September 20, 2023 — The Fellowship of Reconciliation expresses its full solidarity with the UAW’s struggle for a contract that guarantees better pay, better hours, better work conditions, and job security for auto workers. Clergyman and former FOR executive director A.J. Muste was renowned not only for his principled commitment to pacifism and his astute political analysis but also for the instrumental role he played in the early U.S. labor movement.
Deeply committed to nonviolence as a tactic for political change, during the Lawrence Textile Workers Strike, Muste raised money for the strikers and was quickly made executive secretary of the committee guiding the 30,000 striking workers. And he didn’t just do so from the sidelines. Muste joined the picket line at the front, which in those days meant not only exhaustion but police beatings and arrests. Muste told the strikers: “Our real power was in our solidarity and our capacity to endure suffering rather than to give up the right to organize.”
“The abuse of labor rights in this country is appalling,” said FOR executive director Ariel Gold. “ Leviticus 19:13 tells us, ‘Do not oppress your neighbor or steal; do not withhold the workers’ wage with you until morning,’ yet the Big Three automakers are raking in far more money than they could ever spend while the people working for them scrape to pay their rent and buy groceries. We should all be grateful to the UAW workers and join with them. May their efforts reignite the labor movement their predecessors fought so hard for.
“In this time of rapid automation and the evolution of the industry through expanding technologies it is important that workers are beneficiaries of the profits the automotive industry has enjoyed,” said FOR Senior Advisor Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler. “It is just as important that workers will be safeguarded in terms of wages and job security in an evolving industry in the future.”
FOR is proud, through its association with A.J. Muste, to have played a role in forming the movement that led to the creation of the UAW and waves of union organizing across the country. By striking today, the UAW is not only advocating for its members, but for the rights of all working-class people to have safe and rewarding jobs, a living wage, dignity, and time to spend with family. A victory for the UAW is a victory for all workers, all families, and our country as a whole.
