The Covid-19 epidemic has impacted everyone in the United States in some way or another, but its impact on many categories of workers has been especially brutal. Some sectors, such as air transportation, hotels and restaurants, are virtually shut down, leaving workers without a paycheck. Meanwhile, workers employed in mass transit, grocery stores and especially hospitals and nursing homes are exposed to severe risk of infection, illness and death.

Let’s start with the unemployed. UNITE HERE, which represents more than 300,000 workers in hotels, restaurants and institutional cafeterias, reports that 98% of its members are out of work. The grand hotels of major cities and casinos of Las Vegas have gone dark, but those aren’t the only UNITE HERE members affected. Airline bookings have fallen through the floor. That’s led to furloughs and layoffs for flight attendants, pilots, ticket agents and ramp workers – and the kitchen workers who pack meals for airline flights. As readers of this blog well know, many of these workers also belong to UNITE HERE. Airline, hotel and restaurant workers surely have a long and difficult road ahead: with financial concerns and residual fears of infection, it will take years before Americans resume their pre-pandemic travel and entertainment spending levels.

While record unemployment affects much of the workforce, a few critical sectors are witnessing skyrocketing demand – and with it, skyrocketing risk of worker exposure to the coronavirus. Witness the challenges of supermarket cashiers and clerks: on April 13 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) reported that covid-19 infections had killed at least 30 supermarket workers. Amazon warehouse workers don’t have a union, so there’s no workers’ representative to share numbers, but infections there have resulted in worker protests and walkouts. And of course no one faces a greater risk of infection than the doctors, nurses and techs treating covid-19 victims in our nation’s hospitals. Nearly 10,000 health care workers have been infected by the virus, making them a shocking 10-20% of the coronavirus cases. (Fortunately, many of these workers are young and have no prior health conditions, so there are fewer hospitalizations and fatalities than that number might suggest.)

Bus drivers and subway operators face the worst of both worlds. Reduced service means fewer hours and fewer jobs, and many riders are expected to steer clear of crowded buses and trains for the foreseeable future. But our metro employees continue to carry those at-risk health care, supermarket, and distribution center workers to and from their jobs, and mass transit is not configured for social distancing. The result? At least 75 transit workers killed by covid-19 despite reduced service. It’s especially bad in New York City, home of both America’s largest mass transit system and the pandemic’s domestic epicenter.

Please pray for the unemployed and those whose jobs place them at elevated risk for infection. And urge OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard to protect everyone from unnecessary risk on the job.

The Kennedy Center is earning headlines, and not in the usual good way. The Center begged taxpayers for money to tide them over through the Covid-19 pandemic, and got a sweet $25 million injection in the stimulus package to cover their bills. Within hours of winning the money, Kennedy Center management spun around and told the National Symphony Orchestra members they are to be sent home without pay. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), their union, says this is illegal and is defending their contract in court. I’ve heard a story much like this before and it ends badly for Kennedy Center management: see Matt 18:22-34 for details.

A recent article in Commonweal — “The Orthodox Church & Social Teaching” — just alerted me to a new social teaching document issued by the Greek Orthodox Church in America with the approval of Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople himself. FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church is heavy on economic justice, among other themes. See, for example, paragraph 37:

Against all such practices, the Orthodox Church will insist upon the high dignity of labor and upon the inviolable sanctity of each person, and that “The laborer is worthy of his hire” (1 Timothy 5:18). Moreover, no one should labor without respite: the Church insists that a just economy or business is one that insures not only the reasonable productivity and respectable pay of workers, but their opportunities for sufficient rest from work, for recreation, and for restoration of body and soul with their families, friends, and communities. It must require of every society with the means to do so that it protect its workers—both documented and undocumented—against abuse, humiliation, neglect, and cynical exploitation. It must ask of governments that they pass laws that make it possible for employers to provide jobs but not to treat labor as a mere commodity or business expense without any special moral status. Every advanced economy must, if it would be just, make it a matter of law and custom that those businesses that enjoy incorporation in nations that provide trustworthy legal systems, functioning financial institutions, and basic civil freedoms must be willing, as part of their social compact with those nations, to comply with laws and practices that provide workers with humane conditions and living wages, and that forbid complicity in corrupt systems of structural poverty in other nations. This entails laws that ensure that, even in establishing facilities in the developing world, such businesses must be held to the same standards of conduct toward labor that obtain in the developed world; and the ability of businesses to manufacture, market, and trade goods, or otherwise to participate in the global market, must be made contingent upon just labor practices. The Church must also call for laws that do not subject undocumented workers to the terror of legal penalty when seeking redress for abuses on the part of their employers. At the same time, the Church should encourage corporations to invest humanely in depressed parts of the world, and to try to provide opportunities where none previously existed; it asks only that such businesses must be held to standards of conduct that respect the inherent dignity of every human person, and that they make their investments in developing economies in order to improve the conditions of the poor rather than to profit from their poverty.

I would have thought this would be a natural place to note the role of labor unions, but of course, not everyone thinks like me. However, paragraph 63 notes the right to organize in the context of inalienable civil rights of the human person:

Then there are those civil rights that must be regarded as the universal and inalienable possessions of all persons: the right to vote for or against those exercising political power, equal access for all persons to political representation, freedom of association, freedom of religion, the right of peaceful assembly and protest, freedom of workers to form unions…

This language in my mind recalls Gaudium et Spes, whose paragraph 68 observes:

Among the basic rights of the human person is to be numbered the right of freely founding unions for working people. These should be able truly to represent them and to contribute to the organizing of economic life in the right way. Included is the right of freely taking part in the activity of these unions without risk of reprisal.

It’s beautiful to see our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox communion reaffirming their commitment to economic justice and the right to organize in a period when both are under threat in secular history!

The terrible COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the lives of Americans across the nation, but falling with special severity on low-income workers. According to the 2018 Federal Reserve Board Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making, four in ten Americans lack the savings to cover an unexpected $400 expense – yet millions of these workers stand to lose much more as COVID-19 shutters shops and restaurants, darkens casinos and stadiums, grounds airplanes, and closes offices.

While most Maryland workers enjoy paid sick leave under state law, some workers are excluded from coverage, and countless state residents who are not ill are facing an economic crisis due to emergency closures. As Catholic Christians, we know we will be judged on whether we have fed, clothed and sheltered “one of these least brothers of mine” (Matthew 25:31-46). That’s why a growing number of Maryland parishes are joining other worker and community organizations and calling for the state to adopt the following emergency measures:

• Employees covered by the Healthy Working Families Act (HWFA), Maryland’s earned sick leave law, should be allowed to use their earned leave where they cannot work due to school closures, business closure, or because they or a family member has been quarantined by a public health official.
• Coverage under the HWFA should extend to all temporary workers.
• All workers whose jobs require significant public contact and those working with vulnerable populations should be immediately covered.
• The waiting period to use sick leave under the HWFA should be eliminated, and the maximum number of days employees can use leave should be extended to 14 days.

Thanks to Fr. Ty Hullinger and the community at Baltimore’s St. Anthony of Padua Parish for leading the way with this letter addressed to Governor Larry Hogan and the parish’s state legislative delegation. We congratulate all the Maryland parishes that have taken these steps and urge others to follow their lead!