LAT: Labor and Religion Reunite (Or: How to divide the right)

[Rose Siding]

This is one way to divide the right. Numerous examples of religion's traditional association with worker rights are recounted in this piece.

Labor and Religion Reunite
The AFL-CIO is sending forth seminary students to shore up the waning clout of unions by reviving the connection with a traditional ally.

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Struggling to regain power and prestige for the sagging labor movement, the AFL-CIO has hired more than three dozen aspiring ministers, imams, priests and rabbis to spread the gospel of union organizing across the nation this summer.

The program seeks to recreate the historic partnership between faith and labor, an alliance that for nearly a century gave union leaders an aura of moral authority — and their cause the stamp of divine righteousness.

As it prepares for a national convention next week in Chicago, the AFL-CIO faces stark challenges: Less than 8% of private-sector workers belong to unions, compared with more than 35% in the 1950s. Calling the federation so weak it risks irrelevancy, several member unions have threatened to secede.
....
Born-again Christian Jerad Morey finds motivation in the stories workers have told him about forced overtime, on-the-job injuries and schedules forever in flux. They're pushed so hard, he said, they don't have the chance to "lead an abundant life" — to read, to play with their children, to worship. "They're not living up to their divine potential," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-union17jul17,0,7835547.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Today's Newsweek article explains how the right worked it...

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It didn't take Rove long in Texas to conclude that the state's tectonic plates were shifting in a Republican direction. The key was to combine the pro-business money of corporate Houston and Dallas with the conservative values—and the Bible-belt traditionalism—of rural (and, up to that point, Democratic) small-town Texas. How? By the early 1990s, Rove had his plan and his man: George W. Bush, whose incandescent personality and "compassionate conservatism" covered both flanks. Rove made it Bush's business to get right with the religious right, but not so much on theology as good works. The idea was to replace government-run welfare and education with church-based charity, saving money and souls at the same time, and not to run as a foe of government per se but as a "reformer" of it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8600327/site/newsweek/page/5/