.

My participation in the Argenbright campaign gave me a much deeper sense of the challenges facing youth and parents in my parish and the surrounding community. So many of the employees at Argenbright were young, even still in their teens. It was a powerful lesson for me on how tough it is to raise kids here, on why so many kids don’t see the value in avoiding the many pitfalls, in sticking with lousy schools and graduating.

Along with their parents, I set out the hope and expectation that they will attend college. But I recognize that for many of them, the road to college will not be as easy as my own was. Whether because of economic constraints, family crises, poor academic preparation, lack of immigration documents, many of the youth I work with will have to enter the full-time workforce immediately after high school. And the jobs that are available to them will look very much like employment at Argenbright. Argenbright is not by any means the worst; in fact, it is probably fairly typical of what’s out there for high-school graduates.

Unlike what the media might portray, most of the kids here make it more or less through without getting into much trouble. I have come to wonder if the real story is not so much gangs and violence and dropouts and incarceration – although these are also powerful realities in the lives of our young people – but the fact that for kids who do what they are supposed to, there is a job with no respect waiting at the end. A job that doesn’t come close to allowing a young man or woman to move out of their parents’ home, much less raise a family, get more education or buy a home.

As the Argenbright campaign wound down toward a resolution, I found myself back near the airport, at the intersection of Century and Sepulveda Boulevards. Traffic backed up as far as the eye could see in all directions, stopped by rows of police in full riot gear. In the very center of the intersection was a small group seated in a circle, facing inward. On each of their backs was a simple sign with a number of years printed on it: four, seven, 22, 18 – the number of years that each of these Latino immigrant workers had worked at the Wyndham Hotel as housekeepers, cooks, porters, drivers, dishwashers. The owners of the Wyndham had announced a few weeks before that the hotel was to be sold. The new owner intended to close the hotel for renovations, dismiss the entire workforce and re-open non-union with new workers. Union workers at the Wyndham, distraught at the loss of their jobs and at the loss of one of the few union hotels in the airport area, had turned out in substantial numbers for the demonstration. A gutsy few had staked out the center of the street and were waiting tensely to be arrested. My job was to stand at the head of the circle and pray, then get out of the way as the riot police closed in. (I had been arrested a few months earlier in another hotel labor conflict, and the terms of my release did not allow me to join in this time.)

I began to close my eyes as I prepared to pray aloud, but caught sight of an older woman sitting across the circle, one of those who had worked for years at the Wyndham. Her face was stoic, but her eyes showed fear. I locked my eyes on hers as I prayed, and I thanked God for the courage of these workers, holding the line for the promise of good jobs in our community. I prayed in the words of the prophet Amos for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream, feeling the words as I had rarely felt them before.

I never had the chance to speak to the woman whose eyes I held during the prayer. The police moved in, and I moved to the sidelines as the protesters were arrested one by one. She went bravely, her head held high. The next day, other arrestees told the story of a long night in jail, far longer than I had spent on my one arrest in L.A. They said that some of the women had been afraid to tell their husbands they were going to be arrested, and watched with trepidation as the hour grew later and later, their unexplained absences lengthening. They said that some of them remembered seeing protesters arrested in their home countries and never coming back. I will probably never know the exact source of the fear in that one woman’s eyes, but it was clear to me that both the stakes and the risk of this action were far greater for her than they have ever been for me in my life as an activist.

The workers from the Wyndham represented a different generation from most of the Argenbright workers. They were older, people with families, mostly immigrants, many with limited English. Many of them had been in their jobs for years, not because the jobs were great, not because the wages were particularly high, but because union jobs are hard to come by in the airport area and the security of a job with benefits and negotiated work rules was not to be given up lightly. In my own parish, the only Latino retirees with a measure of economic security are former union hotel housekeepers. Hotel housekeeping is hard physical work, even in the union hotels. But a union contract limits the number of rooms to be cleaned each shift, guarantees seniority rights, and provides for health and retirement benefits. Compared to their peers, who made a living in domestic work or non-union hotels and factories, the union retirees have at least earned some stability in exchange for their years of hard work.

It wasn’t always true that there were few decent jobs in Inglewood and the other communities surrounding the airport. Inglewood was built on good union jobs in the aerospace industry, but during the 1970s and 1980s, those jobs gradually drained away. Now low-wage service jobs, domestic work, childcare and non-union electronics factories are the primary options for the Latino immigrants who make up the bulk of the area’s current population. And although working life is tough in Inglewood, the options are far better than in the sweatshops of downtown Los Angeles, where countless immigrant workers toil for less than the minimum wage.

My three years in parish ministry in Inglewood have provided an up-close look at the human consequences of the de-unionization I had witnessed from my perspective as an organizer. Working for the Southwest Region of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, I watched as factory after factory, union and non-union, closed their doors and moved their operations to other countries where unions were weak and labor was cheap (Southwest in the union’s East-Coast-driven parlance meant Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana). In rural communities that often meant that jobs became scarce, and workers who had made decent money close to home were forced to commute long distances for far less money. In greater Los Angeles during the recent economic "boom," local jobs are still relatively plentiful. But the jobs that exist provide little of the security required to support dreams of home ownership and higher education for the next generation.

The overwhelming pastoral reality in my parish work stems from the pressures on families who must work multiple, stressful, lousy jobs to survive. In my experience, persistent economic stress is the single factor that most accurately predicts domestic violence, alcoholism, kids with troubles in school, kids who flirt with gang life and the myriad other problems that afflict this community. Parents are sleep-deprived and often have few hours left in the day to spend with their spouses and children. High housing costs and low wages combine to pack families of five, six, and seven people into one- and two-bedroom apartments. Families are amazing in their ability to survive and even thrive under tough conditions, but the human cost of the much-trumpeted "new economy" is high. The Wyndham workers, huddled in the street in protest, understood this reality and were willing to take substantial risks to resist it. They have not prevailed so far, but their struggle touches the very heart of the community they live in.

Some months after the Wyndham demonstration, my rector, who had stood beside me in support as I prayed in the street, received a call "regarding his associate." The caller was a consultant to a convalescent home down the street from the church, and she professed deep concern over a recent "incident." She was sure that the rector would want to know what had taken place and take appropriate action. The incident in question involved my presence the day before a union election at the home, in which I stood with workers and organizers during a shift change and distributed a letter affirming Holy Faith’s commitment to the workers’ right to vote for or against a union without threats or intimidation from management. The worker standing with me was a Certified Nurse Assistant, motivated to unionize by her load of several dozen psychiatric patients as the lone CNA on the night shift in her unit. She shook her head, saying that she did not know what would happen should one of the patients experience a severe psychotic episode. She knew that one person was not enough to handle that eventuality, not with so many other seriously ill patients needing attention as well. As we chatted with one another and with workers leaving and arriving for work, the home’s management team stood silently on the porch, watching each person to see if they stopped to speak with anyone connected to the union. The consultant who called my rector, and later spoke with me at his recommendation, expressed "shock" that I would suggest that there had been intimidation, and further said that she had thought a "person of God" would "take the high road" and remain neutral in a conflict such as this one.

The election at St. Erne’s Convalescent Home was part of the Campaign for Quality Nursing Home Care, a multi-faceted campaign seeking to address both working conditions and patient care in Los Angeles County nursing homes. I became interested in nursing homes when I noticed a number of uniformed nursing home workers standing in line each week at our parish food program, waiting to receive bags of groceries. As I became involved in the campaign, I learned that the average wages for nurse assistants in area homes hovered under seven dollars an hour and that nursing home workers suffer on-the-job injuries at rates equaled only by high-risk industries like mining. Grossly inadequate staff-to-patient ratios like the one described by the CNA at St. Erne’s lead in many cases to serious inadequacies in patient care.

Around the time I got involved with the Nursing Home Campaign, I found myself speaking with a new parishioner, who confided her dream of finishing a certification program as a nurse assistant. She explained that she had worked for several years caring for disabled elderly people in their homes, and shyly suggested that this work had made her think that she might have a gift for caring for others. She was struggling to pay for the certification program and worried that her English might not be equal to taking the exam, but with encouragement from her husband she was persevering. Given the economic pressures and limited opportunities that many of my parishioners face, I don’t have conversations about vocational discernment often enough. It was exciting to hear someone who was able to match her gifts with her career aspirations so clearly. At the same time, I felt some trepidation, given what I was learning about working conditions for so many certified nurse assistants.

I did not voice my concerns in our conversations about vocation, and I shared in the celebration when she finally found the money to pay off her tuition and passed the certification exam. Within a month or so, she had found employment in a local nursing home. She was disappointed by the low starting pay, but nonetheless optimistic about this opportunity to put her hard-earned certification to work. Within six months, she caught a patient as he fell, preventing him from injuring himself but straining her own back. When her injury proved difficult to heal, she began to suspect that her supervisors were setting her up to be fired. She is now unemployed, pursuing a workers’ compensation claim, and unsure what her employment future will be with her inability to lift patients. She remains positive, but it is impossible to miss the deep disappointment in her eyes.

This parishioner, along with many of the nursing home employees I have met, represent a particularly heartwrenching failure of the classic American Dream. They are immigrants and U.S.-born workers with limited educational backgrounds, who have struggled to go back to school while raising children, working and often learning English. They are motivated not only by a desire to earn a living, but by a sincere desire to care for those most often forgotten and neglected by our society. They have willingly taken on jobs that include contact with the most intimate realities of sick and dying human bodies. For some lonely people, they represent the only loving face or word of comfort in each long day. And at the end of their shifts, they are standing in line for food in front of my church.

When I initially sought out opportunities for involvement in the Los Angeles labor movement, I did not anticipate how deeply my labor activism and parish ministry would come to inform one another. I jumped into the struggle because I missed the excitement of picket lines and demonstrations, the satisfaction of standing up in the face of clear injustice. I missed having an easy answer to the classic labor question: "Which side are you on?" Especially in my first months in the parish, I found day-to-day life in the church to be filled with mundane details and lacking in clear connections to larger questions of justice. I figured I was lucky to arrive in L.A. at a time when the labor movement was vital and committed to organizing, and the call for clergy and religious leaders to participate added legitimacy to my desire to be on the front lines from time to time.

More than anything else I have done in these three years, labor activism has taught me about the larger context in which my ministry exists. The small corner of the Los Angeles area where I work, and to a much greater extent the L.A. area as a whole, mirrors the global reality of increasingly diverse collections of people caught up in increasingly rigid economic realities that allow little possibility of socioeconomic stability or mobility to the majority of the world’s people. My bishop has commented on several occasions that he believes the region served by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is the most diverse the planet has ever seen. People come from all over the world to make their homes here, driven in most cases at least in part by economic pressures in their homelands. The result is a region characterized by small pockets of tremendous wealth and vast stretches of poverty and economic struggle.

The progressive movement in L.A. is strongly driven by workers’ issues, and I’m by far not the only priest nor the first who has turned to involvement in local labor struggles as one avenue for confronting the injustices of the global economy. The basic need for good jobs and fair working conditions is fundamental in the communities we serve. There is a substantial group of clergy and religious leaders in Los Angeles who agree that prosperity is built far too readily on the backs of workers. Seeing the struggles of working Angelenos to survive and thrive in economic boom times, we fear for the coming economic downturn. While it is easy to romanticize the excitement of ministry in such a multicultural region, we cannot truly celebrate our diversity until the second half of the Lucan promise is fulfilled in our communities: "Then people will come from east and west, and will eat in the kingdom of God."

While it has become clear to me that the realities I encounter in my parish demand a commitment to stand with organizing workers, I find it a far greater challenge to know how to integrate the insights of labor struggles into the life of my congregation. It is much easier to represent the church in the struggle than to make the struggle central to the life of the church. While I manage to weave references to economic injustice and the call to organize into many of my Sunday sermons, prayers and Bible studies, my parish remains far from the activist community of my dreams. I fear that too often my own activism and that of other clergy errs on the side of using the (limited) power that we have as representatives of religious authority to advocate on behalf of workers, rather than taking on the greater and I believe more important challenge of being agents of empowerment, of creating a sense of urgency in our parishes, and of communicating that questions of who finds a place at the table are central to the life of the Gospel.

Despite my occasional misgivings and frustrations with parish life, I’m "sticking with the parish" in my quest to be a part of the larger struggle for justice. I believe that discovering ways to become activist communities on the local level is essential to the larger project of hastening the Kingdom of God. In The Impact of the Global: An Urban Theology, Laurie Green, Bishop of Bradwell in the Church of England, writes about the value of what he describes as sacramental actions – actions on the local level that serve to illuminate and challenge global realities. Only as we who have come from around the world to dwell in this particular manifestation of the global city find local ways to bring about fulfillment of the Gospel promises of human dignity and thriving do we truly take our place as one small part of the body of Christ.

Anna Olson is the pastoral associate at Holy Faith Episcopal Church in Inglewood, Calif.