As a former Letter Carrier for the US Postal Service, I have been paying particular attention to recent events in the news – especially the shocking decision by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to slow down mail delivery in order to save the postal service money.

As a carrier, I would arrive at the post office at 6am each weekday and Saturday and find several feet of mail on my “case,” a sorting cabinet. The mail had arrived overnight from sorting facilities and was destined for homes and businesses on my delivery route. The cardinal rule of operations was that no first class mail that arrived on my case in the morning could be left behind. On an especially busy day, we might leave bulk mail advertisements for delivery the next day, but all first class letters had to be sorted, packed in the mailbag and delivered to the addressee. If that required overtime for the carrier some days, that was a necessary cost of providing quality service. Fast and secure delivery of the mail is why the US Postal Service is the most popular agency of the US Government.

For this reason, I was suprised to hear that DeJoy had given orders to remove high-speed sorting machines in the sorting facilities and to delay first class mail delivery if necessary to curtail overtime. As you probably have, I have seen delivery of my own mail delayed by these practices in recent weeks.

These measures have now at least temporarily been put on hold. For this we can largely thank the vigorous organizing activity by unions representing postal workers such as the American Postal Workers’ Union (APWU), the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU), and my old union, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). They have spoken out to inform the public what is happening and and fighting to preserve delivery standards for the mail. This is a reminder of the role of unions in Catholic Social Teaching: not simply to win better wages and benefits for their members but to promote the common good.

It’s not for nothing that Pope Leo XIII, in the foundational document of Catholic Social Teaching – his Encyclical Rerum Novarum – compared unions to the medieval guilds and said such associations “were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art [49].” Most workers are committed to their craft and their contribution to society, and want to do a good job, even when their supervisors may be more focused on short-term profit margins.

Recent decades have witnessed an alarming decline in union membership. This trend does not only threaten the livelihood of workers but the quality of our public services and private products alike. Unions, in the postal service and elsewhere, make a vital contribution to the common good.

If you add up all the Churches, schools, hospitals, universities, cemeteries, publications and other institutions, the Catholic Church employs more than one million American workers! That’s a lot of opportunities to evangelize the world by treating our employees in accordance with Catholic Social Teaching — or to scandalize the faithful by failing to do so.

Just in time for Labor Day, the Catholic Labor Network likes to celebrate those institutions that have demonstrated their CST commitment by bargaining with the union chosen by their employees. In our 2020 Gaudium et Spes Labor Report you will find more than 600 such Catholic institutions sorted by sector, state and Diocese. Check out yours and see what you find!

Gaudium et Spes Labor Report 2020: Catholic Institutions with Employee Unions

Today some thirty million American workers displaced from their jobs by the pandemic have lost their lifelines, because the supplemental unemployment benefits provided by the CARES Act have expired and most have lost their employer-paid health care. Millions of other workers in hospitals and nursing homes, supermarkets and meatpacking plants, buses and metro trains – to name a few – continue to work while exposed to infection, but OSHA has failed to issue a workplace standard protecting them. The U.S. Senate has before it legislative proposals that would help both groups, but has refused to act, citing fears that the unemployment benefits will discourage workers from returning to low-wage jobs.

This is a matter of life and death for tens of millions of workers, and we who worship a God who cares for “the least of these brothers and sisters” cannot stand by.

Next Tuesday, Aug. 11, will see a national day of action calling on legislators to act on these critical needs. The Catholic Labor Network invites our members to join in this effort with a day of prayer and fasting. The fast, a spiritual discipline from our tradition, will never be more appropriate than in a time when millions face hunger due to extended pandemic unemployment – these men and women are abstaining from work to protect us all from a deadly coronavirus. Let us too come together in a day of prayer, a prayer calling on legislators to remember their obligations to our nation’s working people in need and act quickly to provide economic security for the displaced and workplace safety for those exposed on the job.

We also invite you to join us for a 30-minute Virtual Prayer Service at 3pm ET. We will come together to pray for the welfare of these workers and for wisdom and compassion from our elected representatives.

CLICK TO REGISTER for the virtual prayer service.

Recent events have reminded all of the deep wounds of racism that continue to afflict the United States, and of the particular problem of racist violence in our systems of policing and criminal justice. The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has inspired wide-ranging discussions of this issue and possible remedies, including discussion of the role of police unions — whether unions of police officers contribute to the problem by protecting those who abuse their authority.

The Catholic Labor Network has struggled with this question and considered it in light of Catholic Social Teaching. Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) established the right of workers to organize in unions as a basic element of Catholic social doctrine in the modern age. Eight decades later, reflecting on Rerum Novarum, Pope Paul VI elaborated on the role of unions in society in his encyclical, Octogesima Adveniens (1971), observing that “The important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the representation of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the economic advance of society, and the development of the sense of their responsibility for the realization of the common good.” (14).

Informed by these two points — the right of workers to organize in unions, and the obligation of unions (like other associations) to serve the common good — the Catholic Labor Network concludes that 1) law enforcement personnel, like other workers, have a natural right to form unions and associations, but 2) these unions are obligated to go beyond serving their members and to actively participate in the fight to root out the evil of racism, especially in the criminal justice system and within their own ranks.

Some commentators have been quick to invoke the killing of Mr. Floyd to challenge the right of police to organize in unions at all, arguing that collectively bargained disciplinary procedures make it difficult to fire problem employees. However, the Catholic Labor Network notes that some of the most prominent advocates of this viewpoint have long sought to weaken or eliminate unions for other categories of public employees as well (e.g. Daniel DeSalvo, “Tired of Bad Cops? First, Look at Their Labor Unions”, Washington Post, 6/3/2020). The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World instructs us that “Among the basic rights of the human person is to be numbered the right of freely founding unions for working people,” (Gaudium et Spes 68) and that indeed Pope St John Paul II has called labor unions “an indispensable element of social life” (Laborem Exercens, 20) in the modern era. The right of workers, including police department personnel, to form unions is sacred and inviolable. Replacing unilateral management fiat with a just grievance procedure is one of the goods that all workers seek when they organize.

Nevertheless, along with that right comes a duty to serve the common good. In a world where all of us are wounded by sin, we face a perpetual temptation to use our powers for selfish ends. This is a special challenge for those granted authority over others. We have witnessed with sorrow how a clerical culture, protective of its members at the expense of those the Church is commissioned to serve, enabled the scandal of clerical sexual abuse to fester for decades. In a similar way, we have seen how many police unions have come to occupy a role where they protect officers who abuse their authority. This has come spectacularly to light in the role and activities of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis under its current leadership. Significant structural racism plays a key and harmful role in our current policing practices. Rather than justifying this, police unions have an obligation to listen to the voices of the community and take up the fight against racism in our system of policing.

Some voices in the labor movement have called upon the AFL-CIO and its state labor federations to expel all affiliated police unions from their ranks. This is a legitimate position, many of whose advocates rightly contend that the labor movement must actively commit itself to antiracism. The Catholic Labor Network prefers the historic approach of the labor movement to addressing unions whose actions have reflected poorly on the broader movement: when unions have been found to be compromised by organized crime, for example, their participation in labor bodies was made contingent on reforms. The Catholic Labor Network believes instead that the labor movement should remain open to those police labor organizations that commit to working to end systemic racism in policing and who are willing to join in solidarity with broader efforts to move from mass incarceration toward greater amelioration of the needs of the communities of color. We call upon our brothers and sisters in the police unions to join a dialogue with the community and human services agencies on the future of policing and public order and to envision a future worthy of the call we have received.

In an important legal decision at the intersection of worker rights and religious freedom, the Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic school teachers are not protected from employment discrimination due to age or disability, because the first amendment forbids the US government from interfering in religious institutions.

The decision addressed two cases at different schools in the Los Angeles area. The late Kristen Biel, a teacher at St. James School was let go after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Agnes Morrissey-Berru, a teacher at Our Lady of Guadalupe School, sued for age discrimination after her contract was not renewed. A 7-2 majority of the court ruled that both teachers qualified for the “ministerial exemption” from discrimination laws because religious instruction is among their duties.

These are difficult cases. The USCCB understandably hailed the ruling as a vindication of religious freedom principles, but it’s unfortunate their statement didn’t acknowledge the rights of workers in any fashion at all. The legal right of Catholic institutions to discriminate according to age or disability may be an undesired consequence of a zealous defense of religious freedom, but it should temper our celebration of the outcome. Although I can’t speak to the merits of either teacher’s claim, all of us should be wary of a system that makes the employer judge in his own cause, as this decision does.

The Bishop’s 1986 Pastoral Letter Economic Justice for All includes a section on “The Church as Economic Actor” with specific reference to the Church’s practices as an employer. The Bishops observe that “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 [347].”

The current situation is far from exemplary. The Bishops state that Church employees have the right to organize in unions [353], but employers such as St. Xavier University in Chicago bust faculty unions at will. The Bishops oppose discrimination in employment, but those with a claim of discrimination have no place to turn for a fair hearing. If we are to reconcile our religious freedom with our social doctrine, it is beyond time for the Church to establish a bill of rights for employees of Catholic institutions and a forum where those whose rights have been violated can press their claims.