may day

Today is May Day...

I was considering trying to come up with something deep to say about Islam and labor and finding all sorts of subtle nuanced connections between the two, but no such luck. Like most religions, Islam teaches that people ought to be treated fairly (and in particular this includes workers). If you want to see a couple of nice quotes on that point, here is a pamphlet. If you want more, entire books which discuss Islamic economics (and its underlying moral principles) have been written and several are available online. From my perspective it is clear that Islam strongly and clearly (more so than certain other faiths) affirms the rights of workers.

Unfortunately, what Muslims DO is another question. Inshallah as an ummah we'll come back to our principles and the sorts of abuses which happen to foreign workers in Saudi Arabi, etc. will come to an end.

But then yet another level to this larger issue comes from the fact that many Muslims are also living in the developing world, and so Muslim laborers tend to be on the receiving end of "globalization" and all the negative consequences which come with that.

So on the one hand, in principle there is a strong Islamic impulse to put ethical constraints on the uses and abuses of wealth, along with other kinds of economic behavior (Islamic texts explicitly mention and disapprove of charging interest, hoarding wealth, jacking up prices in times of scarcity, mistreatment of workers etc.)

But on the other hand even in "fundamentalist" situations, these principles aren't always adhered to.

But in other situations, Muslims (or more precisely, average brown folks living in the developing world, regardless of religion) because of their position in the global economy, would still have a strong motivation to be concerned about economic abuse.