Starbucks Workers Call for Customer Boycott

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It began five years ago in Buffalo, New York and would become the nation’s most audacious contemporary union organizing campaign: Starbucks baristas demanded a voice at work. Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) swept from one store to the next, despite fierce management opposition. To  date more than 12,000 Starbucks employees at nearly 700 stores have voted for union representation, and sat down with management to bargain a contract. How many stores would you guess now have a first contract in place? 500? 50? 5?

Try zero. The workers aren’t asking for the moon, but they do want a livable $17/hour wage floor, adequate staffing, and an end to the company’s Unfair Labor Practices. But Starbucks’ management is determined to prevent the union from securing a permanent foothold there, so they have dragged out negotiations in the vain hope that the workers will become discouraged and give up their union aspirations. So workers have turned the tables and asked worker justice advocates to spurn Starbucks until they get a contract.

The boycott has played a significant role in labor history from the 19th century. At one time – before our manufacturing sector was largely offshored – workers demonstrated their solidarity by purchasing only goods bearing the union label. In more recent history, some of our readers will remember the table grape boycott of the late 1960s in support of Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers. Many Catholic social justice advocates across the country leafleted outside grocery stores, and by 1970 the table grape growers had signed their first contract with the UFW.

SBWU activists have set up a boycott website. If you a prepared to boycott Starbucks in support of these workers, go to the website and take the pledge!

(Note: this boycott is targeting Starbucks’ company-owned, standalone stores – the ones you see on every block in major US cities. It is NOT targeting the Starbucks counter you see at an airport or in your grocery store, which is operated under license by a different employer, whose employees may already have union representation.)

Catholic Labor Network Card Checks bring Union Representation

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In the United States, unions are certified when a majority of workers demonstrates support for union representation. Usually this is done through a hotly-contested election sponsored by the National Labor Relations Board, but some employers who are respectful of workers’ rights agree instead to a simpler “card check” by a third party. The third party receives a list of employees from the employer and a stack of signed union authorization cards from the union, then checks to make sure a majority of the workers on the list have submitted cards expressing their intent to join. The Catholic Labor Network periodically gets requests for a priest to serve as a neutral third party arbitrator and conduct a card check. In recent months, we have received a series of these requests.

Our spiritual moderator Fr. Sinclair Oubre conducted two of the card checks. First, in July, 53 employees of a solar energy nonprofit voted to join their local union. Through another card check process, another 80 gas utility workers in New Orleans became members of their local union.

Most interestingly, CLN trained a priest friend in Georgia in the card check process and he willingly assisted with his first ever card-check to create an independent staff union at their international legacy union. Not only was the union declared, CLN gained a new labor priest who is eager to uphold the dignity of work in concrete ways moving forward.

Congratulations to Ascension Saint Agnes Nurses on Their First Contract

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After a grueling three-year battle with Ascension health care, the nurses of Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland won their first contract on September 19, 2026. The Nurses spent much of 2023 enduring a harsh anti-union campaign from hospital management. Maryland members of the Catholic Labor Network stood with them and in November 2023 they voted to join National Nurses United (NNU). But following the union-busting playbook, the hospital dragged out first contract negotiations for years and attempted to decertify the union. Congratulations to the nurses for their courage and determination under pressure.

Church, Labor Honor Victims of ICE in Chicago

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For more than two decades, America’s labor unions and the Church have collaborated to promote justice for immigrant workers. This work has become more urgent in the past year, as ICE has scaled up its efforts at mass deportations – a process that has too often ended in the death of our immigrant brothers and sisters, and sometimes even of observers. That’s why a group in Chicago has come together to uphold the memory of those who have died in the current immigration crackdown.

The idea was conceived when Dominican Priest Fr. Brendan Curran –co-founder of Priests for Justice for Immigrants – reached out to Chicago Federation of Labor Secretary-Treasurer (and CLN Board member) Don Villar. The Chicago Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) picked up the ball and Chicago-area trade unions ran with it. The Carpenters crafted over 120 beautiful wooden crosses, which they conveyed to the Painters, who lovingly inscribed the name of an ICE victim on each one. In late September they were shared with the public in a press conference at Holy Name Cathedral; the Laborers have volunteered to transport the crosses to parishes and schools around Chicagoland between now and Lent.

Launch event for The Immigrant Crosses Memorial

Read more here

What is the cost of union busting? A CLN Member Contribution by Bob Funk, Executive Director, LaborLab.us

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When workers at a hospital, university, or school start talking about forming a union, many employers hire outside “experts” to squash the effort. An industry of “union avoidance” consultants and law firms, worth an estimated $1.7 billion a year in the United States, exists to serve them. These specialists, paid hundreds of dollars an hour, run captive audience meetings, coach supervisors, and write the anti-union literature meant to sow fear and doubt, often without telling workers who they are or why they’re there. Congress identified this problem back in 1959 and required these arrangements be disclosed, calling the activity “reprehensible” and something that “should be exposed to public view.” But loopholes and weak enforcement have kept workers in the dark about who’s doing this work and what it costs.

Catholic employers are no exception, and some spend just as much as anyone else. Ascension Seton, founded in Austin, TX, by the Daughters of Charity in 1902, describes itself as a ministry of the Catholic Church. A federal report filed by its hospital in Kyle, TX, Ascension Seton Hays, shows it retained two consulting firms, Heightened Solutions and Bardi Education Services, on November 1, 2023, just over a week before nurse residents and fellows at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin filed to unionize with National Nurses United. The hospital paid the firms more than $160,000 through the end of that year to help management “communicate” with employees about their right to organize. The residents and fellows won their election anyway, voting 120 to 5, joining the staff RNs who had organized in 2022, and all of them ratified a first contract that March. A review of Department of Labor filings by National Nurses United found Ascension spent more than $1.2 million system-wide on anti-union consultants in 2023 alone.

And Ascension isn’t alone. Faculty unions at Catholic universities, including Boston College, Duquesne, St. Leo, Marquette, Loyola Marymount, and St. John’s, have watched their schools cite a religious exemption from federal labor law to stop bargaining. And nurses at SSM Health’s St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, WI say they faced union-busting while organizing this year.

Unfortunately, federal filings like these only tell part of the story. They may show what an employer paid outside consultants, but not the added cost of attorney fees and the paid time managers spend on union-busting instead of their own jobs. LaborLab, a workers rights organization, built a free calculator to help fill in that picture. Run against the campaign to defeat the residents’ and fellows’ organizing drive, it estimates the hospital’s full effort cost between $486,000 and $602,000, or $2,200 to $2,700 per worker, well beyond the $160,000 in consultant fees it disclosed. Not all of that is money the hospital could simply redirect; much of it is staff and manager time pulled away from patient care rather than a check it could write elsewhere. But it’s a fuller picture of what workers are up against than any filing shows on its own. Workers in other campaigns can use the same tool to see the full size of that effort, instead of waiting a year for a partial picture to show up in a federal filing.

That’s the gap LaborLab’s tools are built to close. Alongside the calculator, our new union-buster search tool pulls together federal filings on more than 800 consultants, 8,000 law firms, and 21,000 attorneys, including who they work for and what they’re paid, where that’s disclosed. Workers can see the whole picture before a vote, not months after one. Since Rerum Novarum, the Church has taught that workers have a right to organize. Knowing who’s trying to talk them out of it, and what it’s costing to do so, helps them exercise that right freely.

Catholic Employers Behaving Badly

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In November, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is commemorating the 40th Anniversary of their landmark pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All. In it the Bishops taught, “All church institutions must fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with the institution through whatever association or organization they freely choose.” Unfortunately a growing number of Catholic universities and hospitals are instead acting like their union-busting, for-profit counterparts when it comes to labor relations.

In June nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, part of the SSM health network, voted 511-63 in favor of joining SEIU. But hospital administrators are refusing to recognize and bargain with the workers’ chosen representatives. This is a common tactic used by for-profit corporations facing organized workers: they seek to delay a first contract in hopes that the workers will become discouraged and give up. The union has been forced to file an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

The nurses have one advantage over their counterparts at the nation’s Catholic colleges and universities: National Labor Relations Board jurisdiction is well established by law, so they have a place to turn when the hospital administrators refuse to respect their rights. Not so those employed at Catholic higher education institutions. Here, cynical university administrations have invoked First Amendment freedom of religion protections to bust unions with legal impunity.

You may remember reading here how adjunct and non-tenure track faculty at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles also voted in 2024 to join the SEIU. The administration seemed ready to negotiate with the faculty union until receiving their bargaining proposals. At that point they seem to have decided that it was easier to bust the union than bargain with their employees. In September 2025 they announced that they were withdrawing recognition from the union, and if the Labor Board tried to tell them otherwise, they would cite their exemption from the law as a religious institution. That’s right – LMU was too Catholic to be subject to US Labor Law but not Catholic enough to follow Catholic social teaching out of respect for the Church.

A similar situation has emerged at St John’s college in New York City. For decades, St John’s served as an exemplar of Catholic Social Teaching, bargaining with two faculty unions. Then in February 2026 they abruptly announced that they intended to withdraw recognition from both unions. Because of an almost unique NY state law protecting their right to organize, the unions were able to file a ULP with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) in April, winning the support of the state’s Attorney General. However, the university is refusing to budge, and intends to invoke the First Amendment in the federal courts to escape their obligation to bargain.

Text of Cardinal McElroy’s Labor Day Mass Homily

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Labor Day Mass 2026

St. Matthew’s Cathedral

Washington, D.C.

Cardinal McElroy Homily

It’s wonderful to be with you here today, and to welcome all our regular parishioners, at the Cathedral, and all those who are visiting here. And especially on this day, to welcome on this Labor Day weekend, representatives of workers and workers themselves, and organized labor in the Catholic Labor Network.

In the first reading today, from the book of Genesis, we see the foundation of the Church’s entire understanding of the meaning of work, and of its products. It is God who brings the whole of the earth into being, creating our universe out of nothing. Every blessing that we know on this earth is a gift to us from God, created in grace, and given to us in love. And the whole of the created order is bestowed upon us, not as individuals but as the community of peoples, of all of humanity who live in this world.

Church teaching says to us a very important truth, and it says it again, and again, and again. The creation is the gift of God to all. Catholic theologists calls it the universal destination of all goods. No one intrinsically owns anything. All that is that has come ultimately from the gift of God, belongs to all of us. Private property exists, and it exists as accommodation to the ways of the world, to make economies work. But in a more fundamental sense, the gift of the created order and all that has flown from it, is the heritage of all. Catholic teaching says that it is the heritage of all. We have to remember that, everyone has a right to part of the world’s bounty. But also on this world, we are called to be co-creators with God, to take that bounty and, through our lives and our labor, build it up. 

In Catholic theology, for every gift and right, there is a responsibility. And for the gift and the rights of all the material goods of creation, we have a responsibility, all of us, to help build that up. And for most of us, it is through work, through our labor, and all the different kinds of work we undertake in this world.

Part of this work is bestowed upon us as a responsibility for us because we need to participate in building up the world, in making the order of creation more beautiful, more worthwhile, more beneficial to all of humanity. But part of it is because when we are workers, we are co-creators with God. It is God who brought everything into being, but when we work, in the dignity of our labor, we are co-creators with God.

You know, for us in the Church, the great example of the co-creator is St. Joseph. You know, the father of Jesus, he was a carpenter. In his carpentry, he made a home for his family, and he was a responsible participant in the community, in the life of building up the earth. That is the call for each of us in our lives.

Work is not something imposed upon us merely as a burden. We all know it can be burdensome from time to time. But work is given to us as a way of self-expression, of our need, of our human need to create, to contribute to, to build up here on this earth and in all the communities that we enrich in our lives.

So that is the fundamental teaching of the Church. As God created all the earth and all that we know in this life, so we are called to build upon that, by our labor, by our talents, by our responsibility, by our commitment, by working, even when some days it’s really hard to get up and go to work. That we are co-creators with God and that there is a dignity to human work that is immense and should never be damaged or undermined.

A great moment in modern Catholic social teaching was when the Church confronted tremendous damage upon workers in the world at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical called Rerum Novarum because he was bringing the church and society to grips with the fact that when the world shifted from agrarian life to industrial life, there were immense new threats to workers. Terribly inhumane working conditions, exploitation of wages, tearing apart of families, lack of security. And thus, the end of the 19th century Rerum Novarum says to us: in the world there needs to be an understanding of the dignity of work that all respect; that workers respect, that governments respect, that employers respect, and to try to make humane the living conditions and benefits and pay for those who labor every day to help themselves, their families, our society, and to build up the world. And in that particular moment, the rights of organized labor were particularly important as being a counterforce to the raw economic power of major employers. And that has been in Catholic teaching strongly since that period.

Today, we are on the cusp of another revolution that will dramatically affect work in our world and the dignity of labor.

In August, Cardinal Tobin, Cardinal Cupich, and I, who are the three American cardinals who are heads of dioceses, spent several days in Silicon Valley with the heads of the AI teams in what they call the frontier labs, those who are on the cutting edge.

And they spoke very openly about the state of AI – where they’re going, where the strengths are, where the challenges are. And there are many of them – many strengths, many blessings will come from this, but also there are many destructive elements to it and one of the areas we spoke about was that of work and of labor and what AI is going to do and, particularly down the road a few more years, the development of robotics in tandem with AI is going to accelerate tremendously changes in the workforce. And the question is, will there be meaningful work left? And will that meaningful work be allocated in a way which offers opportunities to all of us in this world to be co-creators? To have places of work where we can contribute to the world and build it up?

And the answer to that is, no one knows. The labor market is going to radically change in the next 20 years and there are certain sectors where they feel will essentially be wiped out by AI, and there are other sectors, some of them surprising, some of them about manual labor and social service and all those things which will not be, but what we do know is there going to be a tremendous dislocation of workers. Millions of workers who have jobs now will not have those jobs 10 years from now.

And thus, we as a society have to be at the table seeking this vision of work and seeking to make sure that exploitation does not grow and that the wealth of the country doesn’t increasingly go to the fewer and the fewer at the expense of the working class.

We have to be there in terms of understanding where our government should go, where we as a society should go, where the economy should go. And that is the challenge for labor in our day of anticipating this and making sure that as decisions unfold that are going to have such tremendous repercussions for all workers, that there are tremendous efforts, thought-out efforts, structures in place to make this transition one which allows for continued creation through labor and the buildup of the human family by understanding the dignity we have as workers, and what we are called to be and what we are called to do in this world.

So on this Labor Day, let us give thanks to the Lord for the beauty of creation, for the dignity of labor, which God has bestowed upon us. Let us give thanks for all those who work in this world. Let us give thanks for men and women and children of families who have little of this world’s good. And let us do everything that we can to vindicate workers in this moment in which we live and in the years which are going to come, which will transform human labor. That we might have a labor force and a labor opportunity that truly reflects the gift of God to us all, the call of God to us all, and the wonderful talents we have, to build up the creation that God gave us in the book of Genesis in the first reading today.

 

Transcript taken from live stream video. Please excuse any typos.

The Main Lesson from Chavez’ Downfall

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A charismatic leader can be important to a social improvement effort. The betterment will not last, however, if things devolve into a personality cult. The tragedy of Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) is a case study in the danger of a well-intentioned movement that allows a leader to become a quasi-divine, unaccountable force.
It is wrong to presume that farmworker unions did not exist until the saintly pioneer, Chavez, created the National Farm Workers Association in September 1962. Nor was it ever accurate to think that Chavez single-handedly brought the experience of Mexican-Americans to national attention. In fact, the laborers initially involved in striking grape vineyards were Filipino-Americans, not primarily Mexican-Americans.
Further, Chavez was not a self-developed champion, as was once imagined. In the early 1960s two priests, Fr. Donald McDonnell (1923-2012) and Fr. Thomas McCullough (1922-1989), with the permission of their bishop, became missionaries-at-large to California’s poor. They came upon Chavez and instructed him in theology and agriculture issues. In the late 1940s Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), founder of Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation, got involved with Mexican-American homeowners in California. In 1953 he hired Fred Ross (1910-1992) as his West Coast director. Ross structured the groups as the Community Service Organization. Ross identified Chavez as a leader. Within a year, Alinsky hired him too. After nearly a decade with CSO, Chavez turned his attention to farmworkers.
Larry Itliong (1913-1977), a Filipino-American, preceded Chavez in farm worker organizing, and even he was not an originator. The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers, affiliated with the CIO, was long active in the State of Washington, Alaska and California. Itliong was involved with UCAPAW and in the 1940s he led strikes among asparagus pickers. In 1959 an Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee was formed in the merged AFL-CIO. In the summer of 1965 Itliong led a successful AWOC strike in the Coachella Valley, southeast of Los Angeles.
In September 1965 Itliong gathered hundreds of workers into Filipino Community Hall in Delano, California for a vote to strike the area’s grape growers. It was a bold move and Itliong realized he needed help. As is common with ethnic groups, Filipino-Americans and Mexican-Americans did not easily mingle in the community. Plus the two ethnic groups competed for jobs. Yet Itliong approached Chavez to join in the strike. Until then, Chavez spent his time talking with farmworkers but had yet to launch any job action. Chavez realized the opportunity and joined forces with the Filipino-Americans. Thus began the now famous Delano Grape Strike and National Boycott. Four flags were prominent in the first demonstration: the U.S. flag of course plus the flag of the Philippines, of Mexico and the flag/banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In time the group’s named was changed to United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and then to United Farm Workers Union. Itliong served the new union, including as director of national boycotts. However, Itliong was soon overshadowed by Chavez.
Jill Cowan recently spoke with Itliong’s relatives for New York Times (7/25/26). They and others say Itliong was muscled out of the way by Chavez and his loyalists. Aquilina Sariano of Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles draws the correct lesson from the disconcerting disclosures about Chavez: Society tends to “venerate individuals instead of the messy collectives who make change.” There is no need to swap Chavez’ name for another name on buildings and signs. The goal remains justice for workers.
Unlike Chavez, charismatic leaders do not normally engage in deviant behavior. Still, when a pastor, a community organizer, a union official, or another group leader exhibits excessive fondness for attention, let it serve as a warning that the goal of social improvement is giving way to self-promotion. Social improvement needs those who project confident qualities that will attract and retain busy and creative followers. Yet, the genuine change agent must stay out of the limelight and nurture the collective mission. “Loyalty to Chavez” superseded the development of farmworker leaders and the external mission of the organization, Mirian Pawel concludes in her excellent biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Droel is an editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

Catholicism and AI by Bill Droel

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With hammer in hand, Martin Luther (1483-1546) struck a significant blow against clericalism and for the laity in the world by insisting on the universal call to holiness. A cobbler’s work is as valuable to God as is a priest’s, he explained. The vocation of a homemaker is no further away from God than that of a priest in the pulpit.
Subsequent leaders of the Reformation lost sight of Luther’s significant contribution on the primacy of baptism and the centrality of lay spirituality. Instead, those leaders preached the “utter depravity” of each person and claimed that the world was a playground for the devil. Temptation lurked all around. This pessimistic turn in Protestant thinking only reinforced the heaven and earth dualism, the difference between clergy and laity.
Gradually, Protestants found a way to balance the good that people can do in the world and the persistence of worldly evil. For example, successful industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) pointed to the philanthropic responsibilities for monied Christians, in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth.”
Max Weber (1864-1920), a founder of sociology, popularized the balanced approach in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin, 1904). Certain Christian virtues (like thrift, competence, loyalty, efficiency, measured charity) reinforce habits that are important to success in a capitalist economy, he wrote. Unfortunately, the Christian side of this philosophy has been eclipsed these days by a laissez faire style of capitalism that prizes utilitarian ethics, individualism, and consumerism.
What does Catholicism have to say about work?
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were greatly disturbed by the downside of capitalism: crowded housing, dangerous occupations, child labor, in a word, misery. Their radical proposals included the abolition of private property.
Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) came to the defense of private property in his 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor. Leo XIII added, however, that capitalism must have restraints, like government regulation, labor unions, professional standards and more.
In his Theology of Work (Regnery, 1966), Fr. Marie-Dominique, OP (1895-1990) further developed Catholic doctrine about the laity at work. His perspective, like that of other contributors to Vatican II (1962-1965), was pegged to an industrial economy with its impoverishing downside.
Before his election as pope, Saint John Paul II (1920-2005) was a stonecutter in a limestone quarry. He was employed in a chemical plant and as a railroad maintenance man. He was a dramatist and a theater promoter. He was also quite fluent in the Marxist perspective on work. As pope, he wrote a September 1981 encyclical, On Human Work. It stands as a masterful Catholic reflection on the philosophy and theology of work.
Kate Ward of Marquette University brings the topic into our post-industrial context with Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (National Center for the Laity, 2026).
Ward begins with a contrast between a work-until-you-drop mindset and a Catholic worldview. Our current economy is premised on what she calls workism. It values activity in the world exclusively by “outputs that can literally be counted.” Workism is associated with long hours on the job, with unpredictable job schedules, with side hustles (aka entrepreneurship or gigs).
By contrast, as she details, Catholicism uses “an inclusive definition of work.” For starters, Catholic theology regards work as “more than what we do for pay… Unpaid work is work.” It is “any activity through which humans transform the world.”
Ward heaves aside the pessimistic idea that work is a punishment for sin. Adam and Eve were (in one translation) “dressing paradise” before the Fall and they continued to work thereafter. Rather than a punishment, work in and of itself contributes to holiness.
Though Catholicism maintains ideals about work, it is realistic; work–on the job, around the home and in the community–is irksome. Nonetheless, keep in mind that through toil and accomplishment the “primary importance” of our activity “is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces,” Ward urges.
Injustice finds its way into the world of work—again, on the job, in the home and in the community. Inadequate wages are a prime example. Yet, a person’s employer might be paying “the best they can afford,” Ward interestingly acknowledges. She goes on to explain the concept of indirect employers. These are the entities that set the terms within which a person’s direct employer (like a small business owner, a non-profit agency, or a franchise) operates—factors like government regulations, the sector’s expectations, the corporate office that controls significant variables.
Ward concludes Making a Life with applications of Catholic doctrine to caregiving, to art and leisure. She also examines food preparation from farm to table. Like all products of work, a meal is “a larger reality that can be called sacramental.” It stands “for something larger; the labor that produced it.” That labor is an extension of God’s ongoing creation and thus a meal (like other products or accomplishments) contains grace.
Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name, he says, precisely to build upon the Catholic theology of work begun in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Specifically, Leo XIV says Catholicism must reflect on an AI-economy. Kate Ward’s Making a Life is a good start to such reflection.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII (free), On Human Work by Saint John Paul II ($7) and Making a Life by Kate Ward ($18).

Catholic Schoolteachers and Unions in 2026

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Since Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church has endorsed the right of workers to form trade unions and bargain collectively. In their 1986 Pastoral letter on the economy, Economic Justice for All, the US Bishops were explicit in stating that those employed by Catholic institutions, including Catholic schools, enjoy the right to form unions. So in theory, it should be easy for the 150,000 teachers and professional staff at our nation’s nearly 6,000 Catholic schools to form unions.

In practice, this is not the case. While millions of their public school counterparts belong to either the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), only a few thousand Catholic schoolteachers enjoy the protection of a union contract.

In the beginning, it wasn’t this way…

In the 1960s and 70s, teachers across the United States organized in unions to protect their rights on the job, and Catholic school teachers were no exception. Across the Northeast and Midwest in particular, Catholic school teachers flocked to unions until they hit a brick wall in 1979 called NLRB v Catholic Bishop of Chicago.

When the union organizing wave came to Chicago, Cardinal Cody was having none of it, regardless of what Catholic doctrine said about workers’ rights. And he argued that the National Labor Relations Board couldn’t make him respect the teachers’ right to organize, because his religious freedom under the First Amendment exempted him from its jurisdiction. The Supreme Court agreed that the NLRA did not cover parochial school teachers, who lost their protections under US labor law. The teachers could organize only at the sufferance of the local Bishop, and very few Bishops were enthusiastic enough about Catholic Social Teaching to tolerate a schoolteacher union. NEA and AFT walked away from organizing the Catholic schools as a hopeless cause.

In a few cases – most notably, New York – states attempted to step up and protect the schoolteachers’ union rights. And in several locations where unions had become established before 1979, Bishops were sufficiently respectful of Catholic Social Teaching to refrain from busting the young unions, leaving the nation with a string of isolated teachers’ unions, mostly based in Diocesan schools.

The biggest single concentration is found in the Archdiocese of New York, where the Federation of Catholic Teachers represents teachers at some 87 Elementary and High School Teachers throughout the Archdiocese that bargain as the Association of Catholic Schools. The FCT is affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) and is currently working without a contract as the two sides try to reach agreement at the bargaining table.

Most of the remaining union teachers came together in an independent union, the National Association of Catholic School Teachers (NACST). Why an independent union? The NEA and AFT have endorsed abortion rights and oppose school vouchers; as an independent union they can chart a more appropriate course for a Catholic teachers’ union on these issues. The largest affiliate is Association of Catholic Teachers Local 1776 in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Other major affiliates are located in Hartford, Connecticut; St. Louis, Missouri; Camden, New Jersey; and Cleveland, Ohio.

If you are a Catholic school teacher who is interested in organizing a union or association in your place of work, you have your work cut out for you! But you are doing the right thing, even if your principal or Bishop doesn’t appreciate this at first. We invite you to contact the Catholic Labor Network, where we will put you in touch with NACST or the FCT for a consultation.