Phil Tabbita is the President of the Catholic Labor Network. In his day job, he is Manager of Negotiation Support and Special Projects for the American Postal Workers Union (APWU).

Phil Tabbita did not begin his working career with the intention of becoming a union activist. He just needed a job while he studied music at Wayne State and the Postal Service was a good job to have. Before going to Wayne State, Phil attended the seminary, but left feeling bitter towards the church. He grew up believing priests were saintly, but in seminary he encountered regular fallible men. He stopped attending church and believed he could structure his faith independently and have his own prayerful relationship with God.

Phil began working for the US Postal Service in 1970 as a window distribution clerk and was active in the organization of the APWU as a number of Postal Service unions merged.  He joined the national APWU staff in 1983 and has been involved in every round of contract negotiations since 1981. Ten years after he had left the church, he was the lead for the union side of an arbitration and a witness offered to lie to help the union’s case. Phil was shocked at the cavalier attitude towards an amoral act like lying under oath. This event caused Phil to reflect on his faith and he realized he no longer had a relationship with God. He returned to the church to become an active member of the Catholic community and developed a deep connection to the Eucharist because of his closeness to God through the sacrament.

Phil tries to spread Catholic Social Teaching through his labor work and believes it is the best kept secret about the church. He believes work is ubiquitous and touches everyone, therefore we should work to make jobs decent and dignified. The Church is the antidote to the world and gives us the ability to look around and see good people. Work also gives us the ability to carry out our obligation to make the earth better.

Phil’s role at the APWU is to serve as executive assistant to the president, support collective bargaining, and act as a union advocate in arbitration among other jobs. Phil is active in the Knights of Columbus and is an usher at the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

 

On May 1, 2020 — the Feast of St Joseph the Worker — Fr. Sinclair Oubre presented A Personal & Brief History of the Founding of the Catholic Labor Network to a national audience via Zoom. In response to requests by listeners, here is the text of his address:

 

The personal roots of the Catholic Labor Network are found in my hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. This was a town where the word “union” was not a dirty word, and to be in a union was a source of pride. Though there had been many challenging strikes, the union families knew that though these had been hard time, the wages, pension, and healthcare benefits significantly outpaced those of their relatives in Louisiana.

Each union family knew that these wages and benefits were not gifts given by the refineries and construction companies, but were hard won union victories through collective bargaining, and sometimes by withholding each worker’s labor so as to demonstrate how serious the workers were.

In addition, Port Arthur and Southeast Texas had strong apprenticeship programs that trained the next generation of craftsmen. These apprenticeship programs supported a system where the individual craftsman’s welfare was directly tied to the welfare of his or her fellow union workers, and the welfare of their union.

In my own family, my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father, and my two uncles on my father’s side were all members of the Carpenter’s Union. Later, my father became a member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union when he began working at the Texaco Refinery. In my high school graduating class, many of my classmates joined pipefitter, boilermaker, electrician, carpenter, or plumber apprentice programs. Others were hired directly into the plants as laborers, and eventually rose to be operators. All being members of the oil workers union. So, the roots of the Catholic Labor Network lie in my family’s union experience, and the tremendous benefits the union provided to my working class classmates in our parochial schools.

The personal roots of the Catholic Labor Network are also tied to a happenstance event that occurred at the University of St. Thomas’ Student Government Office. In 1978, while studying as a seminarian for the Diocese of Beaumont at St. Mary Seminary and the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, I was elected to the University Student Government Association. Passing through the SGA office in what is today Crooker Center, I picked up a copy of a booklet entitled: “On the Condition of Labor” by Pope Leo XIII. I started thumbing through it, and I was astounded that at the end of the 19^th century, a pope wrote a strong critique of Marxist socialism and free market capitalism, while offering a third way that promoted private property, subsidiarity, the common good, and the dignity of the human person. This was very different from the montages that we were making in religion class at my Catholic high school. If I was reading this instead of the pablum that was being served up, I would have paid more attention in class. This set me on a course of using every elective I had as an undergraduate to take political science courses that focused on Catholic Social Teaching and work.

In 1978, I became an honors philosophy student at The Catholic University of America. While there, I was blessed to be taken under the wing by Don Slaiman, a Jewish socialist who worked in the Organizing Department of the AFL-CIO. He worked hard to mentor young men and women who were interested in the labor movement. He introduced me to Frontlash, the AFL-CIO’s outreach program to college students. Soon after I joined Frontlash, Jessica Smith became the director, and she led the organization in many dynamic ways. She is still a close friend, and an assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Through Frontlash, I was able to make a number of lasting labor connections that led to other connections later in life.

Frontlash also made it possible for me to be a summer intern with the International Association of Machinists Union. During the summer, I worked in the political action committee office. IAM President William Winpisinger backed Ted Kennedy’s primary run against President Carter. This allowed me to be a go-fer at the Washington, D.C. Mayflower Hotel where all the pre-1980 Democratic Convention committee hearings were held.

All these experiences helped me to develop many strong local and national labor ties. Being ordained to the priesthood in 1986, I soon began a volunteer ministry to seafarers calling at our ports, and also I began to attend the Sabine Area Central Labor Council meetings. Through these meetings, I began to meet the business agents and officers from our different unions, and found them very welcoming. I also began to learn more about a Chicago priest named Msgr. George Higgins. For years, I had seen his column “The Yardstick” appear in our local diocesan newspaper. Articles about the grape and lettuce boycotts, the formation of the United Farm Workers, and many other labor issues were chronicled in Msgr. Higgins’ column in our bi-weekly diocesan newspaper.

I do not remember how, but I became aware that a number of theological faculties including Catholic University, the Dominican House of Studies and Oblate College were sponsors with the AFL-CIO in a conference entitled: A Dialogue Between The Religious and Labor Community on Social and Ethical Concerns in Changing Economy. At this January, 1989 program were Catholic leaders like Archbishop Weakland, Fr. William Byron, S.J., Fr. Ed Boyle, S.J., Sr. Nancy Sylvester, and Msgr. George Higgins.The conference addressed mutual labor and religion issues like: Human rights in the workplace, Living/just family wage, Plant closings, Organizing unions a moral right, and what can be done through Religion-Labor understanding and cooperation.

This conference was followed by a second conference in 1991, to observe the 100^th Anniversary Rerum Novarum. In June of 1991, religious organizations and the AFL-CIO hosted in Atlanta: On the Condition of Workers in 1991: A Continuation of the Dialogue Between the Religious Community and Organized Labor. In the opening plenary session, Bishop John McCarthy, then bishop of Austin, Texas, wove a story of the how socio-economic conditions had frayed the ties between Catholic seminarians and unions.

In the 1920’s, an Irish boy’s father was in the union. In addition, all his uncles were union members. That boy fought in World War II, and because of the GI Bill was able to go to college, and thereby move into a white collar job. His son went to a better university, and became a lawyer or doctor. In addition, he became more affluent and had no contact with labor unions. This man then meets with his Pastor at the country club, who also has had no experience with unions either. Because the pastor’s grandfather had been a union member, but his father went to college on the GI Bill, and he had lived in the suburbs with his father working in an office. The affluent Catholic parishioner with is suburban well educated pastor had forgotten what labor did to put them where they were. Unions were just “Things that were important in the past, but were no longer necessary in the modern world.”

In 1993, Msgr. George Higgins with the assistance of William Bole published, Organized Labor and the Church: Reflections of a “Labor Priest.” This book gave me a great insight into Msgr. Higgins, and the elaborate and active relationship that had existed in the United States Catholic Church and the labor movement. In this book, I was introduced to the great Msgr. John A. Ryan, and Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, Fr. Raymond McGowan, and many other priests who dedicated a significant amount of their priestly ministry to promoting our Catholic Social teaching, especially as it related to worker and unions.

Reading Higgins’ reflections, I learned that there had been a strong relationship between the US bishops and labor, that there had been labor schools in hundreds of parishes, and parish priests were actively engaged in both helping to organize their workers into unions, while simultaneously working to stymie efforts by communist union members to take over the locals. This was such a different environment from what I had grown up in Port Arthur, where we could be having a knock-down-drag-out strike at Texaco that could last months, with about 20% of our parish men on the picket line, and 20% locked in the plant, and nary a word was spoken from the pulpit about the labor/management clash that was dividing our community.

Finally, by 1995, Decatur, Illinois had become the battleground for the future of industrial and manufacturing unions. In this one city, Staley had locked out its workers, and Bridgestone/Firestone and Caterpillar had forced its workforce out on strike because of demands for major contract concessions. In response, “Road Warriors” traveled throughout the country attending labor union and central labor council meetings.

One group came to Port Arthur, and showed a video and made a presentation at the Sabine Area Central Labor Council. In that video, a Decatur parish priest, Fr. Martin Mangan, was pepper sprayed during a sit-down strike at Staley’s main gate. Being the chaplain to the central labor council, and by now a member of the Seafarers International Union, and having a desire to see the old alliance between the US Catholic Church and America’s union movement reestablished, I decided that on my motorcycle ride home from my canon law studies at Catholic University that summer, I would stop off, and visit this priest, and find out how does one do “Labor Priest.”

I cold called Fr. Martin, and he welcomed me to stop by at the end of July. When we sat down at a local restaurant, I was all ready to ask Fr. Martin how to be a labor priest, but before the words got out of my mouth, he was asking me how to be a labor priest. It was apparent that if there ever had been a manual on how to be a labor priest, it had long since been lost.

Also in the early 1990’s, I met an ex-Franciscan brother, Steve Donahue at a Central Labor Council picnic. He was working for SEIU Local 100 out of New Orleans, and doing organizing work. I was so excited to meet someone trying to live the spirit of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, I struck up a friendship with him and his fellow Baton Rouge Catholic Worker, Tim Vining.

I also came to learn that there was a prison chaplain named Fr. Don Brooks in Tulsa, Oklahoma who was active with local unions. There was also Msgr. Charles Rice of Pittsburgh, Jack Egan of Chicago, Ed Boyle, S.J. of the Boston Catholic Labor Guild, Mary Priniski, and there was Deacon Bob Miller, who worked for the AFL-CIO as its United Way liaison. But there was no single, place where clergy, religious, Catholic Workers, or just Catholic union members could work together to continue the Catholic/Labor cooperation of the past. It is important to note that Msgr. Higgins had retired from the USCC, and though there continued to be an office of social justice, there was no one who specifically had the labor portfolio.

To both give spiritual support to the dispersed group of Catholic labor ministers, to promote Catholic Social Teaching relating to worker and unions, and to be a sign of solidarity with the striking and locked out workers in Decatur, I suggested to Fr. Martin that we hold a meeting in Decatur. Dates were set for March of 1996. Union families opened their doors to the attendees, and for three days, the 30 or so participants learned about the three Decatur labor struggles; they learned what each person was doing in their own corner of the country; and they received a lesson on the Labor Priest through a panel of people who lived it: John Cort, Msgr. George Higgins, Msgr. Charles Egan, and Fr. Ed Boyle, S.J.

The results of this first meeting were the establishment of a loose affiliation of Catholic clergy, religious and laity who promoted Catholic Social Teachings relating to work and unions, and the building and launching of a web page: catholiclabor.org.

In 2001, the Catholic Labor Network was invited to host a wrap-around seminar at the USCCB Catholic Social Ministry Gathering. I was attending a Interfaith Worker Justice Board Meeting with Tom Shellabarger on September 11, 2001. Tom invited me to attend a USCCB planning meeting for the 2002 CSMG. The committee approved CLN being part of the wrap-around sessions. From 2002 to the present, CLN has met on the Saturday of the CSMG. The program consisted of:

• • • Mass or morning prayer
    • Discussion on the state of Church/Labor Questions
    • Speakers
    • Lunch with a keynote speaker
    • And in more recent years, it is followed by the Administrative Board’s meeting

With the hard work of Clayton, first as a volunteer director, and later as a paid director, the Catholic Labor Network has grown to be the only Catholic association that is completely dedicated to promoting our CST regarding workers and unions, and to rebuild the classic Catholic/Labor coalition.

I have a concern about the ongoing support among the US bishops regarding their strong and clear support for the right of workers to organize in secular and church institutions as laid out in the 1986 pastoral Economic Justice for All. There have been some worrying trends:

Catholic Hospitals not supporting directive #7 in the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services; the erosion disappearance of diocesan building guidelines that considered collective bargaining as a value when bidding contracts; disturbing instances were dioceses have unilaterally dissolved their collective bargaining agreements with their unions.

Labor historian Kim Baker submits his reflections fifty years after the untimely death of Walter Reuther, pioneering leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

A half-century ago, on May 9, 1970, America lost one of its greatest heroes, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, in the crash of a plane whose engine, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, was missing parts and had parts wrongly installed–including one part installed upside down.

This tragedy, and several similar tragedies, occurred amidst a time like today, when progressive reformers are battling valiantly to promote social justice in every area of economic life.  Therefore, it behooves us to take a fresh look at Walter Reuther and what he fought for, and to realize the large extent to which today’s workers and worker-justice activists are standing on Reuther’s shoulders.
Reuther, in turn, was standing on the shoulders of the workers and worker-justice reformers who preceded his rise to dominance as a leader in the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during their organizing and 1935 founding.  Reuther and his fellow workers and activists saw industrial unionism as a direct outgrowth of a democratic-socialist vision for the United States, a vision in which workers and other Americans can thwart income inequality and play larger roles in determining their economic and political destinies.

One cannot fully understand worker justice in the 1930s and 1940s without exploring the extent to which unions in those decades were affected by the relationship between the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and its allies, and U.S. socialists and their allies (including the Catholic social-action movement).  Communists and socialists were bitter foes long before the 1930s, and except for a brief period of cooperation during the Popular Front era of the 1930s (cooperation which ended with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939), UAW and other CIO unions were constant battlegrounds.

Communist workers everywhere had to follow a line of complete subjugation of worker interests to the war aims and foreign-policy objectives of the Comintern (the Communist Party globally), which still and always included world domination.  During World War II, CPUSA-led union factions hampered collective-bargaining activities (already hampered by corporate domination of wartime union-management relationships) by demanding no-strike pledges and extreme production speed-ups, and by downplaying workers’ concerns with low pay, meager benefits, lack of worker input, and unsafe working conditions.

From UAW’s founding, Reuther courageously led the union’s democratic-socialist coalition.  He was a member of the Socialist Party in the 1930s until 1938, when he joined the Democratic Party, and he played a major role in UAW going from 30,000 members in 1935 to 400,000 members in 1938.  He sought cooperation with the workers of every union faction, and was a veteran of the sit-down strikes and of the bitter three-year-long struggle to organize Ford Motor Company (featuring the famous photo of Reuther being bloodied by company goons).

Walter Reuther’s World War II innovations, however, most dramatically exemplify his leadership.  His defense-readiness plan was extremely effective, and could serve as a model for dealing with today’s coronavirus.  And most significantly, in June 1945 he filed a brief with all war-production agencies recommending that in postwar, “increased production must be supported by increased consumption, and increased consumption will only be possible through increased wages.”

Indeed, he made this recommendation part of UAW’s then-current round of negotiations with General Motors by proposing that the company’s workers be given a 50-percent wage increase and that it not be accompanied by an increase in the price of GM cars.  Reuther’s proposal did’nt go through, but it was a ground-breaking challenge to economic inequality in a ground-breaking manner and promises to play a key role in today’s crucial national debates.

Poet Robert Frost speaks of the importance of “the road not taken”; and America’s not taking the road championed by Reuther set a discouraging tone for the country’s postwar years, when labor had to yield to corporate dominance and the country entered an era of excessive consumer abundance.  Reuther was disappointed, but he still fought hard for worker justice (such as by supporting Cesar Chavez and farmworker organizing and by promoting public-sector unions), and he expanded efforts long made
on other social-justice fronts, including civil-rights struggles, Vietnam War protests, and a greater voice for young people.

Unfortunately, this road called for but not taken has received woefully insufficient attention in the few major biographies of Walter Reuther.  Nelson Lichtenstein, for example, in “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit”, portrays Reuther after World War II as a champion of corporatism and consumer abundance, a portrayal which insufficiently accounts for Reuther having to row against the anti-labor current of that era and for his increased efforts in non-labor directions.  Also, Lichtenstein neglects the positive anti-Communism which Reuther displayed and which helped propel him to the UAW presidency in 1947, helping bring about CIO’s expulsion of 13 CPUSA-led unions in 1949-50.  Sadly, positive anti-Communism was soon replaced by the negative anti-Communism of the right wing and of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk.

Ironically, during Reuther’s fight for his innovative challenge, James Matles, President of the CPUSA-led United Electrical Workers-CIO (UE), secretly negotiated with GM on behalf of the 30,000 company workers which it represented.  The UE-GM agreement unfortunately became a basis of the much weaker agreement which UAW eventually had to settle for.

In “The Wage Earner”, a highly-regarded Detroit labor newspaper, the paper’s editor, Paul Weber, commented in October 1945 on the Reuther challenge: “If Reuther succeeds in forcing GM, one of the country’s largest industrial empires, to redivide the fruits of its production, the day of gigantic profits in American business will be done … {T}he result may not be the end of capitalism, but it will certainly be the beginning of a new kind of capitalism.”

The actual result, as we know, was swallowed up in the machinations of runaway capitalists and right-wing politicians, who then gave us decades of assaults on worker’s rights to organize and bargain collectively–including, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 12,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, or PATCO (see Collision Course by labor historian Joseph McCartin, Oxford University Press, 2011).  Such assaults continue today, but thanks to the renewal of the democratic-socialist vision for America’s future, Walter Reuther’s “road not taken” promises to become a wide highway of worker justice and of social justice in general.

 

For more than a century, America’s building trades unions have prepared workers for skilled, family-supporting jobs in the construction industry. Today these unions are preparing for a wave of retirements, and are recruiting a new generation of workers through a pre-apprenticeship program aimed at diversifying their ranks. In Nashville, the Catholic Labor Network has been teaming up with Catholic Charities and local parishes to move low-income workers into these high-wage jobs.

The pre-apprenticeship program known as the Multi-Craft Core Curriculum (aka MC3) programs introduces those considering a career in construction to each of the trades in turn. Thanks to outreach work at area Masses by local CLN representative Aimee Shelide Mayer, four of the nine participants in the last MC3 class to precede the coronavirus lockdown were immigrants from Diocese of Nashville parishes — three from a large Hispanic congregation, Iglesia Sagrado Corazòn, and one from one of the oldest churches in the Diocese, Church of the Holy Name in East Nashville.

At the close of the two-week program, all nine participants graduated with plans to enter the trade of their choice.  Graduation on February 7^th was a joyous event.  Marisa Morales Perez from Sagrado Corazòn said in her address to the graduation attendees that she was there “for her siblings and her family,” and hoped that her aspired path with the Painters would help support her family so she would no longer have to work second shift.  Leo Martinez, also from Sagrado Corazòn, said he wanted to “show his children that anything is possible if you make the commitment.”  Leo had received electrical training in California before moving to Tennessee, but now—with the skills he learned with MC3—hopes to enter a full-time apprenticeship with the Electrical Workers.  Joseph Kenyawia, who moved to Nashville from Sudan twenty years ago and is a pillar of the Sudanese community at Holy Name, said that joining the Insulators Apprenticeship following graduation is his “opportunity to leave a firm foundation for [his] family.”

For now, coronavirus shutdowns are interfering with what is also known locally as MC3: Music City Construction Careers. CLN looks forward to additional recruitment when instruction resumes!