By Rick and Peggy Rhoads:

*Peggy*: I grew up, from the age of 12, in the Mennonite Church. As I grew older, my faith in Christianity waned, because I thought it was exclusive. If you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, you are going to hell? I couldn’t reconcile this view with the good actions of many who were not Christians.

After I left college, my faith remained stagnant; I couldn’t find a sense of community. That is until I started working for the Department of Labor in Chicago. There I met other women, Employment and Unemployment office workers, who, like me, were working the same jobs as men and getting paid less. I joined with this group of mainly Black women, to file an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint to erase this sexist and racist wage differential and win back pay. With the help of the enlightened men in our union and other Dept. of Labor workers, we won that case and went on to fight for other reforms, including winning an across the board $100 per month pay raise in the early 1970s.

Across the board pay raises, as opposed to percentage pay raises, are a rarity in the labor world. They redress the inequality between white-collar and blue-collar workers and are much more difficult to win.

After I retired from Santa Monica College in 2002, where I was a union activist, I wanted to find a community that had faith, not in a set of ideal beliefs, but in the ability of working people of all ethnicities, genders, and origins, to set aside differences and fight for their best interests. I believe that I have found it. Today, at 12:30, our Peace and Social Justice Committee will meet to put our Unitarian Universalist Faith in Action. Please join us!

*Rick*: We’re talking about faith this month. When I was 10 my Dad took me to see Peter Pan on Broadway. I didn’t clap for Tinkerbell. I didn’t believe she would die if I didn’t clap. Two and a half years later I quit Hebrew School and refused to be bar mitzved because I didn’t believe in God. I was into science. I equated faith with superstition. I’m afraid I was self-righteous and obnoxious about it. 

From age 20 to 26, I was involved in organizing against the Vietnam War. Organizing requires making and receiving commitments from other people. Will you write the leaflet? Will you make the phone calls? Will you show up? Will you share your ideas and your doubts?

One of my first jobs after college was in a large New York State bureaucracy. We were on probation for a year. After 11 months management fired me, and gave me two weeks notice. I had helped organize a march of clerks, typists, and us college-graduate types around our floors and into the director’s office, to protest against workload increases for the typists. We were united: clerical workers and “professionals,” men and women, young and old, black, Latin, Asian and white.

Management claimed they were firing me because my work was poor. But they had made the mistake of rating me excellent on three quarterly reviews. My fellow workers organized a petition campaign to keep my job, and they were on the phones and in the break rooms all the time, discussing what to do.

It was exhilarating, but I was scared about losing my job.

On my last day, management called me into the office at 4:50. They reiterated that my work was poor, but said that they sympathized with my need to support my two young children and would extend my probation for six months. By the time I took the elevator down it was 5:25. In this office people normally disappeared like shooting stars at 5 p.m. I reached the lobby and found 30 people waiting for me, some of whom I hardly knew.

In the 40 years since then, I’ve seen countless episodes of working people coming through for each other—despite being indoctrinated practically from birth with ideas such as  “look out for yourself.” Most recently, along with Diana Spears, James Witker, and Jila Tayefehnowrooz from our congregation, I was on a picket line of 60 people in front of Millennium Carwash, to demand that Anselmo Leyva, a worker fired for participating in the Clean Carwash Campaign, be rehired. 60 busy people took time out of their day to support one worker.

Based on evidence, I have faith in working people. We light this chalice in their honor.