Inglewood Community Paper Urges Community to Support IA 33 Workers

By BETTY PLEASANT, Contributing Editor 12.JUL.06 Los Angeles Wave

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

Faithful Central Bible Church, that black-owned behemoth of a religious-business-entertainment enterprise in the heart of Inglewood, is engaged in the iniquitous activity of union-busting and is implementing a virtual pogrom against working people to further its profiteering ends.

In some kind of pie-in-the-sky moneymaking venture since gone awry, Faithful Central and its senior pastor, Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, purchased the Great Western Forum arena for $22.5 million in 2000 and began holding religious services in it on Sundays and renting it out as an entertainment site for profit on other days. In addition to being home to the Los Angeles Lakers before the church bought it, the Forum was venue to a steady stream of concerts and other amusement events and provided employment to hundreds of middle-class workers in Inglewood and the Los Angeles environs.

From the moment the Forum opened its doors 39 years ago until the moment Faithful Central Bible Church bought it six years ago, the arena had been a wall-to-wall union workplace, paying living wages to ushers, ticket-takers, concessionaires, stagehands, engineers and janitors — all the people associated with operating an entertainment complex. But no more. All of these people are gone — discarded, locked-out and replaced by non-union scab labor driven en masse to the Forum job site from wherever they can be found in buses with Faithful Central Bible Church painted on their sides.

The last batch of union workers was locked out of the Forum in April and they have been picketing and protesting the action ever since. The problem is Bishop Ulmer. He has steadfastly refused to meet and talk with anybody to resolve the problem. He refuses to talk to the workers and their union officials, and is said to have even rebuffed attempts by Inglewood’s city, state and federal elected officials to get him to talk to the people and work out a solution. Instead, Ulmer has hired a notorious anti-worker management company, SMG, to handle all matters pertaining to the Forum, and he has given Gene Selling of SMG free reign to do whatever he must to break the workers and increase the church’s profits from its entertainment enterprise. And Selling is as good as gold: He’s putting people out of work and eliminating middle-class jobs from middle-class Inglewood.

Ulmer is Pharaoh-like in his obstinacy, maybe even worse, because Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus never made any promises to the children of Israel (except for that final, fatal one). Ulmer, on the other hand, promised the children of union that he would meet with them if they would not picket his church on Easter Sunday, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. The children of union agreed and did not picket on Easter, allowing Faithful Central congregants to enter their arena/sanctuary in peace to celebrate the redemptive power of Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate and risen from the dead in the victorious expiation of our sins. Yet, Ulmer reneged on that promise and still has not met with the children of union.

Now we are at a crisis. We have a black church that is functioning as the oppressor of the people! This is unheard of in the annals of blackness and is an aberration in the culture of God-serving, peace-loving, justice-seeking, freedom-fighting black people since time immemorial. It is time for oppressed people to rise up and fight back against Faithful Central as it would against any other entity hell-bent on destroying them. It is time for all black people, church-going people, working people, raised-on-the-union people and people who care about people to come together and stop treating this church with kid gloves and start treating it like what it is: Wal-Mart!

The children of union picket the Forum every Sunday from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Join them.