Workers’ Rights Examined in Jewish-Muslim Text Study

Reflections on Our Text Study on Workers’ Rights

By JMCBI

Just before May Day, the traditional celebration of workers’ rights, we came together to explore what Jewish and Muslim traditions contribute to the current discussion on labor.

Sponsored by JCUA’s Jewish-Muslim Community Building Initiative, this text study featured Rabbi Victor Mirelman and Muslim chaplain Abbas Chinoy who facilitated the event on a rainy Sunday evening in the comfortable Dollop Café in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

The need to contemplate labor issues has gained urgency around the Midwest. In Wisconsin, only a few months ago Gov. Scott Walker made it almost impossible for public employees to organize; and in Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also changing the city’s relationship with its employees. It wasn’t even a month ago that Gov. Walker repealed the Equal Pay Enforcement Act that had offered legal avenues to fight wage discrimination based on race, age, disability, religion and sexual orientation.

Muslim chaplain Abbas Chinoy (at top, in photo at left); and Rabbi Victor Mirelman (in center of photo at right).

The evening began with this question: How have worker rights (or lack thereof) influenced peoples’ lives?

While one participant had very positive experiences with her union, another expressed her disappointment with the union of which she had been a member; she said she had been neither well informed or well cared for.

JCUA Supports Quinn’s Plan to Shutter Tamms Supermax Prison

By Jane Ramsey
President, JCUA 

The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs applauds Gov. Quinn’s proposed closure of the Tamms Correctional Center Supermax prison and urges the Illinois General Assembly to support this long overdue action.

(The Supermax prison is one of many state facilities proposed for shutdown in the governor’s 2012 budget message.)

For more than 10 years, JCUA and many of its allies have advocated for the closure of Tamms, an institution where inmates are held in complete solitude in 7 x 12 foot cells for 23 hours a day with virtually no human interaction and a lack of environmental stimulation.