Catholic Church leaders across the country are responding to the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of police and reflecting on structural racism in the United States. Below find selections from some of their thoughts. The video of George Floyd in police custody Monday evening is gut wrenching and deeply disturbing. The sadness […]
CLN Recording Secretary Catherine Orr also serves as Program Coordinator for the Roundtable Association of Catholic Diocesan Social Action Directors. Catherine Orr has been working with marginalized communities for many years and has embodied the call of Catholic Social Teaching. While attending Marquette, she was doing a service learning project in which she worked at […]
Wednesday June 3 the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions have organized car caravans in cities across the United States to focus on the essential needs of American workers as the pandemic continues. Many of these needs were addressed in the HEROES Act that passed the House of Representatives on May 15. We don’t yet know […]
The workers of UNITE HERE Local 11 are hurting. More than ninety-five percent of the members of Local 11 – who work in Los Angeles hotels and restaurants – have lost work as the pandemic shuttered the city’s hospitality sector. So the largely Latino and immigrant workforce did what came naturally: they gathered virtually for […]
May 24, 2020 marks the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ widely hailed letter on the environment, Laudato Si. The remarkable letter reflects on our materialist culture, pointing to widespread pollution and the threat of global warming. He tells us that the Earth “cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her […]
While some unions face a devastating dilemma when their members’ livelihood is tied to the carbon economy, others are finding common ground with environmentalists. Janitors represented by the SEIU and their green movement counterparts have long shared an interest in eliminating toxic cleaning products. Under the banner of Bargaining for the Common Good, SEIU Janitors […]
In Washington DC’s National Airport, a group of immigrant workers from Africa and Latin America has been struggling for years to form a union and bargain for a living wage. Now they are concerned that their employer, the multinational corporation Eulen Group, will use covid-related layoffs to kill the their union drive, targeting union activists. […]
Phil Tabbita is the President of the Catholic Labor Network. In his day job, he is Manager of Negotiation Support and Special Projects for the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). Phil Tabbita did not begin his working career with the intention of becoming a union activist. He just needed a job while he studied music […]
Aside from the elderly and retired who are most likely to suffer fatal complications, the covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have struck no segment of American society harder than the American working class. It was a grim irony, therefore, that federal social distancing guidelines expired quietly on May 1, the Feast of St Joseph […]
On May 1, 2020 — the Feast of St Joseph the Worker — Fr. Sinclair Oubre presented A Personal & Brief History of the Founding of the Catholic Labor Network to a national audience via Zoom. In response to requests by listeners, here is the text of his address: The personal roots of the […]