Faith-Labor Organizing: Why Building Permanent Infrastructure is the Intervention This Moment Demands

Our congregations and our unions each have a measure of power. None of it is enough. The change we seek requires building power together; prioritizing building that power together in parallel with the work we are already doing alone.

Our faith communities and labor unions share geographies, serve many of the same families, and claim a common commitment to human dignity. We rarely build power together. When we collaborate, the collaboration tends to be transactional: labor shows up for a rally the church organized, a pastor blesses a picket line. The event ends. Everyone goes home. No infrastructure remains.

In Northern Virginia, our first Faith & Labor 2-day Training launched this April at Virginia Theological Seminary, a partnership between Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement, Virginia Theological Seminary and the Northern Virginia Labor Federation. The training brought together faith leaders, broad-based organizers and labor organizers into the same room to build shared infrastructure that outlasts any single campaign.

A successful stop sign campaign at a dangerous intersection is a win. A collective bargaining contract at a single employer is a win. Neither builds the kind of power that can respond when a state agency is dismantled or when a national crisis demands coordinated action across regions. We need shared infrastructure: durable, adaptable, that can address systemic challenges affecting workers and their families, not just the local fights we can win alone.

How This Partnership Emerged

History is unambiguous: when worker rights and the moral arc of humanity advance most, faith communities and labor are in the trenches together. The abolitionist movement; the eight-hour workday; the sanitation worker strike in Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. died supporting a union strike. Civil rights and labor rights were never separate fights–they were the same fight, waged by people who understood that dignity is indivisible. When these movements separated, both weakened.

When autocracy rises, it targets unions and prophetic religion, because organized workers and organized faith are the two forces that can mobilize people across race, geography, and class. Preventing a slide into autocracy requires these two traditions to be intentional and intentionality requires material investment in organizing money and people. It is also to recognize that the light at the end of the tunnel only becomes possible when labor and faith communities are joined tightly in the shared struggle for dignity.

That history drove the partnership. But the immediate spark was simpler: we are organizing the same people separately, often for related fights, without knowing it.

Three years ago, I began one-on-ones with labor leaders across Northern Virginia. The conversations revealed mutual frustration and mutual suspicion. Some union organizers saw faith communities as naïve, focused on charity rather than power. Some clergy saw labor as transactional, insufficiently concerned with the whole person and only looking to “rent a clergy” for rallies or strikes. Both sides had been burned by partnerships that felt extractive: show up for our event, lend us your credibility, then disappear.

The breakthrough came when we stopped talking about collaboration and started practicing it. We plan to run joint listening sessions in congregations with a focus on speaking with private sector workers. We are in active practice of inviting labor organizers to observe our leadership development and vice versa–the traditions, while different, are not incompatible; they are complementary.

A critical insight: each side must not feel the other is paternalistic or lecturing on how the other should organize. Labor has a century of hard-won wisdom about building power against adversaries with resources to crush you. Faith communities have centuries of practice holding people together through suffering, building the relational density that sustains movements across generations. We each have something to teach. We each have something to learn. The partnership only works if both sides believe that.

Why Now

Sixty million American workers say they would join a union if they could. Public approval of unions sits at 70 percent, near a sixty-year high. Meanwhile, union density continues to fall. The desire is there but the infrastructure to convert that desire into organized power is not.

Church membership has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in Gallup’s history. Weekly attendance sits around 20 percent.

Both institutions are losing members. Neither is losing infrastructure. Union halls still exist in every major metro area. Churches, mosques, and synagogues still anchor neighborhoods. What has eroded is the relational tissue between us, our leaders, and the communities we serve.

Broad-based organizing offers labor something it cannot generate alone: deep relational practice, moral authority, and a base of power that reframes economic fights in terms that cut across partisan lines. Labor offers a rich history of disruptive power, grit, experience in the trenches, and organized workers with economic leverage that can translate moral witness into material wins.

Neither of us can win alone. That is the point.

What We’ve Learned So Far

The planning process surfaced differences as expected. Language was the first negotiation. Labor organizers use “campaign” to mean a sustained, escalating fight with a clear target and timeline. Broad-based organizers use the word “campaign” more loosely than our labor counterparts do. For us, a campaign is the whole life cycle of an issue, not just the final push. That sounds like a small distinction until you try to build a strategy on top of it. We had to agree on the meaning of the words before we could agree on what to do. So we studied a fight that had already lived through that question, a worker led campaign over a public transit system in the City of Alexandria, Virginia, that showed us what solidarity between faith and labor actually looks like in practice.

In 2018, drivers at DASH, the City of Alexandria’s public bus system, voted 97 to 13 to join Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689. DASH (unofficially known as Driving Alexandria Safely Home) is run as a nonprofit and staffs its workforce through a private company. The drivers earned less than nearby counterparts, and it took the drivers, prior to this campaign, over 20 years just to reach a top wage of $29 an hour. The fight had become a learning touchstone for the leaders gathered in April, trying to figure out how faith and labor can build together, because it served as an example of what it looks like to find solidarity between two sets of priorities.

Pace is a point of divergence between broad-based organizing and labor organizing. Union campaigns run on tight deadlines. A contract expires, an election gets scheduled, management pushes back, and the deadline is non-negotiable. Broad-based organizing moves more consistently at the pace of trust, which can feel painfully slow to a colleague staring down a calendar but both have instances in which organizing conditions are interchangeable. Broad-based can have tight deadlines and labor can and does, at times, move at the pace of trust.

The DASH fight shows the solidarity between the two, and it shows an example of a way forward. ATU had a hard date for a unionization election. But the foundation underneath that sprint was relational, and it was built one driver at a time. Organizers met drivers at the Subway down the street from the garage. They rode Metro dressed as passengers to talk with drivers off the clock. They learned that junior drivers had to be approached before senior drivers, who carried more resistance, and that reaching the Ethiopian drivers in the workforce meant bringing in someone those drivers already knew. When public pressure finally arrived, it landed on a base that had been built quietly for months. The sprint won the vote, 97 to 13. The trust made the sprint possible. We are still figuring out how to honor both rhythms, but DASH suggests we don’t have to choose.

The surprises have been generative. Labor organizers were startled by how directly faith leaders talk about self-interest; not as selfishness but as the engine of sustainable commitment. Faith leaders were startled by how precisely labor organizers track power: who has it, who wants it, what they will do to keep it. The traditions are more compatible than either side assumed.

Scale

VOICE is a founding affiliate of the Just Power Alliance, launched in 2024. The Alliance’s nine founding affiliates represent roughly 330 institutions and organize over half a million people across the East Coast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes. After Virginia, the model could scale across the network: DC, Maryland, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Connecticut. Each geographic location is anchored in local faith-labor partnerships.

The vision is not a new national organization. It is national infrastructure; organizers and leaders in different cities, fluent in the same skills and in more than one organizing tradition, who can support one another’s campaigns and develop leaders who move between the sanctuary and the union hall.

Organized money benefits from the division between faith and labor. When we fight housing battles without labor’s economic leverage, we lose. When we fight contract battles without faith communities’ moral authority, we fight alone.

The structural separation between our movements is not inevitable. It is a condition we can organize against.

If you are an organizer, a pastor, a rabbi, an imam, a union leader, or a lay leader, the question is whether you will prioritize building power with people outside your institution along with the work you are already doing inside it.

If you believe the change you seek requires building the power to achieve it, your answer should be yes.