A journalist looks at Catholic labor relations

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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

 

 

Calling all CLN movie fans!

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Maryland Catholic Labor Network activist and AFGE Assistant General Counsel J. Ward Morrow will be offering an online course on Labor in the Movies. Participants will view labor history as portrayed in film, discuss that history and learn how it may be applicable today in the recent union efforts of Starbucks and Amazon employees. The six-session course runs Tuesday nights starting October 31. It is offered through the John Hopkins Alumni Association but is open to all (fee required). CLICK HERE for more information.

“Co-Creators With God”

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A Labor Day weekend Homily by CLN Spiritual Moderator Fr. Sinclair Oubre

Yes, everyone here knows that on Monday, our nation celebrates the day after the twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time. We will gather with our family, fire up the grill, and possibly, hand crank some ice cream, and say: “Thank God, the Pharisees challenged Jesus’ disciples about not washing their hands before eating!”

No, its Labor Day Weekend, and we all know that for most of us, we will get a paid-Monday off, and we will use that time to catch up on some chores, gather with the family for a cookout, maybe catch a sports game on the TV, or go to Houston and watch the Astros beat the Diamondbacks.

What we won’t be doing is remembering the great Irish Catholic Peter McGuire, and his great work in founding the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and the organizer of the first Labor Day Parade in New York City on September 5, 1882. (My grandfather and father were members of the Carpenters Union.)

Very few of us will give much thought to the importance of the common working man or woman, and how their work is both absolutely necessary for the quality of life that we enjoy here and in every land. Nor will we give much thought on how our work and the work of our neighbors, no matter how society considers the work humble or replaceable, is a participation in God’s ongoing creation and the building up of his Kingdom.

Since 1969, our United States Bishops have issued a Labor Day Statement. I have posted it to our Facebook page so that you can read it, and reflect on its teachings.

This year’s statement begins with these words:

“This Labor Day, let us recommit ourselves to building together a society that honors the human dignity of all who labor. Through the treasure of Catholic social teaching, we have a long history of proclaiming the essential role labor plays in helping people to live out their human dignity.”

Unless the work is abhorrent, obscene or repugnant, we not only create wealth for the needs of our families, assist in expanding the common good, but we also fulfill God’s will when he created man and woman on the sixth day.

“Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.

“God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.

“God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the wild animals, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the earth, I give all the green plants for food. And so it happened.”

This dominion is not permission to exploit and despoil, but it is a call to be a good steward of the treasure that God has entrusted to us.

We must ask ourselves the question, “How can we take these treasures that God has given us, and use them to give God glory and improve the lives of our brothers and sisters?”

Jesus gives us a model of what this work is that we do. When Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth, and teaches at the synagogue, the people wonder at his words, and remark about his past in the town.

St. Mark records that Jesus’ neighbors remark:

“They said, “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?”

Jesus was not just the son of a carpenter, but he was a carpenter himself. The work of the carpenter is to take items found in God’s creation, and shape them to lift up men and women.

Jesus the carpenter took wood drawn from a tree, shapes the wood to be a chair or a table, thereby lifting his neighbors from having to sit on the ground and eating off the ground. Jesus the carpenter took wood drawn from a tree, and formed it into a bed so that his mother and his neighbors would not have to sleep on the ground. Jesus the carpenter took wood drawn from a tree, and built a dwelling, and with the craftsmen of their skills provided safety and security from the hardship of weather and the dangers of evil persons.

By making the chair, the table and the house, in so little of a way, Jesus participated in the creation that his Father began in the first chapter of Genesis.

Jesus the carpenter also become the precursor of Jesus the Savior. By building the table, he anticipates the place where the bread of life will become manifest. By building the chairs, he anticipates the time when he will be raised on the cross, and thereby raise us up from the dust of sin and death.

The priests and the deacons often preach how we should imitate Our Lord Jesus. We should imitate his prayerfulness. We should imitate his courage to speak the truth. We should imitate his love of the week and the poor. We should imitate his abandonment of his will for the will of the Father. But on this Labor Day weekend, we also should imitate his work in lifting up his mother Mary and his neighbors. We should imitate his work in protecting and guarding his neighbors.

Now Satan, the deceiver, continues to roam this world, and just as at the time of Adam and Eve, he continues to try to deceive us. When in Genesis 3:1ff, he twists God’s command, which leads Eve and Adam to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The twisted lies of Satan continue in our own day. He whispers the lie that “we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.” He whispers that we are only happy when we make as much money as we can. He whispers that we don’t have to look where and how things are made, just that we must spend as little as possible so that we have has much as possible.

If we follow Satan’s whispers, we will be like Charles Dickens’ Unconverted Scrooge.

As we fire up the grill, prepare the hot dogs and hamburgers, make the potato salad, and look forward to the Blue Bell, please remember why we have this Holiday:

To celebrate the work that you do at the service of your family and neighbors;
And to join ourselves evermore closely to our Heavenly Father in his ongoing creation in this world and the world to come.

Joy and Hope: Catholic Institutions with Unions

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During the year periodically we have to devote our newsletter to Catholic institutions engaged in union-busting behavior out of line with Catholic Social Teaching from Rerum Novarum to today. Happily these employers are not the last word. The Catholic Labor Network has identified more than 600 Catholic institutions that instead demonstrate Catholic Social Teaching by bargaining with unions representing some or most of their employees.

In accordance with our tradition, each Labor Day the CLN offers its Gaudium et Spes report listing these institutions by State and Diocese. New entries this year include Catholic Cemetery workers in Youngstown OH who organized with the Machinists; nurses at Ascension St Agnes in Baltimore MD who joined National Nurses United; and Non-Tenure Track Faculty at two California Catholic Universities, University of San Diego and Loyola Marymount, who joined the SEIU. Most of these workers are still negotiating a first contract so please keep them in your prayers! Unfortunately, the list of unionized Catholic schools has shrunk a bit as organized schools in some urban cores closed.

To find out what’s up in your state, check out the report:

Gaudium et Spes 2024

Two Labor Days

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The Working Catholic: Labor Day History by Bill Droel

The original Labor Day parade was held in 1882, in New York City. It was sponsored by the Knights of Labor. Its organizers were two Catholics. Though not related, they shared the same last name. Matthew McGuire (1855-1917) was a machinist from New Jersey; Peter McGuire (1852-1906), working in Chicago at the time, was a carpenter. In 1894 Labor Day became a national holiday and was set on the first Monday of September.
St. Joseph, also a carpenter, is associated with Labor Day in round-about fashion. The saga begins here in Chicago where on May 1, 1886 a federation of labor unions began a campaign for an eight-hour workday. A subsequent rally in our now trendy Haymarket area turned violent when someone threw a stick of dynamite. Police then fired wildly into the crowd. Four workers and seven police died. Seven workers were sentenced, four of whom were hanged in November 1886.
In July 1889 communist leaders in several European countries designated May 1st as Labor Day to honor the Chicago Haymarket workers. (Illinois Labor History Society; www.illinoislaborhistory.org)
In 1956, to offset the communist influence on Europe’s Labor Day Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) established May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Some U.S. bishops immediately asked to observe the new St. Joseph feast on the first Monday of September in our country only. Permission was granted, but nonetheless instead of the September date the May 1st date for St. Joseph took hold in the U.S.
Ed Marciniak (1917-2004), a Chicago labor activist, saw in the two dates a significant difference in worldviews. People in the U.S. “have never developed a strong class consciousness,” as did those in communist-influenced Europe, he wrote. Working families in Europe drifted away from Catholicism because Church officials there and in Latin America got too much “in league with the wealthy against the poor.” By contrast, U.S. Catholicism “has never had…a hostile working class.” (Since 1968 many Catholics in our country have left the church behind. They walked away out of indifference or lately in disgust, but not out of economic or political hostility.)
An economic system predicated on “class struggle…will be inadequate and distorted,” Marciniak concludes. So maybe having two dates in our country (May 1st and first Monday in September) contains a hidden blessing. (Learn more about Marciniak in Ed Marcinaik’s City and Church, National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $20).

From Worship to Workplace: The Eucharist Sends Us Forth

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courtesy of Aimee Shelide Mayer

Starting Sunday, July 21, 2024, through Pentecost of 2025, the People of God in the Catholic Church across the United States are being sent on mission. The third and final year of the National Eucharistic Revival is dedicated to going out: to the streets, homes, neighborhoods, and, indeed, to workplaces as messengers and missionaries of hope and healing. We are sent from the monstrance to the margins, as it were, to share Jesus with those desperately in need of Good News.

And aren’t we all in need of some good news? Gloria Purvis, in her address on the fourth day of the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, spoke of the Eucharist as a sign of our unity.  But then she quickly—and deftly—addressed signs of disunity that hurt our country, our Church, and the entire Body of Christ.

“I need to talk about some of the signs of disunity,” she declared in the middle of her address.  She went on to list examples of disunity plaguing our Church and world, including denying the pope’s authority, preference for temporal power, including partisan political power, and racism. She urged people to be missionaries and martyrs for the cause of unity and human dignity, adding the challenge: “Indeed we love the martyrs, it seems, until we might have to be one.”

In hearing her words and sitting with the theme of the third year of the Eucharistic Revival, “The Year of Mission,” I could not help but think of the work of the Catholic Labor Network and its members and friends, many of whom have been missionary voices in the battlefield of corporate America, fighting to uphold human dignity for all workers in the crossfire of unrestrained capitalism. Nourished by the Eucharist, they go forth from worship to the workplace, from the pew to the picket line, to be missionaries of hope and human dignity. There are also members and friends of CLN who simply try to bring a spirit of compassion and understanding to their workplace, evangelizing by word and deed to communicate the healing love of God.

For those of us who work in (or care about) the intersection of faith and labor, our mission territory is—and has been—in the public sphere.  It includes the picket line, the negotiation table, the breakroom, the city council meeting.  Our mission territory might be our own parish council or diocesan chancery, as we encourage our religious institutions to fully implement the tenets of our rich Catholic social tradition on the Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers, first documented in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 and echoed in papal encyclicals of Popes Pius XI, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and pastoral letters in the decades since.

Wherever this Year of Mission takes you, know that you are not alone.  You go out in good company with people of good will across the country who believe that work is made for humankind, and not humankind for work.  From now through Pentecost 2025 and beyond, may we be missionaries who evangelize others about the dignity of work and the value of all human life.

 

St. Louis Catholic HS Introduces Students to Careers in Union Construction

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Why don’t more follow?

As a proud member of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), the union of construction laborers, I am aware that there are still some career paths outside the college track that will earn you a family-supporting wage. One of the best starts with a union-sponsored apprenticeship in one of the construction trades.

When someone enrolls in a union apprenticeship program, they can expect a combination of classroom education with on-the-job training. Where a college student earns tuition, the apprentice is paid for his or her on-the-job training. And that’s not all – union members receive 100% employer-paid health insurance and a pension to cover them in retirement. (You heard that right, in 2024 America union-side construction workers still have pensions!) And while the work is hard, it’s rewarding; it’s not unusual for a union electrician or plumber to pull down a six-figure salary, especially if they work some overtime during the year.

You would think that Catholic high school guidance counselors and principals would welcome union apprenticeship coordinators with open arms. You would be wrong. I have heard of countless efforts to offer these opportunities to Catholic school students, only to be waved away. Our parents don’t want their kids thinking about alternatives to college, they usually explain.

Now I’m excited to report that I heard about a school that said yes: St. Mary’s in St. Louis.

The initiative was organized by two men who DID appreciate the value of a career in the trades. St. Mary’s alum Jake Hummel (a union electrician who is today the leader of the Missouri AFL-CIO) and St. Mary’s Principal Mike England decided to go one step further than career days and actually set up a pre-apprenticeship program in the building trades to offer as an elective to students.

Interested students received their gear, such as steel-toed shoes and hard hats, participated in the same basic safety training that union construction workers receive, then had an opportunity to visit the training centers run by each trade (e.g. carpenters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers) and try their hand at the work. On graduation they will have a leg up in the competitive process of securing an apprenticeship in the craft of their choice and starting a successful career.

As Catholics we believe that all work has dignity, and should respect those who choose a skilled trade instead of college – including when they are our own children. If your school would like to find out more about introducing students to careers in the building trades, please contact me at [email protected]

Will Starbucks Workers Ever Get a Contract?

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In December 2021, a group of Starbucks Baristas in Buffalo NY voted to form a union, Starbucks Workers United, affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Their example spread like wildfire, with employees at dozens and then hundreds of other locations voting to join the union. Today more than 10,000 workers at 440 stores have come under the union’s banner. For the first time in this century it seemed possible that a major American consumer brand would “go union” and workers suffering low pay and unpredictable schedules could find their lives transformed. Instead their effort is becoming a lesson in the ways that current US labor law fails to protect the right to organize.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is supposed to prevent employers from retaliating against workers who exercise that right. However, as a practical matter, if you are punished or fired for supporting a union in your place of work, the Board will take months if not years to make you whole – longer if the employer chooses to appeal the decision in the courts. And while the NLRA requires employers to bargain with a union chosen by its workers, there is no provision for arbitration in a deadlock, giving the employer a powerful incentive to avoid reaching agreement on a first contract that would establish the union in their enterprise. In principle, US labor law protects your right to join a union; in practice, your employer exercises a near-veto on that right.

Seeing the increasing popularity of the union, Starbucks could have embraced the development and chosen a high road business strategy, mitigating the costs of a union contract by improving employee retention and leaning into an identity as a worker-friendly brand. But that’s not the direction CEO Howard Schultz took. As revealed in Spring 2023 hearings before the Senate Labor Committee, Schultz chose the road of massive resistance to his employees and their wishes. At that time the union had already filed more than 500 Unfair Labor Practice charges against the company for things like surveillance and retaliation aimed at union supporters. And Schultz’s negotiators were stalling in bargaining towards a first contract. Starbucks had no intention of allowing its employees to secure the benefits of union membership and has successfully confined the union to a small fraction of its 9000 stores.

Schultz has now retired, and in April 2024 Starbucks and the union announced progress in contract negotiations. We must hope and pray that these prove successful and that the company comes to respect the rights of its employees.

Since the time Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, Catholic Social Teaching has upheld workers’ right to organize. Clearly the current framework of American labor law fails to protect that right, and it’s time to fix that law so it does.

Why Have a Union?

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Why Unions at Good Companies?
The Working Catholic by Bill Droel

“Why did the new, worker friendly workplaces prove unable to keep their employees happy enough not to have to pay union dues?” So asks a Chicago Tribune editorial (4/10/24). The editors have in mind Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, the camping equipment retailer REI plus several museums and theatres here in Chicago and elsewhere. After all, Trader Joe’s has a 7% annual pay increase, a 401K, a health insurance option, employee discount on groceries and more, the Tribune informs us.
Many executives and managers plus the Tribune editors have a mistaken premise. Employees who desire a union are not entirely motivated by discontent, particularly regarding their wage. The desire for participation is an increasingly important factor in union activity among nurses, tech engineers, hotel staff, autoworkers and more. These employees organize in part to keep their good company good.
Then too perhaps the Tribune and others are mistaken that these companies really are progressive. The companies in question undermine their image once the word union enters their domain. The noble employers quickly reveal another side. They retaliate. They threaten to close a store or an entire plant. They harass outspoken employees. They make side-deals with passive employees. They begin legal action against employees who promote their cause with t-shirts and tote bags that display the company name or logo. Such employers conclusively reveal their true character when they retain a union-busting firm. They continue their hostility by avoiding conversations and negotiations with employees.
Paternalism is not respectful. Grand mission statements are hollow without genuine involvement of all the workers.
Catholic labor relations doctrine can help. It states that a decision for or against a union belongs to the employees without paternal or maternal interference from their employer. Every honest company, no matter the circumstances, should share information with its workers through regular conversations, attractive pamphlets and newsletters plus supplying understandable summaries of the data given to investors. But a union vote is to be without harassment.
Catholic doctrine does not say that any one or another company must have a union. Nor does Catholic doctrine endorse this union for this company. Again, the choice belongs to the employees.
Catholic doctrine does say that a healthy society has the collective participation of workers in some form. Democratic unions are a normal way to secure participation.
Catholic doctrine instructs employers and employees to behave ethically. Retaining a union-busting firm violates Catholic doctrine and is objectively sinful. Instead, employers are advised to seek reputable assistance in their labor relations. Those employers who bargain tough are well within bounds.
For more on this topic, obtain St. John Paul II’s Gospel of Work (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $8)