A journalist looks at Catholic labor relations

In early October, OSV News, which provides stories to Catholic Diocesan newspapers around the country, published an important story on labor relations at Catholic institutions. Reporter Kimberly Heatherington checked in on how Catholic schools, universities and hospitals addressed different themes of worker justice, including the right to organize and bargain collectively through a labor union. The picture was decidedly mixed.

It shouldn’t be this way, according to no less an authority than America’s Catholic bishops. In their 1986 pastoral letter on the economy, they wrote:

On the parish and diocesan level, through its agencies and institutions, the Church employs many people; it has investments; it has extensive properties for worship and mission. All the moral principles that govern the just operation of any economic endeavor apply to the Church and its agencies and institutions; indeed the Church should be exemplary… All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with the institution through whatever association or organization they freely choose.

The italics are the bishops’ own. The bishops of 1986 realized that we needed to practice what we preached about social justice – to do otherwise would be to court scandal. How can we expect lay Catholics in positions of business leadership to respect workers’ rights if Catholic institutions did not?

While Heatherington found some positive stories to share, the behavior of many Catholic institutions was – to say the least – hardly exemplary. Too often, we are falling down on the job. Or rather, our nonprofit Catholic institutions are behaving much the same way as lay, for-profit corporations: busting unions, paying poverty wages when they can get away with it.

I hope this important story will be picked up widely in Diocesan newspapers, and I hope you will check it out and share it widely. To check it out, click on the link below:

At Catholic institutions, unions and employers negotiate tensions for the sake of mission