LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: In the United States there are more than two million citizens locked up behind razor wire and prison bars.

MARK MAUER: We lock up our citizens at far greater rates than any other industrialized nation or any other kind of nation in the world.

SEVERSON: Mark Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project. He says that when it comes to lock ups, Louisiana is easily the toughest state in the nation.

MAUER: Louisiana has been at the top of the pack and just incarcerating people at rates that are just unimaginable any place else in the world.

SEVERSON: Richard Crane is the former chief counsel to the Louisiana Corrections Department. He says there was a push nationwide in the early 1980s to crack down on crime, and Louisiana took it seriously.

RICHARD CRANE: You could always get votes by increasing sentences, and Louisiana more than any other state just went wild with that.

SEVERSON: Today there are about 40,000 people behind bars in Louisiana. That’s one out of 86 adults. The prison population doubled in the last two decades, and the state prison system simply couldn’t keep up. So in the early 1990s the state gave local sheriffs an incentive to build their own prisons. Cindy Chang first reported about prisons-for-profit for the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper.

CINDY CHANG: In Louisiana, you’ve got all these prison entrepreneurs who are mostly local sheriffs who have built these prisons. The prisons function just like hotels—that they get a payment per person per day, and if they don’t keep the beds full they’re going to lose money.

SEVERSON: The Louisiana Secretary of Corrections Jimmy Le Blanc:

JIMMY LE BLANC: We didn’t have the means; we didn’t have the funding to accommodate building prisons. We didn’t have the money so that partnership, that cooperative endeavor of agreement together was a means to build additional prisons and have the beds that we needed to house prisoners.

SEVERSON: It works this way: County or parish sheriffs get about $25 a day for inmates that would have otherwise ended up in state prisons. Some of that money goes to house and feed the prisoners. What’s left over goes to the underfunded sheriffs’ departments to use for much needed equipment and for manpower.

(to Crane): At one point that was a real good thing, because they didn’t have bulletproof vests; they had bad or old or used equipment.

CRANE: Well yes, you know, but is that the way to finance those things, you know by increasing sentences for the sole purpose of filling of up local jails. Is it ethical to incarcerate people for the sole purpose of making money?

SEVERSON: Burl Cain, warden of one of the country’s biggest prisons, Angola, says he has reservations about profiting from incarcerations.

WARDEN BURL CAIN: Yes, the profit motive bothers me when the profit motive is the motive to not provide the necessary essentials for the inmate. You feed them with a thimble, is a term I use. You try to cut them to 1800 calories a day, and so those things bother me, and they do that in the private sector more than the public, because they measure every little thing they give you. They’re cutting costs, they’re cutting dollars, and when they cut your quality of life by doing that, that’s wrong.

SEVERSON: The approximately $25.00 payment the sheriffs receive per inmate per day is less than a third of the average daily prison costs nationally, so there is very little or no money left over for rehab or education programs.

CHANG: The term that’s often used is warehousing, that these people are just being warehoused during their sentence.

MAUER: Going back to Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, the Quakers and other religious reformers invented the penitentiary system from the word “penitence,” and their idea was you could take sinners, lock them in a prison cell, give them a Bible or have someone read the Bible to them and they would repent for their sins. So it was well-intended; it didn’t work out very well in practice. What’s sort of striking is that the model of incarceration has not changed that much 200 years later.

SEVERSON: One reason for Louisiana’s huge prison population is that the state leads the country in the percentage of inmates sentenced to life without parole. Life without parole for a young inmate who lives to be 72 years old can cost Louisiana taxpayers more than a million dollars.

MAUER: More than one-in-ten people in prison in Louisiana are serving life without parole. The only way you can get out is getting a pardon from the governor, and that is something that rarely happens.

SEVERSON: Here at Angola, 97 percent of the over 5,000 inmates sentenced here will die here, no matter how young they were when they arrived.

LE BLANC: We probably have more than our share of lifers in Louisiana, and there are some nonviolent lifers, I mean, like three strikes and you’re out. We have quite a few of those, and those are the ones in my opinion that we need to be looking at.

CAIN: They should not necessarily be released, but they should have a hearing. They should be reviewed, and our situation and in a lot of states there’s no hearing.

SEVERSON: Louisiana did recently close down a prison and transferred the 900 inmates, who were in for lesser crimes, to Angola. It turned out to be a positive move, because the warden can use the lifers as mentors for the short-timers in the prison’s re-entry program.

John Sheehan has served 26 years of his life-without-parole sentence for second-degree murder. He’s the lead mentor for automotive students. Heyward Jones, also in for life-without-parole for second-degree murder, is a social mentor.

JOHN ANTHONY SHEEHAN: They can look at us different than other men that come in. You can have a church group that comes in and tells them one thing, but you have somebody like Heyward here and myself that have a life sentence that’s actually living here all the time, and tell them if they don’t do the right thing they can wind up here. Our message comes across a lot realer to them than what messages of other people do.

SEVERSON: But the re-entry program the warden is so proud of is not in the budget. The funding comes from the annual prison rodeo. The Louisiana Corrections Department, like those in other states, relies on churches to provide many re-entry programs. Still, Louisiana spends almost $700 million a year for corrections, money that could go toward other programs in a state that has some of the worst poverty and schools in the country.

LE BLANC: I’ll give you a good example. Our prison intake is 15,000 a year. Our high school drop out is 15,000 a year. I mean, that tells you the story of what is happening to us. They’re coming out of these schools and coming to prison.

CAIN: And you shouldn’t pay more for corrections than you do for education, but you are, and you’re keeping the wrong people in prison because you’re keeping everybody.

MAUER: I think it’s a very disturbing development that the world’s wealthiest society, the United States, a society that prides itself on its democratic traditions, is also the world’s leading imprisoner. There’s something fundamentally wrong, I think, with that picture.

SEVERSON: The picture is slowly changing, in part because states can no longer afford to imprison so many people. Legislatures are gradually reducing sentences for nonviolent crimes and turning more to rehabilitation programs. That includes Louisiana to a lesser degree, partly because of push-back from local sheriffs, whose budgets rely on keeping their jails as full as possible.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Angola, Louisiana.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: In a packed convention hall in Bakersfield California, members and friends of the United Farm Workers recently celebrated this legendary labor union’s 50th anniversary. They also came to honor the legacy of the UFW’s founder, the late Cesar Chavez, one of the most famous figures in organized labor history who during his life some saw as a dangerous radical, and others, as a kind of saint.

ARTURO RODRIGUEZ: You know, Cesar passed away 19 years ago. To some of us it was like yesterday.

GONZALEZ: Arturo Rodriguez is the president of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez’s son-in-law.

RODRIGUEZ: He taught us. He nurtured us. He made sure that we understood really the importance and the criticalness of doing what we’re doing. He lived the ideals of the farmworker movement.

GONZALEZ: It was in the 1960s and ’70s that Chavez, who worked in the fields himself as a teenager and never received a formal education beyond the eighth grade, organized poor and immigrant farmworkers, first in California and then across the Southwest.

Through strikes in the fields and the organization of national consumer boycotts of table grapes and lettuce, Chavez and the UFW forced big growers to the negotiating table, where the union won historic concessions.

MIRIAM PAWEL (Author, The Union of Their Dreams): What Chavez did was put farmworkers, who had really been sort of invisible, into the public consciousness.

GONZALEZ: Miriam Pawel, the author of a critically acclaimed history of the UFW, is now writing a biography of Cesar Chavez.

PAWEL: It was the first successful labor union for farmworkers. It was the first time that farmworkers were able to have contracts, to have health insurance, to have basic minimum wages. It was very much the civil rights movement of the West in many ways and that’s really how it started.

GONZALEZ: And Chavez became a labor and civil rights superstar, courted by national political figures like Robert F. Kennedy. And in 1969, he became the first Mexican American to appear on the cover of TIME magazine.

Nearly two decades after his death, Chavez is still a potent symbol, especially to America’s growing Latino population. Streets, schools, and monuments across the country carry Chavez’s name. And every year thousands visit his gravesite at the National Chavez Center 30 miles east of Bakersfield.

Chavez and the UFW often achieved the union’s greatest victories in partnership with religious groups. It also relied heavily on religious imagery, such as marches featuring a banner of the Virgin de Guadalupe and Chavez’s tactic of fasting to bring attention to the plight of farmworkers.

CHRIS HARTMIRE: The religious symbolism was central to the UFW.

GONZALEZ: Chris Hartmire, a Protestant pastor, was in the 1960s the director of a ministry for farmworkers, a position which led him to become one of Cesar Chavez’s closest confidants. He says Chavez understood working with churches could bring his union practical benefits.

HARTMIRE: Because of the power of the church to communicate its message out there and the fact that the church is everywhere. And because of the credibility it gives the movement. The growers say “he’s communist.” People believe a lot of things about the church, but they don’t believe we’re communist, so it helped to defeat that kind of propaganda.

GONZALEZ: At the Chavez national monument, several displays honor the role of faith in the UFW’s history. Yet even as the UFW celebrates its past achievements and the legacy of Cesar Chavez, many are asking troubling questions about this union, namely, does it still remain relevant, and is it doing all that it can to help today’s generation of farmworkers?

PAWEL: People need to realize that the UFW is not helping farmworkers today and whatever it did in the past really is history.

GONZALEZ: Pawel says because contracts with growers have been allowed to lapse and the Union hasn’t been aggressive with recruiting, the UFW’s membership has plummeted from more than 80,000 members in the 1970s to fewer than 6,000 today. And with that decline has come a loss of clout and the ability to represent farmworkers. Pawel traces the union’s problems back to Chavez himself and his increasingly heavy-handed leadership of the UFW before his death.

(speaking to Pawel): Is it fair to say, according to your research, that Chavez starts cultivating a cult of personality?

PAWEL: Yeah, it certainly becomes a cult of personality. Things get very ugly in the late 70s. There are a lot of people who are purged, they’re purged in very ugly ways. There are a lot of people who believed that they were going to spend their lives doing this and who had committed themselves and get cast out in very ugly ways, denounced as spies and traitors in ways that decades later really haunt them.

GONZALEZ: In rural areas today the UFW still campaigns on behalf of farmworkers such as an effort to give legal status to workers who have been in the United States illegally and advocating a ban on the use of pesticides that could harm field hands. But critics accuse the UFW of being too often more concerned about public relations and the marketing of its image than labor organizing. A taste of that was evident at the UFW’s convention where product after product carried the union’s logo.

(speaking to saleswoman at convention): What else do you have?

Saleswoman: This is a change container, some bracelets, shot glasses, there’s the shirts down there. There’s a bunch of buttons, historical buttons. They even have pet leashes.

GONZALEZ: There are also criticisms of the nonprofit Cesar Chavez Foundation, an off-shoot of the UFW run by Cesar’s son, Paul Chavez.

PAWEL: The Cesar Chavez Foundation reported in 2010 taking in $30 million, an enormous amount of money, that is not money being spent on farmworkers.

GONZALEZ: Instead of union organizing, the Chavez Foundation spends its revenue operating the National Chavez Center and its grounds, building affordable housing, and running Spanish language radio stations in the west. Paul Chavez says it’s all in keeping with his father’s vision.

PAUL CHAVEZ: This is part of who we are, is providing services to workers in the community and at the workplace. So it does not stray. Actually what it does is, it’s keeping and adhering to the original principals of the movement.

GONZALEZ: But what about the farmworkers of today, decades after the UFW’s greatest victories?

Well, much of what the union fought for, like rest periods and water and shade for workers, still exist. The vast majority of field hands in places like California’s San Joaquin Valley, are often just as exploited and vulnerable as they were when the UFW first formed.

FAUSTO SANCHEZ: One of the biggest problems that we see every day is the wages, the low wages that they get paid.

GONZALEZ: Fausto Sanchez is a community worker with the California Rural Assistance League, which advocates on behalf of farmworkers. He says big growers still keep tight control over their workers through a system of foremen who fire farm hands at the first sign of organizing.

SANCHEZ: They don’t want any people to be organized, and they say people who are organizing themselves, they are so political, and they are very political, and they don’t want anybody who is political working in the field.

GONZALEZ: How many people that you talk to are in a union then, whether it’s United Farm Worker or some other union. Any of them? Or a very small number?

SANCHEZ: A very small number. I would say about one percent or two percent.

GONZALEZ: One percent or two percent of farmworkers you see are involved in organized labor?

SANCHEZ: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Cesar Chavez’s friend and ally, Chris Hartmire, wishes the union was more active in the farm fields.

HARTMIRE: From an outsiders perspective it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of new organizing going on, and I wish there were, but I also know it’s extremely difficult. Workers in the fields now don’t know who Cesar Chavez is. They think he’s a boxer from Mexico, Julio Cesar Chavez.

RODRIQUEZ: The reality, it is tough.

GONZALEZ: UFW president Arturo Rodriquez acknowledges his union’s declining influence but says it’s refocusing its energy to organize farmworkers, including labor agreements benefiting field hands picking mushrooms and strawberries. The union is also fighting for immigration reform.

RODRIQUEZ: There is no doubt that we have a lot of work to do, but at the same time we have made a lot of gains, we’ve made a lot of victories, and we’re very thankful for what we’ve been able to accomplish, and we look forward to continue working as hard this next fifty years as we did this last fifty.

GONZALEZ: The union delegates and friends who gathered in this hall hope the UFW’s best days are still ahead of it and not in the history books.

Delegates waving flags saying “si se puede!”

GONZALEZ: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Bakersfield, California.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Back in the 1990s, Cambodia, impoverished and rebuilding after its genocidal Khmer Rouge years, took steps to give its new garment industry a competitive leg up. It agreed to a system of fair labor standards with a minimum wage rule, a limit to working hours, unions to represent workers, and freedom of expression. All would be open to international inspection. Today, there are perhaps 400,000 garment workers in more than 300 factories in and near the capital, Phnom Penh. They are subcontractors to brand names and retailers in Europe and America.

Beginning from scratch less than two decades ago, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown into the largest export earner for this country. Three out of four dollars that come into Cambodia come from the garment factories.

The key question is how much all this has benefited workers, almost all of whom are female. Many factories have been plagued by labor unrest. Occasionally, it’s been violent. There have been frequent reports of faintings on factory floors. The unions cite unhealthy conditions and workers weak from malnourishment.

CHEA MONY (Trade Union Leader): Workers have very low salaries, only $61US per month. You cannot afford to live on that day to day. It’s legalized slavery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chea introduced us to these workers. Like most of their colleagues, they are young, rural migrants living in tight, shared quarters, supporting extended families back home.

SOY NAKRY (Garment Worker): We have to pay for the room, electricity, water.

VONG SOPHAL (Garment Worker): In the evening, we just buy some fish and make some soup. Sometimes we have to keep part of it for breakfast.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chem Savet supports a farm family in a rural province 60 miles away, including her husband, her parents, and two-year-old daughter.

CHEM SAVET (Garment Worker): I can only see her once a month. When I go home she really misses me, so she hugs me, especially when I must leave one day later. One time she put some of her clothes in when I was packing. She wanted to come with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The standard six-day, 48-hour week plus overtime leaves little time for travel to see family. Factory managers aren’t sympathetic during family emergencies, they complained, and many employees are on temporary instead of permanent employment contracts.

FEMALE GARMENT WORKER: Previously, we saw a lot of strikes, but those haven’t happened recently in our factory because there are a lot of newcomers.

DAVID SCHILLING (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility): The minimum wage clearly is not sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. We’re talking food. We’re talking clothing.

DE SAM LAZARO: David Schilling is with the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It’s a shareholder activist group that wants to add a moral voice in global economic matters.

SCHILLING: Whether you’re talking about all the Abrahamic traditions, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, at the core is that concept of the human dignity of the person. So you’re taking that and then you’re moving into the realities.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo represents Cambodia’s garment factory owners. He sees a very different reality for workers.

KEN LOO (Cambodia Garment Manufacturing Association): They’re not whipped, you know. They’re not chained. They come to work willingly.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says most garment workers make more than the $61 minimum wage; closer to $90 dollars a month, he says, higher with overtime. That’s more than policemen, teachers, or most civil servants, he adds.

LOO: We have to put things in context. The per capita GDP of Cambodia for last year as announced by the World Bank was $908. The average common factory worker earns 40 percent more than national per capita GDP. If you use that as a gauge, I think any worker in America would be glad to get 40 percent more than national per capita GDP.

DE SAM LAZARO: Cambodia’s minister of commerce says factory owners have little wiggle room because they are no more than contract tailors.

CHAM PRASIDH (Cambodian Minister of Commerce): They do not own the fabric. They do not own the brand. They just import the fabric, cut, sew, pack, and then sell.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prasidh could impose higher wages in the factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia. But he says that would be suicidal.

PRASIDH: There is a lot of demonstration to ask for living condition, ask to increase the minimum wage, and what happen? The investor just packed their sewing machine, and they go home!

DE SAM LAZARO: Or they go to another country?

PRASIDH: They go to another country so we have to compare that, our price with Bangladesh. We have to compare our price with Pakistan or India, yeah, or even with China.

DE SAM LAZARO: San Francisco-based Gap is the largest buyer of garments made in Cambodia. It also buys from dozens of other developing nations. Spokeswoman Bobbi Silten says Gap, which owns the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well, has no plans to leave Cambodia.

BOBBI SILTEN (Gap Foundation): We have very longstanding relationships with many of the vendors in Cambodia. It’s been one of our top ten sourcing countries for the last ten years. So we are very committed to being there, and we think that the labor standards that they have put in place is one of the reasons why we continue to stay.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo says buyers may talk up the labor standards. But in 2008, when the global recession began, many, including Gap, cut back in Cambodia. At the same time, he says, Bangladesh—with lower pay and labor standards—saw no drop in business.

LOO: It just confirms our knowledge that, indeed, compliance of labor standards is the icing on the cake. Price is the cake.

PRASIDH: It is a race to the bottom, and Cambodia—to survive we have to create something special.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jill Tucker says Cambodia does have a special competitive advantage since buyers want to be associated with ethical labor standards. Tucker heads an agency supported by the UN and the US government that conducts factory inspections for compliance with the labor standards.

JILL TUCKER (Better Factories Initiative): In the olden days, by that I mean maybe ten years ago, it was more of a cat-and-mouse game than it is now, and the really smart producers, I think, realize that, you know, you need to treat your workers well to retain your workers, and that it’s just not worth it to not treat your workers well.

DE SAM LAZARO: She cites this factory, run by a Taiwan-based company, QMI, as a good example. There’s plenty of air and light and, managers say, good labor relations. All ten thousand of QMI’s workers are on permanent contracts, and wages here range from $90 to as much as $150 a month. That’s still below what unions say is adequate. But Tucker says demands for higher wages, however justified, are a tough sell given realities in the US, the biggest market.

TUCKER: I really wonder if American consumers are willing to pay significantly more for their apparel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Really?

TUCKER: Yeah. The cost of apparel has only dropped over the past decade. None of us are paying more for our garments than we were 10 years ago.

SILTEN: We do need to think about what consumers are willing to pay, where we can source these goods to achieve, you know, get the math to work for everyone. From a macro standpoint I think it’s a very complex issue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gap’s Silten isn’t sure if consumers would pay more for ethically produced garments. The Interfaith Center’s Schilling says retailers like Gap, pressured by competitors and Wall Street investors, aren’t likely to ask them to do so. More likely, he says, campaigns by activist groups should bring a greater awareness of worker rights issues as they are now on environmental ones.

SCHILLING: There’s more and more advertising around, you know, sort of ecologically sound products. I think more and more that’s going to happen within the social space as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: That would bring greater awareness of the plight of workers in Cambodia and more urgently other nations that don’t subscribe to fair labor standards, and Schilling says it could not happen fast enough.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For decades, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops, and others have been working with labor organizers to try to improve conditions for farm workers, and there’s been some success, most recently in the tomato fields of south Florida, where immigrants harvest nearly all the winter tomatoes this country grows. Our report is from Saul Gonzales in Immokalee, Florida.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Florida may be better known for its oranges, but it’s tomatoes that rule in the farm fields surrounding the small town of Immokalee. In fact, during the winter months, nearly all of America’s domestically grown tomatoes, still green when they are picked, come from this part of south Florida, and it’s a large and poor immigrant workforce that’s essential in getting that crop from plant to plate.

Tomato harvesting is still very much a “by hand” work? There is no machine that exists that does this?

STEVE MCHAN: That is correct.

GONZALEZ: Steve McHan is harvesting manager for Pacific Tomato Growers, a major producer in Florida.

MCHAN: The production volume from here is somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 boxes per acre, and we pack 25-pound boxes is what we’re averaging.

GONZALEZ: So it’s industrial scale?

MCHAN: Industrial scale, correct.

GONZALEZ: However, Florida’s tomato industry is a business that’s long been accused of exploiting its workforce through overwork, underpay, and mistreatment. That’s turned these fields into the frontlines of a high profile national campaign to improve the lives of farmworkers.

JORDAN BUCKLEY: People who work in agriculture are among the least paid, least protected workers in the whole country.

GONZALEZ: Jordan Buckley and his colleagues are with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, and the Interfaith Action Network, which works with faith groups to help farmworkers.

BRIGITTE GYNTHER: For people of faith, for us this is a moral issue. You know, how the people who pick our food our treated.

GONZALEZ: Now to understand the plight of farmworkers you have to know something about their place in America’s industrial food economy.

BUCKLEY: They are some of the poorest workers here in our country, and yet not for a lack of hard work. It’s not some dearth of industriousness. In fact, the reason is because the increasing consolidation of purchasing among retailors. So where you have the fast food and food service and supermarkets squeezing their suppliers and demanding ever cheaper costs for their tomatoes, that’s resulted in growers squeezing their farmworkers, and that’s why farmworkers haven’t seen a real wage increase in upwards of three decades.

GONZALEZ: Florida’s tomato workers are usually paid by how much they pick, traditionally getting about 45 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. That means to make a day’s minimum wage, each worker has to pick two-and-a-half-tons of tomatoes a day. What does that kind of work pay mean for the daily lives of farmworkers and their families? Twenty-eight-year-old Darinal Sales struggles to support his wife and two girls on what he makes in the fields. Because four other farmworkers live in the same dilapidated trailer, his whole family shares one small room.

GONZALEZ: Ustedes viven aqui?

DARINAL SALES: It’s because of the situation at work that we live like this. Our pay just doesn’t last and allow us to live in better way.

GONZALEZ: Immokalee is a town full of young men from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, many undocumented, who have come here to scratch out a better life for themselves by harvesting Florida’s tomato crops. Some of them end up victims of the industry’s worst abuses, including incidents of modern day slavery.

BUCKLEY: There have also now been nine federally prosecuted slavery operations in just the last 14 years here in Florida agriculture.

GONZALEZ: Slavery?

BUCKLEY: Yeah, literal slavery. Right here on Third and Boston we go down four blocks. That’s the site where workers were locked in the back of a cargo truck, literally shackled. We saw bruises on their wrists where they had been literally restrained by their employers.

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the dangers and pay, farmhands are eager to work. To see how eager, you’ve got to get up very early. Every morning in the pre-dawn hours this parking lot in downtown Immokalee becomes a giant open-air labor market. Hundreds of farmworkers come here looking to make contact with labor bosses. If they’re lucky they’ll be picked for another hard day of work in the tomato fields. The men and women selected are the ones boarding buses that take them to the fields. It’s in this parking lot that we met Aurelia Hinajosa, who’s worked in Immokalee’s tomato fields for nearly 30 years.

AURELIA HINAJOSA: Americans really like their vegetables and fruits, and who is going to pick it? The people born in this country have better kinds of work, and they’re not going to go to the fields.

GONZALEZ: But things are slowly starting to get better for Florida’s tomato field workers. Last year, after more than a decade of patient organizing work, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached a landmark agreement with growers and corporate tomato buyers like McDonalds and Burger King. The agreement gives farmworkers a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but that one cent increase translates into an additional 32 cents for every bucket picked by workers. That in turn will boost each farmhand’s pay by about $5,000 a year.

BUCKLEY: We are basically on the threshold of entering into this new industry in having rights protected and their being this consensus among buyers that we demand humane labor conditions in our supply chain.

GONZALEZ: The agreement has also made some in Florida’s powerful tomato industry question their past actions and attitudes.

SARAH GOLDBERGER: Historically, it has not been the poster child for good behavior and good treatment of its workers.

GONZALEZ: You admit to that?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Goldberger is a spokesperson for Pacific Tomato Growers. She says the agreement between workers and the tomato industry has replaced tension with cooperation.

GOLDBERGER: It has been so non-adversarial. It is a pleasure, quite honestly.

GONZALEZ: That’s a big change?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Other changes in the fields, like this one owned by Pacific Tomato, include greater access to drinking water and more rest periods, regular bathroom breaks, and a zero tolerance for verbal abuse and sexual harassment by field bosses. Now that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and it allies have an agreement, they’re spreading the word about it. The small community radio station they run in Immokalee regularly tells workers listening about their rights, pay, and future organizing plans.

Radio (In Spanish): The campaign to improve the work conditions and pay in the state of Florida.

GONZALEZ: Worker advocate and former field hand Lucas Benitez met us at the early morning labor gathering to talk about how important these changes are to the men and women who pick America’s tomato crop.

LUCAS BENITEZ: That’s what we want, work with dignity. Where every worker, every person who goes to the fields feels pride in being part of the agricultural industry that is putting food on millions of tables every day and that the worker is getting paid enough to put food on the table of his own home.

GONZALEZ: However the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies in religious and faith groups say they have much work left to do. That includes a new national campaign focused on  supermarket chains which have declined to  participate in the penny-per-pound pay agreement.

BUCKLEY: There are three principal sectors of tomato retail: fast food, food service, and supermarkets, and now the leaders of the fast food industry are on board. The leaders of the food service industry are on board. All that remains are the supermarkets.

GONZALEZ: To keep pressure on the stores and to make sure gains are protected, farmworkers regularly reach out to religious leaders and congregations.

And so I’m joined by Darinal and Oscar from the CIW.

GONZALEZ: This morning, Jordan and workers from Immokalee, including Darinal Sales, are addressing a Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida. These speaking engagements are part of a sustained campaign to get people of faith thinking about their fairness and justice when they sit down to eat. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action has been working in Immokalee for eight years on behalf of workers.

GYNTHER: You know, there are many times when we say grace we are grateful for the food on our plates. But where did that food travel? Who picked it? How did it get to us? And that is something we don’t often think about. But I think as people of faith we are called to think about the connections between us and the people who toil in the fields day in and day out to put food our plates.

GONZALEZ: For the men and women who pick Florida’s tomatoes their most important harvest has been some measure of justice and respect.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Saul Gonzalez in Immokalee, Florida.

BOB FAW, correspondent: We are very good at measuring what we make in this country and the services we provide. It’s called the gross national product. But 43 years after Robert Kennedy complained that the gross national product “measures everything except that which matters most,” economists like Carol Graham say maybe there should be an additional barometer.

CAROL GRAHAM, Brookings Institution: We need more metrics to fully understand human well-being and human welfare and how to advance it.

FAW: In other words, happiness, the subject of a torrent of recent books from the Dalai Lama to Harvard’s ex-president. Even in the academic world, “happiness” has become a cottage industry.

GRAHAM: There’s a search for a new paradigm with the financial crisis and the sense of were our fundamental’s wrong? Were we chasing the right goals?

FAW: The tiny country of Bhutan now actually uses “gross national happiness,” a survey that measures the quality of life there. France and England are also trying to include “happiness” when assessing their economies. International business consultant and author David Rothkopf:

DAVID ROTHKOPF: Something like happiness, it sound frivolous, but it’s not frivolous. The purpose of society is to create a better quality of life for all the people. It’s not to create the highest amount of aggregate wealth.

FAW: From the sublime moment of an artist in a performance, to children playing blissfully, to church-going ladies displaying their Sunday-best, we know what happiness looks like. But what exactly is it? For the last eleven years Carol Graham has tried to measure happiness.

GRAHAM: We’re getting a handle on this. There’s a new science of measuring it. We haven’t cracked all the codes and it’s not an exact science by any means but we do find some very consistent patterns.

FAW: By surveying thousands of people about how they view their lives, if they smiled that day or were worried, Carol Graham found that money doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness, that anxiety actually diminishes it, and that people of faith tend to be happier than people without.

GRAHAM: One of the things that surprised me when I got into this enterprise was how common the determinants of happiness were around the world. People actually get happier as they age, as long as they’re healthy.  Health is incredibly important, stable employment. Friendships and family tend to matter. Income matters but only up to a point.

FAW: The fabulously successful internet pioneer and sports team owner Ted Leonsis had to learn what brings happiness the hard way. As a young man, he literally made a fortune, and found it was not enough.

TED LEONSIS, entrepreneur : Maybe you’re lucky and you can start your own business and take it public and sell it, make a lot of money, and declare victory. And I did that in a really compact amount of time, and you get there and think: Is that it? Is that what the dream was all about? It’s not as fulfilling as you were told it would be.

FAW: So after a near-crash in an airplane, Leonsis vowed to seek not wealth, but happiness.

In his book, Leonsis outlines five steps to happiness. One of them: Empathy. For example, after making a harsh statement about his cleaning crew.

LEONSIS: I called a meeting and I said, “Look, I apologize. Teach me what your job is. I want to clean the building. I want to walk a mile in your shoes.”

FAW: So on the same day that President Obama attended a game…

LEONSIS: I’m sitting next to President Obama. ESPN reports on it live, first time a sitting president has gone to a game. Game ends, president leaves. I’m feeling like a million bucks. And now it’s, let’s go clean the women’s bathroom.

FAW: Leonsis says he did it to show empathy for the clean-up crews.

LEONSIS: It really taught me a lot. It’s a year later. No one in our company of 1500 people ever talks about me sitting next to the president of the United States. But they all reference when I cleaned the women’s bathroom and showed empathy.

FAW: Leonsis says what he has also found is that truly happy people recognize what he calls “a higher calling.” To leave in this world more than you take.

LEONSIS: People who give back, who are self-reflective of their role in society, they tend to be the people that are role-modeled, that are remembered, that are loved.

FAW: Father Jonathan Morris, vicar at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York City, has also written a book about happiness.

FATHER JONATHAN MORRIS, St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral: Part of finding out who we are and flourishing at the deepest levels of who we are, has to do with helping my neighbor. And that’s part of really tapping into this notion of a search for meaning and purpose and the pursuit of happiness.

FAW: From the beatitudes of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, philosophers and poets agree true happiness is rooted in a higher calling. That is possible only, says Father Morris, through “a union with god.”

FATHER MORRIS: Which means connecting to my very origin, my essential origin and somehow developing a relationship with him that gives us purpose, a special type of purpose, and then gives us joy.

FAW: In his blueprint for happiness, even Ted Leonsis, hardly an avid church-goer, says stay in touch with a higher being.

LEONSIS: Some people interpret that as meditation, some interpret that as your inner voice, some people interpret that as prayer. Regardless of how you personally internalize and make an outcome of it, I think that is a very, very important part of the process of finding what makes you happy.

FAW: All that research on happiness does have real-world implications. For example, if a lack of medical care causes anxiety, shouldn’t government pay more attention to health care than, say, general prosperity? Or, maybe we should do what they’re trying in Bhutan.

GRAHAM: It’s hard to imagine increasing contentment being a goal that we would agree on as a public policy objective, at least not in the United States, which is a very opportunity-focused society. But I do think we could agree that giving more people the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives is an objective of public policy that fits with everything our country is about.

FAW: After all, despite our enormous wealth, in quality of life surveys taken in various countries by Newsweek and Gallup, the US doesn’t even make the top ten.

ROTHKOPF: What could we do to improve the quality of people’s lives? Is it education, health care, rewarding jobs, environment? You find there are a lot of measures of quality of life and you find the countries that do better than we do, in terms of those metrics of quality of life, actually have an approach towards government where government sees its role as providing those things.

FAW: Even hard-headed businessman Leonsis agrees we should focus less on things like the gross national product and concentrate more on what really matters.

LEONSIS: You don’t necessarily win if you’re successful. There’s lots of miserable wealthy people. There’s way more people who if they focused on their communities, their giving back, they’d be much happier in their life.

FAW: Happiness then has many faces. And what all the books, and all those academic studies suggest is that happiness is elusive, is a process, not an end-point. After all, said Albert Einstein, everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Washington.

KIM LAWTON, Correspondent: For the Occupy Wall street protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park, it’s become a familiar sight—religious groups offering spiritual and moral support.

VOICES AT SERVICE: We represent. We represent. The New York City communities of faith. The New York City communities of faith.

LAWTON: Growing numbers of leaders from across the religious spectrum have been supporting Occupy Wall Street’s protest against greed and economic inequity.

REV. MICHAEL ELLICK, Judson Memorial Church, NY: This is not just a jobs issue. This is not only a health care issue or a pension issue. This is also a spiritual issue of the nature of what has happened in the United States and how we function as a people together. And that is very, very, much a matter of moral concern, not only to my Christian tradition but to Islam, and to Judaism, to Buddhism.

LAWTON: There have been regular interfaith prayer services at the park. And religious groups are also providing practical help by donating tents, food and money. They’ve been opening their facilities to the protesters, giving logistical advice and helping to get the message out.

ELLICK: Churches are an excellent place to organize this kind of information because we’re under the radar of commerce or of government.

LAWTON: Many say there is a prominent spiritual dimension to what’s been happening. Inside Zuccotti Park is a makeshift community altar, where protestors of all faiths come to pray or meditate. In several cities, protest chaplains—many of them seminary students—minster to the protesters.

ERICA RICHMOND, Protest Chaplain: We are here to provide a religious presence. We are here to listen to people, to hear what’s on their hearts. And we’re here to pray with people. And people do come up to us and ask us to sit with them in prayer, because people are in crisis and that’s why we are all here.

LAWTON: On this Sunday, United Methodists led a communion service. Participants said concern for economic justice is a core teaching of their faith.

REV. K KARPEN, Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, NY: The Bible is all about just a fairer shake for people and God’s concern for all of God’s children, not just a small segment of the population.

LAWTON: Some religious conservatives have criticized the faith-based support of Occupy Wall Street calling it a 60’s style, leftist effort to redistribute wealth. The Family Research Council urged its members to pray that God would prevent what it called “these radical organizers from stirring revolution.” But faith leaders at the Wall Street protests deny any political agenda.

KARPEN: It’s a broad movement of religious groups to support what’s going on and really to support the conversation, not to take a particular side or another side, but just to say these are the things that we need to talk about.

And they say it’s only going to spread.

ELLICK: What’s very, very real is the frustration. And if people don’t think that’s real, if people don’t think that reflects a real existential reality for the majority of Americans, the faith communities see it. Because we are who they come to when mom can’t pay rent, when the immigration officers steal grandma and there’s no one home. I mean, we’re who they come to. So for us it is an obvious, immediate, moral imperative.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, guest host: We have the story of an organization founded after federal agents raided the nation’s largest kosher meat-packaging plant in Postville, Iowa, and discovered widespread mistreatment of workers. The group, Uri L’Tzedek, which means “awakened to justice,” wants more transparency in the kosher industry, and they’ve started with restaurants.

RABBI SHMULY YANKLOWITZ (Founder & President, Uri L’Tzedek): What became clear to me in Postville was that we had to take responsibility. Not a one time act like a boycott, but something systemic and sustainable that would ensure that there was ethical transparency in the industry.

RABBI ARI WEISS (Director, Uri L’Tzedek): The Tav HaYosher, which we translate as an “ethical seal” for kosher restaurants, is an initiative that we launched in May 2009. We don’t charge anything for this seal. We have a licensing agreement which they sign. The criteria for our certification is, first and foremost, we want to make sure that people get at least minimum wage, and we want to make sure that overtime based on that minimum wage is given. Then we also want to make sure that people are respected, and work is dignified.

YANKLOWITZ: When we started the Tav HaYosher we said, let’s strive for the ideals. We want health care, we want animal treatment, we want environmental standards, we want fair trade, we want workers comp, all these issues, and we went into restaurants finding workers getting paid $2 an hour, $3 an hour. Ridiculous! So we said we have to first just meet law.

WEISS: One of the really exciting things about this program is that it’s a grassroots program. The people who actually go into the restaurants are volunteers, college students, graduate students, young professionals who care deeply about this mission and about this project. Every two or three months or so we have a training, and then we actually assign restaurants to each of the compliance officers.

YANKLOWITZ: There is nothing easy about the work we’re trying to engage in. We are sending young volunteers to ask owners to open their books, to speak with workers about very sensitive issues.

WEISS: We take them aside so that we create a safe space away from management, and we ask them questions to verify what the payroll actually says. How many hours have you worked? What is your pay? What’s it like to work here? Do you feel ever harassed? The feedback we receive from restaurant workers, we keep it anonymous, and we also have an anonymous tip line.

SHLOMIT COHEN (Tav HaYosher Compliance Officer): We’ve approached locations that initially didn’t meet standards. We spoke with them, encouraged them and were able to come back and actually sign them on.

YANKLOWITZ: Sitting in a dark basement with a worker who paints black and white cookies black, white, black, white all day, every day and seeing his eyes tear up when for the first time there was a customer concerned for his welfare, that rocked me spiritually, emotionally to feel the impact of merely showing somebody else that we’re present for them. We’re an advocate for them.

WEISS: We see this very much as a partnership between workers, the community, and restaurant owners.

NOAM SOKOLOW (Owner, Noah’s Ark/Shelly’s): I think I just felt as a good person, someone who believes in doing the right thing. I think it was important to set the standard. We’ve actually gotten numerous phone calls and numerous comments from customers who have come in and let us know that they are supporting us because of the fact that we have the seal.

YANKLOWITZ: This is a new wave of activism, an activism through what one eats, that what we eat and what we buy is a vote of confidence in our highest values.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tav HaYosher has certified over 90 eating establishments in 13 states and Canada.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Question: What do this longtime alcoholic, this up and coming project manager, this receptionist who was homeless, and Noah Haynes, who just turned one, have in common? Answer: The chance at a better life because of this former corporate high-flyer and mother of four.

NANCY MURRAY (Builders of Hope): We’re building houses. We’re rescuing houses that are slated for demolition, rebuilding them and making them available and affordable to families who otherwise would be living in pretty substandard conditions.

FAW: For the past five years, her program, Builders of Hope, has found houses about to be demolished and put in a landfill.

MURRAY: So far, to date Builders of Hope has rescued eleven million pounds of debris from the landfill. The only inventory that we work with is inventory slated for demolition. I’d say 99 percent of the homes that are donated that are older have hardwood floors in them. We’re able to restore those. The roofs, the rafter systems, the floor systems—all in really great shape and very usable.

FAW: Nancy Murray’s nonprofit group rescues houses from commercial, road and hospital expansion as well as private donors who want to build larger homes. The houses are rebuilt and refurbished into energy-efficient green houses, as Josh Thompson learned when he moved into his Builders of Hope home.

JOSH THOMPSON: All the paints that they use are all low-chemical and designed to kind of produce a healthy environment.

FAW: Now that’s what we see. What we don’t see—tell me about the insulation.

THOMPSON: Yeah. What you don’t see is spray-on foam insulation across the whole house—amazing energy efficiency with that. You got all these windows are the double-paned.

FAW: In Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and other North Carolina cities, Nancy Murray’s Builders of Hope, with help from private and government funds, has restored nearly 100 houses, selling them at an average cost of $135,000. Putting them on land she has bought or that has been donated, Murray sells them at cost to low- and moderate-income wage-earners she calls the working poor.

MURRAY: You say affordable housing and everybody thinks, “Oh, those people.” Well, those people are your teachers, your firefighters, your police officers, your nurse. It’s 70 percent of the working population of any major city, and those are the people who need affordable housing.

FAW: People like Noah’s parents, Dana and Robbie Haynes.

ROBBIE HAYNES: There’s houses like this in the downtown area, but it’s just not with our price range. We couldn’t afford to have those upgrades and different things.

FAW: New home owners like receptionist Nikki McKinnon who also could not afford to buy much of anything on her $25,000 a year salary.

NIKKI MCKINNON: Just having your own—it’s nothing like it. It gives you just a sense of pride and worth. It’s just wonderful just to say that I actually own a piece of land in this world, you know. It’s nice.

FAW: Nancy Murray gave up her job as a marketing and advertising executive to start Builders of Hope with money she inherited from her father and with the knowledge of one of his businesses—construction.

MURRAY: We were building million-dollar vacation town homes, and we were displacing people when we bought property that were renting. We would tear them down and build something else, and I thought, wow, what we’re doing is wrong. You know, I started getting a conscience, like this is terrible.

FAW: So she traded in her stilettos for steel-tipped boots, even bought her own earth-mover. It is, she says, a kind of ministry.

MURRAY: There’s a verse in Matthew that states that you shouldn’t store your money up, you know, where moths and rust and decay set in, but to take that money and invest it in Kingdom work and to really be able to use it to make a difference in loving others and caring for others while we’re here on earth.

FAW: With a staff of 60, her Builders of Hope scours a 60-mile radius looking for houses, some donated by homeowners like attorney Bryan Brice, who get a handsome tax write-off and satisfaction.

BRYAN BRICE: This is reuse and recycle and and hope in a way that is affording home ownership to lower- and middle-income families, and if you look at this whole neighborhood it’s just amazing what they’re doing here to rebuild this area. We’re glad to be a part of it.

FAW: But there is more here being rebuilt than houses. Once, this neighborhood was crime-infested.

MURRAY: Gang members were giving some problems to some of our first homeowners here, actually. This was gang territory.

FAW: Now the area is virtually crime-free.

MURRAY: That demonstrates that revitalization really does work.

FAW: Her Builders of Hope also refurbishes and rebuilds rental units. That restoration and the rebuilding of the houses is performed in part through a mentoring and training program established by Murray. Her organization hires hard-to-employ men who’ve had prison records or substance abuse problems, like the long-term alcoholic Kennie Byrum.

KENNIE BYNUM: I could see that they cared about not only just me, not focusing on let’s stop what we’re doing and care about Kennie, but let’s bring Kennie along and show him that he can be part of something that deals with caring about others. It’s a fellowship that I’ve never witnessed before or been part of before.

FAW: So lives are also being transformed here as well as houses. Phillip Brickle, once a longtime drug addict who became a pastor, now owns one of Nancy Murray’s houses.

PHILLIP BRICKLE: It’s a place of peace. It’s a place of joy.

FAW: What’s it do to someone like that? Do they change because they now can live in a home like this?

BRICKLE: I believe it gives an individual self-worth. You know, it also gives an individual a feeling of ownership, and any time you have a feeling of ownership it gives responsibility. So I do think it does bring about responsibility, and whenever you have more responsibility, it brings about change.

FAW: Juggling house moving schedules with city zoning permits, among other issues, is a true test of Nancy’s faith.

NANCY MURRAY: I would get mad at God, you know. It was like, okay, you brought me here, you convinced me to do this, you know, this project is about to fall apart. Everything is going to go by the wayside.

FAW: Finally, she says she put her fate in God’s hands to guide her to make the right decisions. It was then, she says, Builders of Hope took off.

MURRAY: You’re saying, okay, we’re here for a reason. Why are we here? What do I need to learn? What people are going to interface with me because we’re in the midst of this problem that maybe because I’ve met them something else is going to happen? So you trust that everything happens for a reason, and it’s all connected, and ultimately gets you to the place where God wants you to be.

FAW: In addition to the projects in North Carolina, Nancy’s Builders of Hope moved, refurbished, and relocated 76 homes in New Orleans that were about to be demolished to make room for a new hospital. It’s estimated about 250,000 houses a year in the United States get torn down. Cities like Detroit and Dallas have contacted Nancy about her work.

MURRAY: This is a model that can replicate, and then it does have very important ramifications, I think, nationally in terms of being able to rebuild neighborhoods and to get people back in housing, but we do need funding. We need supporters.

FAW: With the constant fundraising it is a struggle, but the satisfaction, she says, is worth all the uncertainty and aggravation.

MURRAY: You move them in over there, and the eyes and the excitement and the warmth and the pride—it’s just so sweet to see that when you do give them an opportunity and you give them a chance and something beautiful that they deserve, they take care of it and they blossom and they grow, and they really create a new community for themselves.

FAW: Here, where because of one woman’s faith a house is not just a home, it’s a new beginning.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Raleigh, North Carolina.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Pro-union protests in Wisconsin spread to other states this week as legislatures consider measures that would limit pension obligations and collective bargaining. The demonstrations have sparked a national debate over budget responsibilities and justice for workers. Many in the religious community are actively supporting the labor movement, although some people of faith argue that fiscal responsibility is also a moral priority.

We have analysis from Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Kevin, welcome to you both, a lot of religious involvement in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Yeah, you’ve really seen, I think, in the last couple weeks a revival of this message from religious groups that we haven’t heard in a long time, this sort of solidarity with workers and with union rights. You know, with all the talk in recent years about abortion and gay marriage and health care even, we haven’t heard much about unions from many churches, especially the Catholic Church, which has been a longtime supporter of organized labor.

ABERNETHY: Long tradition of support of labor.

ECKSTROM: Right, and that’s really come back this week.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And I think that’s surprised a lot of people, because the church, the Catholic Church, had been perceived as really focusing more on issues like abortion, and so to see them come out and take a stand to say, yeah, we understand there are tough budget decisions, but workers’ rights and human dignity and the common good of all, including workers, is important, and the ability to organize is also a moral value, and that’s what the bishops were saying.

ABERNETHY: But it’s been more than the Catholics, of course. It’s been lots of denominations represented in Madison.

ECKSTROM: That’s right. You had a lot of rabbis actually out marching with the workers in Madison. You had Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, the whole gamut. One of the leaders in Wisconsin from the United Church of Christ, I think, put it pretty well when he said we all understand that we’re going to have to make tough budget cuts. The question is how those cuts are going to be made and whether the people who are affected, and in this case public employees, are going to have a seat at the table. That’s really what they’re fighting about.

ABERNETHY: But Kim, the moral arguments go both ways, don’t they? I mean, there are strong moral arguments for not having a deficit.

LAWTON: Well, and that’s become a growing issue especially for religious conservatives—talking about these deficits as a moral issue. The Bible says don’t be in debt, and therefore that’s how they’re arguing. You haven’t seen, I haven’t seen a lot of religious conservatives out there right now going against the unions per se, but they are very much focusing their arguments on this, you know—the morality of the budget.

ABERNETHY: How representative do you think the people are who are protesting, both sides, of their rank-and-file?

ECKSTROM: Well, I think, you know, you always have to be careful about a division between the hierarchy—you know, the bishops and the archbishops who come out and make these statements—and the folks in the pews, and I have friends in Wisconsin who are no friends of the labor unions, but yet their bishop is out speaking in favor. So whenever you have public statements like this you have to be—you have to remember that what is said in the pulpit doesn’t always necessarily flow down to the pews.

LAWTON: And it’s interesting, because I think there are some politics involved in here as well.

ABERNETHY: Oh, yeah.

LAWTON: And so—and the unions do have a certain political reputation, and so for some people in the pews they’re more used to that, and so this talking about it as a moral issue is a new thing. You know, I was also struck by something else that’s been going in all of these—the rallies, and there’s talk of nonviolent civil disobedience and organizing. A lot of these faith-based people who are doing this are really, they’re specifically calling back to the legacy of Dr. King in the civil rights movement and this notion of the faith groups, and including a lot of Jewish leaders, really providing a pastoral underpinning for this protest, and it’s interesting they are drawing a lot of parallels. Somebody said “Wisconsin’s our Selma,” and so that’s a development I’m watching.

ECKSTROM: One of the chants they’ve been saying is, “This is what religion looks like,” as they’re out there at the State Capitol chanting and protesting. That, to them, this is faith-based action.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, many thanks, and Kim.

Tweet