Oxfam – an organization more widely known for its famine relief work – recently released an alarming report detailing the extent of the low-wage economy in the United States. The headline finding: approximately one third of US workers earn less than $15 per hour. The numbers for women and minorities were even more concerning – for instance, nearly half of Black workers earn less than $15. For a full-time worker, a $15 per hour wage amounts to $30,000 per year; it’s hard to imagine supporting a family on less than this anywhere in the United States. It’s a sign of deep structural problems in our economy that we have learned to depend on low wage labor to perform much essential service work. CLICK HERE for the Oxfam report.

While employees at nearby secular competitors earn a living wage, food service employees at Our Lady of Peace Nursing Home in Lewiston New York earn the legal minimum in their community and CNAs earn scarcely more. That’s the main reason employees of the nursing home held a one-day strike in March.

The workers, represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), walked off the job for a single day on March 9. They have now resumed bargaining with nursing home, owned by the St. Louis-based Ascension Health Care.

Catholic Social Teaching calls for every worker to receive a living wage. The legal minimum wage in upstate New York is set at $13.20 per hour, or approximately $26,400 per year for a full-time employee.

Theresa Tomlin, an 11-year CNA at Our Lady of Peace, said “I have to pick up double shifts to survive. Other aides are on public assistance or have taken second jobs. People are fighting to make ends meet.”

“I’ve thought about leaving but what keeps me there are the residents. They are like family to me.”

The low wages at the facility aren’t only a problem because of Catholic Social Teaching. Employees at the facility say that staffing shortages have become severe. With nearby competitors offering wages that are $1-5/hour higher than at Our Lady of Peace, they say, it’s impossible to recruit workers.

“We all used to love it here. Not so much anymore – we are unable to give residents the care they deserve because of understaffing,” said Tresa Torcasio, a 12-year nurse at the facility and parishioner at nearby St. John’s. “You can’t get people in if they can make more money someplace else.”

A guest contribution from CLN member Frank Maurizio

Voters in Tennessee have a crucial decision coming up this fall as we are being asked whether or not the state’s long-tenured “right to work” law should be enshrined in the Tennessee constitution. The timing of this vote – in fact, its necessity at all – is odd; this deep-red state is hardly headed toward becoming a bastion of organized labor.

But Tennessee lawmakers – overwhelmingly Republican – are nervous. Tennessee, which in 2020 was the third least unionized state in the U.S., led the nation in union gains in 2021. Meanwhile, neighboring Georgia ranked seventh in an increase in union jobs.

Clearly, something is happening in the South as union activism – still far from where the Catholic Labor Network and other pro-worker groups would like to see it – is gaining strength. In my neck of the woods (I moved to Chattanooga from labor-friendly New York two years ago), we are excited by Ford’s recent announcement that it is bringing new electric vehicle and battery plants to Tennessee, and the automaker is reportedly open to a unionized workforce.

This has given the right-to-work champions more impetus to get the constitutional amendment approved by voters in November. It has also resulted in a GOP-led effort to ban organizing through card check at companies that receive state incentives to move here.

The fate of that effort remains uncertain but the legislative majority and its allies in the business community are putting their full weight behind the right-to-work constitutional amendment. That means, of course, that those of us who support the right to organize have a responsibility – and an opportunity – to remind voters that right-to-work laws are nothing more than a continued effort to take advantage of workers and thwart their chance to earn a fair wage.

And we might just have an opening: A Gallup Poll last year showed union support at its highest level in more than 50 years at 68 percent of those polled (Labor Unions | Gallup Historical Trends). Another study found that 60 million Americans would join a union if they could. Promising trends, indeed.

As AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said at a recent convention in Nashville: “Workers are fed up and America is taking notice of our collective action. … Working people are waking up and understanding the value of labor unions.”

As the vote on the constitutional amendment gets closer in Tennessee, let’s hope that Brother Redmond is right.

Few workers are at greater risk of exploitation than domestic workers. Nannies, au pairs, house cleaners, home health aides – all too often these workers work alone under the supervision of their employer, and under informal and precarious work arrangements. Sexual harassment and wage theft are frequent occurrences. To make matters worse, they have historically been excluded from coverage under labor and employment laws. That’s why the Catholic Labor Network recently teamed up with Washington DC’s Festival Center to host a “listening session” with DC domestic worker Antonia Surco for the area’s faith-inspired activists.

Like most domestic workers today, Surco is an immigrant – in her case from Peru. Sucro spoke about her career caring for both young children and disabled elders in prosperous DC homes, caring work that she loves to perform. However, it is risky – she was dismissed suddenly at the start of the pandemic, facing total loss of income. As a domestic worker without a written contract she was ineligible for unemployment and unable to access key elements of coronavirus relief. A parishioner at nearby St. Catherine Laboure in Maryland, Surco was cheered by the presence of representatives of several DC parishes and of the Archdiocese of Washington.  She urged participants to support passage of a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights that would include, among other things, a requirement that those hiring a domestic worker sign a written contract.

Surco is one of the leaders of the DC Chapter of the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. The group formed to fill a void in American labor and employment law – protection for domestic workers. During the New Deal of the 1930s, when the federal government passed the Social Security Act (unemployment insurance and old age pensions), the National Labor Relations Act (the right to organize in unions) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (the minimum wage), domestic workers were conspicuously excluded from coverage. These exclusions set a pattern, and domestic workers were often left unprotected by subsequent employment laws. It is unlikely a coincidence that this work, then and now, has largely been performed by people of color.

Surco and her colleagues are asking the Washington DC City Council to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Such legislation would ensure that in the future domestic workers were covered by the DC Human Rights law (which guards against both discrimination and sexual harassment) and by the District’s workplace safety and health ordinance. It would also guarantee domestic workers a written contract.

As Catholics, we believe that every worker is a child of God possessing human dignity. Every worker has rights. The time is now for a DC Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. To view the listening session on video, click play below.

Amazon has made headlines recently for fighting its own workers seeking to organize in unions at distribution centers in Alabama and New York. It turns out that workers’ rights aren’t necessarily respected on Amazon construction sites either, as a group women workers learned while finishing drywall at a new Amazon distribution center in Beltsville, Maryland.

A notorious open shop contractor, Avena, had the contract for framing and drywall, but relied on a series of labor brokers to staff the work. The women told IUPAT union organizers and Catholic Labor Network field representative Guillermo Martinez that an Avena drywall superintendent named Brian Bueso had been harassing them and treating them differently than the men. “He would follow everything that I would do and would always be behind me,” explained one of the finishers, Maria Sagrario Garcia. “He prohibited us from going to the bathroom.” When the women complained about his behavior to the general contractor, Bueso told their labor broker that he wanted all the women removed from the job.

Consulting with the union, the women learned that they were also victims of extensive wage theft. With the project running behind, they had been working 72-hour weeks for two months – and had never been paid time and a half. The union estimates that the workers are owed more than $50,000 in lost wages.

With help from the IUPAT, the women have filed a wage theft claim with the Maryland Department of Labor – and a sexual discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).