CLERGY LENDS LABOR A HELPING HAND, CITES ETHICAL ISSUES.

Byline: Steven Greenhouse The New York Times

More than at any other time in decades, religious leaders are making common cause with trade unions, lending their moral authority to denounce sweatshops, back a higher minimum wage and help organize janitors and poultry workers.

The clergy has not lined up with labor to such an extent since the heyday of Cesar Chavez, the charismatic farm workers leader, in the 1970s and perhaps the Depression, union and religious leaders say.

Many in the clergy say they have rallied to labor's banner because the newly revived union movement is addressing what they view as the key ethical issues of the day, including the growing gulf between the haves and have-nots.

``People are becoming poorer and less secure in this era of downsizing, and capital has gotten tougher,'' said Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, former national president of the American Jewish Congress. ``People in the clergy like me who grew up during the New Deal are going back on the warpath to try to defend the weak. Under these circumstances, where else would you expect the clergy to be but increasingly on the side of labor?''

Hertzberg was among 57 ministers, priests and rabbis who held a news conference in Newark in the spring and signed a full-page advertisement aimed at pressuring a New Jersey dairy to settle a strike and criticizing its two-tier wage offer as too low to support a family.

One recent morning, 25 members of the clergy, several from New York and Chicago, prayed in front of the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, N.C., to urge management to sign a union contract and improve working conditions.

Labor-clergy coalitions have sprouted in New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Boston, Detroit and Chicago, and a steering committee of 40 clerics is forming the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice.

In March, the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, the umbrella group, organized a 40-hour fast in which more than 1,000 people in 10 cities, including some 50 members of the clergy, fasted to protest Gov. George E. Pataki's proposed welfare and health care cuts.

``We fear for the future of our society where a very wealthy elite benefits from government policies while the endangered middle class experiences falling wages and increased economic uncertainty,'' said Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, co-chairman of the New York coalition.

Business executives are not happy about the alliance between labor and clergy. Many contend that labor disputes are not part of the clergy's mission. They argue that many in the clergy do not understand how a union can hurt a corporation's - and the nation's - competitiveness and that they often do not study the complexities of a dispute.

Marc Goldman, president of Farmland Dairy in Wallington, N.J., had some harsh words for Hertzberg and other clergy members who signed the advertisement attacking his offer of $8.25 an hour and benefits to many new workers.

``None of the clergy who signed on bothered to contact us,'' Goldman said, asserting that his offer was similar to one the striking Teamsters union had signed with other dairies. ``Clearly, they were manipulated. I lose a certain amount of respect for clergy who represent themselves as interested in justice but deny someone justice by not hearing both sides before making up their mind.''

The clergy's show of support for labor has taken many forms: sermons, petitions, pastoral letters, protest marches, meetings with management, sit-ins and congressional testimony. And that aid has come from many quarters, from African-American ministers who labored in the civil rights movement, from priests whose siblings are union members, and from rabbis whose grandparents were union stalwarts as apparel workers on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Religious leaders note that historically the clergy has lent labor a helping hand. In a landmark 1891 encyclical, Pope Leo XIII said that the right of workers to associate freely was fundamental, and he called on all employers to pay an adequate wage.

Pope John Paul II has repeatedly praised unions in his encyclicals, as has the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in pastoral letters. In congressional testimony, John Cardinal O'Connor of New York has attacked management's use of permanent replacement workers because it ``can make a charade of collective bargaining and a mockery of the right to strike.''

The clergy's work with labor has grown markedly since October, when John J. Sweeney became the AFL-CIO's president on a platform of reinvigorating the long-moribund federation. The federation has doubled its organizing efforts, pushed for a higher minimum wage and tried to attract young people as union organizers.

John L. Carr, secretary of the department of social development at the United States Conference of Bishops, said, ``A newly energized labor movement provides new opportunities to share our convictions and act on our teachings.''