Rev. William J. Barber, II, Sen. Sherrod Brown: Why workers will decide the 2020 election

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In the Bible, we read that humankind was created in the image of God, and from that creation story follows the human impulse to create and to labor – whether as a welder or a teacher, whether to write poetry or to cook dinner for our families. We all are trying to be productive for our families and our communities and our country. Work unites all of us. 

The fundamental dignity of work is something all people of faiths understand, and it has been woven throughout the teachings of many faiths for centuries. 

Writing in the Rerum Novarum in 1891, Leo XIII – known to many as the Labor Pope – exhorted employers “not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character.”

More than a century later, Pope Francis told union workers in Italy that “Labour is the most common form of cooperation that humanity has generated in its history. Work is a form of civil love.” 

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Now more than ever we know how much our daily lives depend upon essential workers. But we have failed to give essential workers the basic necessities essential to their survival.

We have failed because corporate interests have lobbied Senate leadership to sit on bills that have passed the House to raise the minimum wage, guarantee essential workers the protection they need, and get emergency relief to families, cities and states to prevent eviction, hunger, and bankruptcy.  

Despite a long track record of cheating contractors and harassing employees, Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 on the promise to stand for American workers.

To communities that have watched good-paying manufacturing jobs vanish, Trump offered both nostalgia for times when the local economy was stronger and divisive narratives about how immigrants and other countries were to blame.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden talks with workers as he tours the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc, Wis., Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Four years later, American workers know they are not better off than they were before Trump offered tax breaks and COVID relief to corporations.

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As Americans go to the polls, workers are prepared to render judgment on a president who has failed to keep his promises. 
Corporate profits have soared and executive compensation has exploded, all on the backs of American workers. But our middle class has shrunk and millions labor for poverty wages. And if work isn’t valued, Americans can’t earn their way to a better life for their families – no matter how hard they work.

For far too long, we have failed to recognize that work’s purpose is to support and nurture our families and communities and civil society – not Wall Street.  

But under the Trump administration, Wall Street has been running the country. The current president’s cabinet looks like a big bank executive retreat.

The halls of Congress teem with corporate lobbyists. And those lobbyists take their cues from Wall Street, which rewards companies that cut costs by any means necessary, and view workers as a cost to be minimized, rather than sisters and brothers.

It’s little wonder that workers become an afterthought – or no thought at all. 

As American workers head to voting booths and mail-in ballots in numbers so large they cannot be ignored, they send a clear message to political leaders: we are the backbone of this country, our work has dignity, and you cannot continue to exploit us.  

In this critical moment, we join our voices because we know civil rights and workers’ rights have always been inexorably linked.

Not long before he was martyred in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr. told AFSCME sanitation workers, “One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.” 

As American workers head to voting booths and mail-in ballots in numbers so large they cannot be ignored, they send a clear message to political leaders: we are the backbone of this country, our work has dignity, and you cannot continue to exploit us.  

And after the votes are cast and the headlines written, chronicling the mighty stream of voters demanding justice and righteousness, our political leaders must use the power entrusted to them to make workers’ lives better.

We must pay people for the true value of their work, and give them power in their workplaces, with higher wages and empowered unions.   

Pope Francis said that unions, “transform the discarded stones of the economy into its cornerstones.” 

Too many people in this nation have experienced the rejection of being treated as a discarded stone. But the Bible promises in Psalm 118 that the stones which have been rejected will become the foundation of a new and just society.

America’s rejected stones are Black, White and Brown; gay, straight and trans; religious and non-religious. But when we all link up and stand together, both in the streets and at the ballot box, we have the power to become the nation we have never yet been.

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Now is the time for a Third Reconstruction that guarantees dignity for every worker in America.

We must rebuild a nation that has failed so many, and the workers of America are ready for the task. 

Democrat Sherrod Brown represents Ohio in the United States Senate.