Remembering Seafarers International Union President Michael Sacco

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Courtesy of Fr. Sinclair Oubre, CLN Spiritual Moderator

On Friday, December 29, 2023, the news spread quickly through the United States Maritime community that one of the elders of maritime labor had died the previous day in St. Louis, Missouri, surrounded by his family, after a short illness.

In the wake of Michael Sacco’s passing, national and international labor leaders praised him for his lifelong service to working men and women, especially the unlicensed merchant marine community in the United States and Canada. Here are a few links to some of the statements:

•    AFL-CIO Liz Shuler: www.seafarers.org/afl-cio-mourns-passing-of-former-siu-president
•    The International Transportation Workers’ Federation: www.seafarers.org/itf-salutes-legacy-of-michael-sacco
•    American Maritime Officers: www.amo-union.org/michael-sacco-longtime-siu-president-and-labor-leader-passes-away

These labor leaders and many others speak of the commitment and the accomplishments of Mike over the 65 years of his union service. They shared about Mike’s service to the rank-and-file members of the Seafarers International Union (SIU).

I have been a member of the SIU for 33 years, having joined in 1990. I worked as an ordinary seaman and as an able bodied seaman. Over these years, I had many opportunities to know and work with Mike. I  met him annually at the New York Admiral of the Ocean Seas Gala. These meetings were always times to renew our friendship, and to catch up with each other’s lives.

There are two things that I will share about Mike that will probably not be picked up in the many public statements.

First, Mike was the most important maritime labor leader in the country. What makes this so significant is that he was the leader of the biggest unlicensed maritime union in the United States. Where leadership often migrates to those who have degrees and hold leadership positions, Mike was unique in that he was the undisputed leader of the maritime unions, and where the led, the other unions followed.

Mike was able to overcome the typical hierarchical social structure that so dominates our institutions, and through his efforts, as Mary proclaims in the Magnificat, he “. . . lifted up the lowly.” Specifically, he lifted up the ordinary seaman, the wiper, and the messman with good contracts and training opportunities.

Second, Mike was not a nominal Catholic. Rather, he was an every-Sunday-go-to-Mass Catholic.

Back in 1996, I was privileged to attend an International Transportation Workers’ Federation meeting in Latvia. John Fay, who at that time was the Secretary Treasurer of the SIU, shared with me that wherever he and Mike were, they always attended Mass on Sundays.

John died in 2005, and I was fortunate to be doing my basic safety training at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship at Piney Point, Maryland. I stayed over a couple of days so that I could preside at the funeral. However, over all these years, I still recall John strong affirmation of Mike’s Catholic faith.

Mike retired in February of 2023. The union is in good hands Dave Heindel, and Dave is continuing the SIU tradition of advocating and defending merchant mariners from the United States and Canada, but also mariners who work on flag-of-convenience vessels calling in our country.

For our CLN priests, I ask that you say a Mass for the repose of Mike’s soul and for his family in this time of mourning. For our lay CLN members, I ask that you pray a special rosary or attend a Mass, and offer it up for Mike and his family, and in both cases, lift up a special petition to Mike that he may intercede with his prayers for the needs of all the men and women who sail the seas.

 

What’s the Problem at Ascension Health?

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One of the things we do at the Catholic Labor Network is monitoring labor relations at Catholic institutions. There’s a reason for this. Church doctrine teaches that workers have the right to organize in unions to engage in collective bargaining, but who’s going to listen to us if Catholic institutions don’t respect that teaching with their own employees?

With some 140 hospitals, as well as numerous nursing homes and other medical facilities, Ascension Health is one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the United States. But labor disputes have repeatedly put Ascension in the news over the past few years.

In Spring 2022, Ascension Health came to the attention of the Catholic Labor Network when nursing home workers represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) struck an Ascension-owned nursing home. It turned out that while Catholic Social Teaching calls for every worker to receive a living wage, many of these workers were earning the legal minimum.

But nursing home workers were hardly the only ones upset with their employer. Concerned about understaffing, nurses at a series of Ascension hospitals began to organize with National Nurses United. In late 2022 it happened at Ascension Seton in Austin, Texas. Soon thereafter it was a couple of hospitals in Wichita, Kansas, Ascension Via Christi and Ascension Via St. Joseph. More recently, nurses at Ascension St. Agnes hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, followed suit.

In each case, hospital management pulled its response from the for-profit corporate playbook rather than Catholic Social Teaching. They hired expensive “union avoidance” consultants to try and prevent their nurses from organizing, sometimes using unlawful tactics and ending up in front of the National Labor Relations Board facing Unfair Labor Practice charges.

The next step in the corporate playbook is usually to drag out negotiations for a first contract as long as possible to see if the workers lose interest. That seems to be what is happening now: workers have yet to extract a contract from Ascension at any of the four newly organized hospitals. The nurses are not losing interest, but they are losing patience. Nurses at the Texas and Kansas hospitals walked out on a short strike in early December.

There is a Catholic model for labor relations, and this is not it. The holy season of Christmas would be a wonderful time for Ascension’s corporate leadership to shake off their Wall Street values and lean into its Catholic Identity with a new approach to their workforce.

Race Relations

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The Working Catholic: Race Relations by Bill Droel

Efforts these days to improve race relations are of related types. There is virtue signaling, as in ubiquitous TV ads featuring a mixed-race couple or the obligatory progressive statements from businesses and national religious denominations. There is social therapy, as when church-sponsored groups examine and then admit to their racism. Thirdly, justifiable racial grievances are expressed through marches and rallies that unfortunately lack any specific goal.

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), considered the dean of community organizing, was known for his confrontational yet non-violent tactics, his sharp-edged comments and his exaggerated personality. Alinsky was a person of “keen sociological imagination” and “thoughtful action,” as Mark Santow details in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race (University of Chicago Press, 2023).  Alinsky never wavered from a commitment to equal dignity, regardless of race or ethnicity. Yet he was not ideological. He did not crusade for integration per se. He believed that if people have confidence in their own agency and in the democratic process, they will usually make better choices and support true pluralism. The problem, as Alinsky saw it, was the lack of power at the local level. There were too few viable mediating institutions through which people could effectively engage others. Thus, Alinsky dedicated his career to forming peoples’ organizations.

In 1938 Alinsky (then 29-years old) left his job at a university institute to, with Joseph Meegan (1912-1994), organize Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (www.bync.org) in Chicago’s stockyards area. This is the first of Santow’s case studies. BNYC had a promising beginning. However, BYNC feared a possible influx of Black residents. The declining stockyards weakened the neighborhood economy. The older housing stock might appeal to Blacks. Thus, BYNC launched a conservation program. On the surface its beautification theme and its opposition to panic peddling and its campaign to upgrade infrastructure was constructive. The unspoken premise, however, was retaining white families in the area and prohibiting integration. Those white families and their institutions (principally churches) felt their defensiveness “was sanctioned by public opinion, economic sense and the law.” Many of those whites, Santow explains, did not realize how government housing programs were designed to “resist integration [through] subsidized suburban home ownership for whites while consigning Blacks to segregated urban neighborhoods.” (See The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, W.W. Norton, 2017.)

A disappointed Alinsky avoided public criticism of BYNC. He only slowly admitted that, in Santow’s words, his effort “contributed to both the ability and willingness of [BYNC] to engage in racial containment…to protect and preserve an island of segregation.” Today BYNC says it “substituted an emphasis on community and economic development for Alinsky’s confrontational methods.”

In 1940 Alinsky formed his Industrial Areas Foundation. About 20 years later IAF returned to Chicago’s neighborhoods, starting with Organization for Southwest Community (Santow’s second case study).

Though OSC is overlooked in most chronicles of Alinsky, including the website of his foundation, the section on OSC in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race is the most interesting. The area in 1959 was white with some upwardly mobile Black residents around its perimeter. IAF never said that integration was a goal of OSC. In fact, its organizers patiently and persistently solicited those mistrustful of Blacks. But many of those active in OSC were at best ambivalent, suspecting the goal was to move Blacks into the neighborhood.

OSC unraveled. Member groups exited. First, over an internal proposal to abolish term limits for officers. It was opposed by a faction who thought the hidden reason for the proposal was the retention of racially tolerant clergy officers. More groups quit OSC when its leadership drafted a letter to support an Illinois State bill on open occupancy. The measure could help neighborhood stabilization by giving Blacks more housing choices, particularly in the suburbs. But again, some OSC groups wanted nothing to do with racial improvements.

To judge by the Chicago neighborhood examples, Alinsky’s success was quite limited. Yet his moral stature, now 50 plus years since his death, remains high. Alinsky was consistently willing to risk failure in order to act in the real world. For Alinsky, too many people are “dismissive of messy compromises and far too enamored of the power and sufficiency of legislation and goodwill,” Santow concludes. Moralizing from the sidelines about race (or other issues) is cowardly.

Alinsky was constantly evaluating: Maybe a single neighborhood lacks enough power to deal with larger divisive forces. In 1970 his IAF organized a metropolitan organization, Campaign Against Pollution, soon called Citizens’ Action Program. Today the IAF has 63 county-wide or metro-wide organizations in the United States. Each is multi-issue and, like Alinsky, each believes that racial and ethnic relations improve as its member groups strive for the widest public conversation possible.

 

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a newsletter on faith and work.

The Campaign for Just Employment Practices at LMU

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A guest contribution from CLN Member Prof. Anna Harrison

The cry for just employment practices is ringing out on the campus of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty went public in November, 2023 with their unionizing effort. And LMU Solidarity/Solidaridad—an umbrella organization of students, staff, and faculty—is pleading with the administration to enact a just employment policy, modeled on the policy developed at Georgetown University.

NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY ORGANIZE

Launching their movement’s website, NTT faculty — a majority of LMU’s faculty – announced:

Faculty at Loyola Marymount University are coming together to improve our campus and address multiple crises. For too long, faculty have been marginalized at LMU, with most relegated to contingent, non-tenure-track positions that offer low pay, inadequate benefits, no job security, no meaningful academic freedom, and no true opportunity to share governance with our administration. This is unjust and unfair, and we have had enough. We do the core work of our university, and we deserve respect.

Part-time and full time NTT faculty across all categories have aligned with SEIU Local 721 to demand job security, better pay, and improved access to professional development. Claiming their crucial role in their students’ education, NTT faculty and their supporters are likewise asserting what we should all have recognized all along: faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.

Ten years ago, LMU’s administration, under then President David Burcham, engaged in classic union-busting techniques that successfully quashed NTT faculty’s hopes for collective bargaining. This time around, LMU’s administration may encounter stronger and more widespread resistance. Students know the damage to their education that results when over half their faculty are routinely disregarded, left to work under conditions that undermine creative intellectual work in the classroom, and which limit their availability to meet students’ needs for advisors and mentors.

PLEA FOR A JUST EMPLOYMENT POLICY

Following on a successful campaign waged with LMU’s facility’s management workers that enacted a minimum wage of $21.00, LMU Solidarity/Solidaridad is urging the adoption of just employment practices to extend to all employees on campus, including those employed by outside contractors. On November 14, 2023, students took advantage of University President Timothy Law Snyder’s convocation address to distribute informational flyers to those assembled. They reminded LMU that as wealth inequality in the United States continues to spiral, institutions of higher education are no exceptions to the larger trend. And even as the numbers and salaries of the LMU’s top administrators balloon, too many staff and faculty live paycheck to paycheck and have difficulty affording groceries, transportation, and rent in one of the most expensive regions in the country.

LMU Solidarity/Solidaridad proposes a just employment policy (like that which Georgetown University adopted) as a means to heal hurtful labor practices. Animating principles include a living wage, a preference for full-time employees and employee continuity, and freedom of association—no union busting. LMU Solidarity/Solidaridad insists: “LMU has a choice to make. As a Jesuit university committed to the service of faith the promotion of justice, we have the opportunity to teach solidarity by example, or we can remain yet one more player increasing economic inequality.” Meanwhile, LMU’s Faculty Senate and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts’ College Council both ratified motions signaling their support of the University’s adoption of a just employment policy. Further actions are planned, including bringing attention to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, whose goals of combating climate change LMU has committed to advancing, and which insists on an integral ecology that joins care of our common home with the repairing of human relationships and that “to stop investing in people, in order to gain greater short-term financial gain, is bad business for society.”

Can you help? President Timothy Law Snyder needs to hear that Catholic Social Teaching is on the side of those organizing. Email [email protected]!

Nurses at Baltimore’s St. Agnes Hospital form Union

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Workers at another Catholic institution have formed a union! At the start of November, a majority of the nurses at Baltimore’s Ascension St. Agnes Hospital voted to join National Nurses United. The nurses were concerned with understaffing at the hospital.

Ascension, a Catholic health care chain with hospitals and nursing homes across the country, has nurtured an anti-labor reputation by consistently resisting its nurses’ efforts to organize, often committing labor law violations that brought management before the National Labor Relations Board. In the Baltimore case, Maryland Catholic Labor Network activists were obliged to call hospital management, reminding them of Catholic teaching on labor unions.

Ascension’s “union avoidance” activities created hardship and misery for many targeted employees but failed to dissuade the nurses from organizing. The hospital is now obliged to bargain with them for a first contract.

Union busting at Baltimore’s Ascension St. Agnes Hospital?

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America’s Catholic Bishops have long published a set of Ethical and Religious Directives covering Catholic health care. The seventh of these “ERDs,” as they are known in the industry, instructs a Catholic hospital to “treat its employees respectfully and justly” including “recognition of the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively.” So what’s the problem over at Ascension Health?

Ascension is one of the largest Catholic Health Care chains in the United States, with more than 140 hospitals and dozens of nursing homes. But whenever staff at Ascension facilities begin to seek union representation, management comes down on them like a ton of bricks. We’ve seen this repeatedly over the past few years as nurses at multiple Ascension hospitals have organized to join National Nurses United. The nurses contend that systemic understaffing in Ascension hospitals is undermining both working conditions and patient care.

Recently in this space we reported that the nurses of Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore had filed for a union representation election. Since that time, the nurses have repeatedly told Catholic Labor Network members that management has retaliated against union supporters with unfair discipline and surveillance. The union has now filed Unfair Labor Practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

The decision to form or join a union belongs to workers, not their employer. Both Catholic Social Teaching and US law are clear on this point. The Catholic Labor Network has addressed a letter to the Ascension CEO urging him to investigate the labor law violations at St. Agnes Hospital and ensure that local administrators are in compliance with both American law and Catholic Social Doctrine.

Labor actions continue across the country

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It was a busy summer, and it seems the season for labor action has extended into fall. Inflation has substantially eroded wages over the past few years, and as contracts negotiated before the pandemic expire many workers are trying to catch up. Technological change is on the table too — autoworkers are trying to secure their place in the emerging EV economy and actors want to protect themselves from replacement by AI. Please keep the following in your prayers:

Southern California hotel workers. The cost of housing in the Los Angles area has soared beyond the reach of low-wage workers. That’s a major reason why hotel clerks and housekeepers represented by UNITE HERE have waged short strikes at major area hotels as they demand a living wage.

Kaiser Permanente health care workers. More than 70,000 health care workers at the giant HMO walked off the job for three days in early October. They said that substandard wages were the reason they were chronically understaffed: they couldn’t retain employees. The strike got management’s attention and the two sides now have a tentative agreement.

TV and film actors. Although TV and film writers have settled with the producers, some 65,000 actors remain on picket lines. They haven’t received a fair shake from streaming revenues and want to prevent the studios from using AI-generated images to replace paid actors.

Auto workers. Now that the big three automakers are profitable again, UAW members are trying to recover wage and benefit concessions they made in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. They also want to make sure that new jobs generated in EV manufacture are family-supporting union jobs. New UAW president Shawn Fain adopted an unusual strategy, striking select facilities of each company and escalating as needed by calling out additional shops. The union has won some important points at the bargaining table already, with Ford willing to restore Cost of Living Adjustments (or COLAs) in the new contract and General Motors agreeing to include new EV battery facilities in the UAW master agreement. But although nearly 40,000 autoworkers have now downed tools, the two parties remain far apart on wages. And now the UAW workers who assemble Mack Trucks have hit the streets as well.

36 Hours on the Job

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The Working Catholic: UAW Strike by Bill Droel

Autoworkers are not only seeking higher pay, writes Binyamin Appelbaum in N.Y. Times (10/2/23). “They are also, audaciously, demanding the end of the standard 40-hour workweek.”
This is not the first time employees have sought fewer hours. In fact, our feast of St. Joseph the Worker/International Workers Day (May First) was inspired by an 1886 Chicago protest for shorter hours. The Federation of Trades and Labor held a May rally in our Haymarket area (now a trendy restaurant spot). Late in the evening someone threw dynamite. Eight workers were rounded up, including a lay minister, a printer and others. Seven were convicted; four were hanged. The incident gave rise to an annual, worldwide day for worker dignity.
Mondelez Bakery, commonly called Nabisco, has a large facility in my neighborhood. Two years ago members of Bakery, Confectionary Union were on the sidewalk or in a lot across the street, striking over pay and retirement plans. As pressing, however, was their concern about shift length and overtime. Like other companies, Mondelez addressed the side effects of Covid-19 by asking or requiring overtime. This remedy became counterproductive because it created stress among the employees and added to operating expenses.
Covid-19 likewise brings attention to the topic of onsite vs. remote working hours. It also prompts experiments around the number of hours on the job per week. The popular crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, to mention one example, is experimenting with four days per week on the job. Pay remains the same. This is not a gimmick, says Kickstarter’s CEO Aziz Hasan.
Other experiments in Sweden and Great Britain have favorable outcomes so far.
An experiment in Iceland among several companies and backed by unions and civic groups was a success. The employees clocked 36-hours over four weekdays. Productivity remained the same. Sick days decreased. Customers noted better quality of service. Now, 86% of Iceland employees are allowed a four-day week, reports Wall St. Journal (7/31/21).
This past January Rep. Mark Takano of California (www.takano.house.gov) introduced legislation for a nation-wide 36-hour workweek. Even during our so-called labor shortage, Takano’s proposal should get consideration, concludes Appelbaum. It “would be better for our health, better for our families and better for the employers, who would reap the benefits of a more motivated and better rested workforce.”
From a Catholic perspective a 36-hour workweek has a prior requirement: the principle of a family wage. That is, one worker per household with one job should be paid enough to reasonably support the family. (A family may include other workers, but that income is extra, not a dire necessity.) Presuming a family wage is established, an employer will pay a 36-hour per week employee at the former 40-hour rate. (Some employees who can afford to do so might negotiate pro-rated pay for 36-hours, but not from a distorted sense of vocation.)
Second, Catholicism says that a shorter workweek is betrayed if it really means less time in the office while bringing more work home. This caution particularly applies to salaried employees. Further, hours gained by less time on the clock cannot be spent on unnecessary consumption or excess time using screens.
In other words, a change in culture must accompany any change in work hours. A whole/holy life involves employment, but also true leisure. It means leaving behind our culture of total labor. The true purpose of time off is to establish “the right and claims of leisure in the face of the claims of total labor,” writes Josef Pieper (1904-1997) in Leisure: the Basis of Culture (Ignatius Press, 1952). Our culture currently needs “the illusion of a life fulfilled.” But instead of genuine time off, it puts forth false leisure with “cultural tricks and traps and jokes.”
True leisure, Pieper concludes, is festivity or celebration. It is the point at which “effortlessness, calm and relaxation” come together. “Have leisure and know that I am God.” –Psalm 46:11
Whatever the outcome of the autoworkers job action, their proposal for a shorter workweek should not be dismissed.

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a newsletter on faith and work.







Why are America’s auto workers on strike?

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America’s summer of strikes is reaching its crescendo with an industrial dispute in the US auto industry. The legendary United Auto Workers (UAW) union represents some 150,000 workers who build cars for General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (Fiat/Chrysler), and when their contract expired last week union members began striking selected plants. What’s the fight about?

The problems began with the onset of the Great Recession in 2007-2008. The recession tipped GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and threatened to do the same with Ford. UAW members agreed to major concessions to enable the companies to survive the downturn, including creating a new, lower-paid tier of workers. Workers hired after the recession receive lower wages than their predecessors and are denied participation in the defined benefit pension benefit enjoyed by generations of UAW members. They were also hesitant to press wage demands on the weakened companies, so even senior workers saw their incomes eroded by inflation.

Now that the automakers have returned to profitability UAW members are demanding not just a substantial raise for all but to bring these lower-tier workers up to the union standard in pay and benefits. The companies have balked, citing competition from foreign transplants – companies like Mercedes, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai produce cars in nonunion US plants with substantially lower wages and benefits. They have also argued that they need to bank profits from this last generation of ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles to build EV production capacity.

This is an important consideration, but there have been troubling signs that the automakers want to use the transition to EVs to reset labor relations in the industry to workers’ disadvantage. They have repeatedly stated that assembling EVs will require fewer workers than ICE vehicles, and have formed legally separate joint ventures with other firms to produce EV batteries – enabling them to escape the UAW national bargaining.

In the twentieth century, the UAW helped define what a good, family-supporting job was. In the twenty-first, the workers who produce our EVs deserve the same. For that reason, it’s essential that the striking auto workers win a fair settlement and recover the ground they’ve lost. Please pray for their success!

“Radical Solidarity with Working Families”

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Bishops’ 2023 Labor Day Statement

Every year, the Chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development issues a Labor Day statement. The statement reflects on conditions in the world in light of Catholic Social Teaching.

The current chair of the committee is Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Archeparchy of Philadelphia. This year’s statement, Radical Solidarity with Working Families, cautiously greets our nation’s improving economic situation while reminding readers how many working Americans still cannot afford food, rent and health care. “We are called to join Jesus in his ministry to bring glad tidings to the poor,” he observes. “We must do more to support families.” The Archbishop urged legislators to act on the Child Tax Credit, paid family leave and access to affordable child care.

Most important, for trade unionists like myself, it was heartening to read an emphatic endorsement of Catholic teaching on labor unions:

Finally, the essential role labor unions can and often do play in society must be acknowledged and affirmed. As Pope Francis stated when meeting delegates from Italian trade unions, “… one of the tasks of the trade union is to educate in the meaning of labor, promoting fraternity between workers… Trade unions… are required to be a voice for the voiceless. You must make a noise to give voice to the voiceless” Unions should continue to be supported in their work that supports healthy, thriving families, especially those who are most in need, and encouraged in maintaining and increasing their focus on performing that critical role. Indeed, as Pope Francis has suggested, “there are no free workers without trade unions.”

CLICK HERE to read the statement in its entirety.