“Brother Marinus”Rescued 14,000+ Korean Refugees

Merchant Marine Captain Leonard LaRue earned lasting fame during the Korean war. The proud Masters, Mates and Pilot union member rescued more than 14,000 Korean refugees trapped in Hungnam when Chinese “volunteers” suddenly intervened in the Korean War. LaRue and his crew executed the daring evacuation under fire on Christmas Day in 1950. After the war, LaRue took vows as a Benedictine monk and became Brother Marinus. Bishop Seratelli of the Diocese of Paterson has opened the cause for sainthood for Servant of God Brother Marinus. To read more, check out coverage in the Diocese of Paterson Beacon.  

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of1935 guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively without employer retaliation — but it excluded agricultural workers. That means farmworker organizations must use other tactics to organize and bring employers to the bargaining table. Since the time of Cesar Chavez and the celebrated UFW grape boycott in the late 1960s, consumer boycotts have been a critical strategy for farmworkers seeking justice. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) are among the labor organizations doing just this.

The tomato pickers of Florida have used targeted boycotts of fast food restaurants to improve their own working conditions – and eventually to obtain a fair labor code of conduct covering many other growers and their employees. Today all the fast food chains but Wendy’s have agreed to abide by the code. CIW has called for a boycott of Wendy’s until they follow suit. In early March, CIW members did a bus tour to four universities hosting a campus Wendy’s and rallied with student supporters, calling on administrators to “Boot the Braids!” The tour visited University of Florida, UNC-Chapel Hill, Ohio State, and University of Michigan. UM has announced that it will not renew Wendy’s lease.

Meanwhile, tobacco harvesters in North Carolina organized by FLOC are calling on RJ Reynolds to police its supply chain. FLOC is unique in the farm labor movement, having succeeded in forming a union of guest workers in the Tar Heel state. But many tobacco workers still toil for nonunion growers, for low wages and under unsafe conditions. Much as the fast food chains have the power to demand that their growers adhere to fair labor standards, RJ Reynolds could do this for their tobacco growers. Until they do, FLOC is calling for a boycott of RJR’s VUSE e-cigarettes. On March 28, FLOC members and their supporters rallied outside the regional HQ for Circle K, asking that the convenience store chain pull the offending e-cigarettes from their shelves. Many such actions have been held since.

We ask members and friends of the Catholic Labor Network to remember farmworkers and honor these boycotts.

Neither Louisiana nor Tennessee are known as “union states.” Workers in both places who want to organize and bargain need to navigate so-called “right-to-work” laws designed to stymie collective action. Nonetheless, in recent visits to the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Diocese of Nashville I found impressive networks of unions, workers’ centers and community groups campaigning for worker justice, often with the moral and material support of the local Church.

Catholic teaching discourages us from using politics to pursue our private advantage, urging us to orient our civic engagement to “the common good.” But what is the common good? University of Dayton theologian Vincent Miller explored this concept in a recent America magazine article, “What does Catholic Social Teaching say about the economy? It’s more complicated than you think.”

Miller was responding to free market ideologues who argue that economic prosperity is a sound measure of the common good, and laissez-faire government the best way to achieve it. But, as Miller points out, this is virtually the opposite of the common good as Catholic doctrine explains it. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church tells us that

The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains “common”, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future. Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished in doing what is good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good. The common good, in fact, can be understood as the social and community dimension of the moral good [164].

Living in a cynical century where “politics” is portrayed as nothing more than a fight among interest groups, we can be forgiven if we struggle to understand this idea. The Church fathers, Miller reminds us, imported the notion of the common good from the Greeks and Romans. Both saw politics – the pursuit of the common good – as a high calling. A man in ancient Athens or the Roman Republic who devoted his life to accumulating wealth was considered contemptible. One who wished to be honored by their peers would devote himself instead to politics, where he would provide for the common defense, commission public works of art and construct temples to the gods.

The Church, bringing the teachings of the Gospel to bear, has enriched the concept of the common good enormously. But private transactions between buyer and seller – however valuable they may be in satisfying genuine needs for both involved – are irreducibly individual. As Miller concludes, “Market economies have much to offer society when oriented toward the common good. For Catholic social thought, it is the task of politics to promote and set limits to the market so that it can serve the common good.”

By the way… With generous support from CCHD, our friends at Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative are part of a consortium working on a project called Bargaining for the Common Good. The premise is that public employee unions will go beyond seeking their own interests alone, and work with community and civic groups to formulate bargaining demands that satisfy worker justice while meeting community needs and concerns for quality public services.

Last month I spent more time in the US Capitol Building than I had in the previous 12 years I’ve lived in the Washington DC metro area. Why? Because changes in federal immigration policy threaten to suddenly uproot hundreds of thousands, splitting husbands from wives and parents from children – and because my Church and my union are leading the fight to prevent this by preserving DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and TPS (Temporary Protected Status).

At the beginning of February, the USCCB hosted its annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering, a conference that brings together Catholic activists from across the nation. After a couple of days of workshops and prayer, participants headed out to Congress to meet with their elected representatives and witness for social justice. Extending DACA and TPS protections was a top issue this year. DACA protects undocumented immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the US as children, through no fault of their own; many of these children remember nothing of their nation of origin, having grown up entirely in the United States. TPS permits those whose homeland has been torn by war or natural disaster to remain in the US until it is safe to return. The president has moved to end both programs, so we urged our House and Senate members to take legislative action to protect their participants from deportation.

A week later, I was back. Working Families United, a coalition of labor unions with immigrant members was taking a stand. Although TPS was begun as a “temporary” program, many of these nations took a long time to recover; TPS holders have built careers, married, and raised US-born children here. The unions brought members holding TPS from across the country to Washington DC and accompanied them to the Capitol to tell their stories.

In Exodus 23:9 we read how God told the Israelites, “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you well know how it feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.” One of the key goals of the Church-Labor Partnership Project (CLPP) is to bring Church and labor together to advocate for immigrants in a time of increasing nativism. We will continue to bring you news as Congress debates how to move forward.