A guest contribution from CLN member Laurie Konwinski

The workers who harvest fruits and vegetables, milk cows, and tend other farm animals do not have the same labor rights as other workers in New York State. The same is true in almost every other state.

It seems no coincidence that during the Jim Crow era, when millions of African Americans labored as farmworkers and domestic workers, those two categories of workers were denied coverage under the basic labor rights established under the New Deal.  Those rights included the right to overtime after a 40-hour work week.  Over eight decades later, federal and state labor laws continue to exclude farmworkers.

Catholic belief in the dignity of labor and in the right of every single worker to basic workplace fairness determines that there is no legal nor moral basis for this unequal treatment. For many years, the New York State Catholic Conference and dozens of other faith and labor organizations supported passage of the state-level Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, a bill to end the exclusion of farmworkers from labor protections such as overtime, a guaranteed day of rest per week, and the right to bargain collectively.

In 2019, the Catholic Diocese of Rochester New York collected more 10,300 petition signatures in favor of the bill.  A watered-down version of it finally passed the New York State legislature that year and was signed into law.  Pressure from the very powerful agricultural lobby shaped the bill so that farmworkers would only receive overtime after working 60 hours per week.  However, the new law also established a three-person wage board to consider if that 60-hour threshold ought to be lowered.

Advocates from Catholic Charities and workers’ rights organizations funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development were among hundreds of people who testified at recent hearings of this wage board.  In asking that the overtime threshold be lowered, they cited the health and safety risks facing farmworkers, especially after 40 hours of work, and the obvious structural racism of a system that provides unequal treatment to a workforce comprised almost exclusively of people of color.  A decision from the wage board is pending.  It may be one more step towards equal labor rights for those whose work feeds millions of people.

-Laurie Konwinski
Coordinator, Justice & Peace Ministry
Catholic Charities Tompkins/Tioga, based in Ithaca NY
and member of the Diocesan Public Policy Committee of the Diocese of Rochester NY

At the start of the pandemic, both business and leisure travel ground to a halt, and hotels abruptly laid off most of their staff. As a result, we have seen a nationwide movement for “Right to Recall” or “Right of Return” – state and local policies requiring that hotels, upon reopening, offer employment to their laid-off career employees before seeking replacements. That movement has come to Howard County, Maryland and local Catholic Labor Network members joined local hotel workers in testifying for such a measure before the Howard County Council on Jan. 19.

Catholic social teaching holds that a properly ordered business enterprise is a partnership between management and workers. Right to recall policies help reassemble these partnerships after the disruptions of the pandemic. It seems a matter of simple justice that the career workers who made these firms profitable in the first place have the opportunity to claim their posts as the economy recovers. That’s why last year the Catholic Labor Network supported hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE and other community organizations in successful campaigns for right to recall in Washington DC and Baltimore MD.

Events in nearby Columbia demonstrated why right to recall is important. The owner of the Sheraton Columbia is attempting to use the pandemic to shed a career union workforce and reopen the hotel under a new name with a cheaper, nonunion labor force. Last year the Catholic Labor Network hosted a “listening session” with the displaced workers at nearby St. John the Evangelist parish, where several of the workers attended Mass. The workers asked the community to boycott the hotel until the owner agrees to reinstate them.

Of course, the proposed Howard County law covers all hotels in the county, not just one – it’s intended to level the playing field and make sure that workers in the hospitality industry are made whole after the terrible covid recession. Displaced hotel workers testified how they currently remain underemployed or employed at jobs of much lower quality, and expressed their desire to resume their career positions when available. (The law does not require hotels to hire employees that they don’t need – it just grants “right of first refusal” to the former employees when the hotel IS ready to hire.)

In the hearing held just after Martin Luther King day, Catholic Labor Network member and Howard County resident Ward Morrow summed up CLN’s position admirably:

The Maryland Catholic Labor Network, working with other faith and community leaders, held a listening session to hear directly from these workers. They are our neighbors, our parishioners, fellow taxpayers, and your constituents. They have worked long and hard in Howard County and want nothing more than to get back to their work just as it had been prior to Covid. If a business leader won’t honor that, and at least one has not, then that is why we need to pass this legislation, as other jurisdictions have done. Dr. King got it right when he said,” The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.” It is time for the Howard County Council to do the right thing in this case and unanimously pass this legislation.

This newsletter will report on the legislation as it moves forward.

courtesy of Mark Piper

Winters in Wisconsin are cold, but on one particular evening it wasn’t just frigid but bleak for the employees of the Allen-Edmonds shoe factory in Belgium, WI. In January 1984, an Allen-Edmonds shoe factory went up in flames — a total loss. It appeared that the non-union 250 employees would be unemployed either short-term or long-term. But, down the road in Sheboygan, Robert Laverenz of Laverenz Shoe Company, joined with his unionized workforce to step in and step up. “It wasn’t a question of should we or shouldn’t we help out,” he was quoted as saying. “The question was how soon and how much could we help?” Members of Local 796 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, representing his employees voted to switch to a four-day work week. “Every single hand went up in affirmation,” he said in praise of the union vote. The competitors’ employees, out of work, came by bus and worked continuously Friday – Sunday producing 1,200 shoes a week of their own – until Allen-Edmunds was able to rebuild from the fire.

This action was done through Catholic Social Teaching, solidarity, and by a non-church entity, a union, which the Church affirms as a good. As recorded in the book Confident & Competent: A challenge for the lay church:

There was no formal church or parish involvement in this act [Local 796] of sustaining and improving the world, no prophetic actions, no special ministries — just laypeople collectively doing what they thought was right in the normal course of their lives… the church in preparation and reflection has the responsibility to train, support, agitate and minister to [people] at work in the world.

 

On New Year’s Day, Pope Francis released his message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace. In an interesting twist, the Holy Father listed labor or work alongside dialogue and education as a tool for peacebuilding. Why labor?

Labour is an indispensable factor in building and keeping peace. It is an expression of ourselves and our gifts, but also of our commitment, self-investment and cooperation with others, since we always work with or for someone. Seen in this clearly social perspective, the workplace enables us to learn to make our contribution towards a more habitable and beautiful world.

Francis looked at the impact of the pandemic on work and workers, and paid special attention to migrant workers and all those trapped in the informal economy. But he also had a more general message.

It is more urgent than ever to promote, throughout our world, decent and dignified working conditions, oriented to the common good and to the safeguarding of creation. The freedom of entrepreneurial initiatives needs to be ensured and supported; at the same time, efforts must be made to encourage a renewed sense of social responsibility, so that profit will not be the sole guiding criterion.

CLICK HERE to read the message in its entirety.

The work of harvesting tobacco is difficult and dangerous, and is largely performed by immigrant “guest” workers. They have turned to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) to seek improvement in their conditions, but growers in North Carolina and surrounding states have largely thwarted their organizing efforts to date. That’s why a faith leader delegation including the Catholic Labor Network’s Executive Director Clayton Sinyai recently met with officials of RJ Reynolds Tobacco.

Current conditions in the market create a race to the bottom, in which large numbers of small growers compete to produce tobacco for RJR at the lowest prices, leading to low wages and living standards for workers. Most of the labor is performed by “guest” workers recruited through the H2A program, who are subject to deportation if they displease the grower or labor contractor who sponsored their work permit. FLOC says that RJR – a large, profitable corporation – needs to take responsibility for labor practices in its supply chain, even if that leads to modest increases in the cost of tobacco.

The faith leaders, who also included Julie Taylor of the National Farm Worker Ministry (NFWM) and Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, were invited to the meeting after collecting more than 600 signatures of faith leaders across the country on a letter deploring conditions in the industry that was addressed to RJR’s corporate parent, British American Tobacco. They urged RJR to negotiate an MOU with FLOC that would ensure the right to organize is respected on the farms of their growers.

RJR officials contended that they had taken several unilateral steps to promote better working conditions in the industry and sought to evade responsibility for workers’ rights at their suppliers, but the faith leaders were insistent that negotiations with FLOC continue.

The Catholic Labor Network is a member of the NFWM. For more information on the meeting, CLICK HERE