Jewish Labor Committee

[l-r: Educators' Chapter member Matias Wolkowicz, Volunteer Helen Murphy, Associate Director Arieh Lebowitz. Photo courtesy Next Left Notes / Bud Korotzer]

August 19th, 2010 NYC: JLC joined nearly 100 people at a demo in front of a newly opened Trader Joe's store in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, to inform consumers about the human rights abuses against farm workers harvesting the tomatoes sold by the company, and to demand that the company sign a fair food agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which is the central organization fighting for these farm workers, who need better wages and more humane standards in the fields. The protestors also called on the company to buy only from growers who meet these standards. Other large corporations such as Whole Foods, Subway, Burger King and McDonald's have already signed similar agreements with the CIW.

The Jewish Labor Committee was there with the Community Farmworker Alliance NYC, Make the Road New York, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative [NESRI], and a range of trade unionists, community, labor, religious and anti-slavery groups, for the hour-long rally. We were accompanied, literally and figuratively, by members of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, a 30-odd-piece New York City radical marching band and dance troupe.

Farmworkers picking tomatoes for the Trader Joe's chain of supermarkets earn as little as 40-50 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes harvested, and their wages have not risen since 1978. In fact, a worker must pick nearly 2.5 tons of tomatoes in order to earn the minimum wage for a typical 10-hour day. Such meager wages lock farm workers in poverty and make them susceptible to further exploitation.

According to Community Farmworker Alliance member Luis Gomez, "[t]he CIW, a farmworker-led organization based in Immokalee, is targeting Trader Joe's to encourage them to be part of the solution. They must eliminate the conditions that allow slavery to occur in U.S. agriculture, which means to help increase wages, to improve working conditions and to give workers a voice in their workplace, so we can bring an end to the harvest of shame in the United States."

Posted by Arieh Lebowitz at 03:32 PM | Permalink

August 16, 2010, New York, NY: Stuart Appelbaum and Martin Schwartz, President and Executive Director, respectively, of the Jewish Labor Committee, today issued the following statement.

We join the many voices in our support of the planned Cordoba Initiative, a Muslim community center to be built a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

As Muslims in New York and around the world mark the holy fast of Ramadan, we are mindful that from George Washington's day to Barack Obama's, the defense of freedom of religious expression has been a part of the fabric of American society, both when it was respected and when it was denied.

The right of anyone in the United States to observe their religious traditions without government interference has been a distinctive feature of American society, and, indeed, the diverse faiths and cultures of the U.S. have made the country stronger and more vibrant. We cannot allow either passion or trauma to dictate public policy about the Cordoba Initiative.

That the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan is a model that the directors of the Cordoba Initiative are drawing upon is important. We applaud the vision of a center that incorporates diverse elements, cultural as well as spiritual and religious, a center that will include place for prayer and study, but is not a mosque per se. The center will add to the diversity of possibilities of religious and cultural expression in a part of New York that has a wide range of Christian and Jewish houses of worship.

We feel impelled to add our voices in support of the Cordoba Initiative precisely because this is a time of rising anxiety about, fears of, and outright hostility towards religious, ethnic and cultural minorities, including physical attacks in Staten Island, legislative threats in Arizona, and opposition to mosque-construction projects in diverse communities. In earlier eras, Catholics and their churches were held suspect as having ulterior motives; the same canard was leveled against Jews and Jewish institutions. We can and must be better than the most fearful and the most xenophobic among us.

We extend a hand of friendship and solidarity to those of the Cordoba Initiative, and look forward to working with them as their important project comes to fruition.

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The Jewish Labor Committee, an independent secular organization, is the voice of the Jewish community in the labor movement and the voice of the labor movement in the Jewish community. Whether through its national office in New York or local offices and lay-led groups across the United States, the JLC enables the Jewish community and the trade union movement to work together on important issues of shared interest and concern, in pursuit of our shared commitment to economic and social justice.

Posted by Arieh Lebowitz at 06:10 PM | Permalink