The Political Machine

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Machine Politics and the Church by Bill Droel

The Catholic church and the political machine had a symbiotic relationship in Chicago and elsewhere for many years. So argues Dominic Pacyga in his latest book: Clout City (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Chicago politics was “a mixture of the sacred and the profane, a combination of cultural and religious roots and more worldly pursuits,” he writes. “Chicago is a secular, capitalist city, but one with a religious core.” Pacyga includes synagogues and Jewish organizations on the religious side. Both the machine and the church/synagogue were compassionate alternatives to the Protestant establishment, popularly called downtown or big corporate.

Within his timeframe, 1870 to 2023, Pacyga profiles many of the key actors in the machine, most of whom were Democrats.  The machine’s efficient years were 1930-1965 when it was largely associated with Richard J Daley (1902-1976), who served 21 years as Chicago mayor and 23 years as the party’s chair in the county. His son Richard M Daley, now in his mid-80s, subsequently served 22 years as mayor.

The machine was hierarchical. The boss relied on faithful commissioners to oversee city services. With rare exceptions the boss also controlled the city council. The council member (called the alderman in Chicago lingo) was paired with a ward committee person. The next level (covering maybe four to a dozen blocks) was the responsibility of a precinct captain, whose day job was often with the city.

The machine had a practical communitarian mindset in contrast to society’s dominant philosophy of individual achievement. A collective mentality was nurtured, in part, by ethnic and religious culture, says Pacyga. He uses De La Salle High School in Chicago’s near southside as an example. It was “a political incubator” for machine politicians, Pacyga details. Five mayors including the Daley’s graduated from De La Salle. Plus, the school educated two county presidents and “countless other politicians, judges and city officials [and] numerous businesspeople, police officers, firefighters and a host of city workers.” That high school stressed order, hierarchy and loyalty. It “encouraged Catholic attitudes toward fairness, duty and sin, often in deep contrast to the rampant individualism and unbridled capitalism” of Chicago.

Of course, the machine had corruption. However, neighborhood people overlooked it, as long as the community at large benefited from jobs, emergency assistance, license considerations, snow removal, trash collection, fire and police protection. The machine “existed side by side with an approach to political governance that derived from and centered on the communalism of Chicago’s immigrant and working-class communities.”

A similar description of New York’s machine, called Tammany Hall, is found in Terry Golway’s Machine Made (W.W. Norton, 2014). Again, political corruption was taken for granted. But for New York’s immigrants, especially those from Ireland, Tammany was able “to mediate the capriciousness of laissez-faire capitalism.” It delivered jobs and social services to working families in a respectful manner, untainted by paternal noblesse oblige.

As in Chicago, the New York machine relied implicitly on a foundation in the Catholic experience. Golway devotes several pages to Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), describing him as “aggressive and political to his very marrow.” Hughes, originally from Ireland, explained the feeling of Irish and other immigrants: For the first five days of my life, I was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire. Then I was baptized as a Catholic and became a second-class citizen.”

In time the machine model of urban politics disintegrated, Pacyga says. The corruption became too enriching for too few while service delivery declined. Further, the post-1960s reform movement within the Democratic Party drew its leaders into elite circles. They associated with tech barons and favored focus groups over the word on the street. The Democrats supported several cultural causes foreign to the Catholic sensibility. Suburbanization was the big factor in the machine’s decline. As immigrants left the city, they took on aspirations of the upper-class. Their Catholicism, if it remained at all, was like the individualism of evangelicals.

Nowadays, does a local politician or a pastor have any influence on one’s difficulties with health insurance or with internet providers or with immigration policies or employment opportunities? Does the notion of community have any traction in a society where the sum of striving individuals is the ethical norm? Is a government or church model based on services in any way compelling to today’s young adults? Should there be a new machine and what form would it take?

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

Thanks for Immigrants

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GIVE THANKS FOR IMMIGRANTS by Bill Droel


Our flag is the number one symbol of our country. Its design of 13 stripes and 50 stars means unity through pluralism. It represents our belief in a layered government with authority given by citizenry. The flag stands for all the positive values of our experiment in democracy.
There are other symbols of our country. This month features pictures and displays of the harvest rituals and feasts that occurred in the early 1600s in Massachusetts, Virginia and elsewhere. These serene images obviously compress history. They are influenced by famous paintings, including one from 1915, The First Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Ferris (1893-1930) and one from 1943, the still popular Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). Thanksgiving was celebrated regionally until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) designated a national day of Thanksgiving to “Almighty God…for fruitful fields and healthful skies.”
The Statue of Liberty is another symbol of our beautiful, bounteous country. It is a fitting image to link with Thanksgiving.
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), whose Italian parents immigrated to France, was involved with a circle of people who were aware of how France aided our struggle for independence. They considered the United States a model for their own movement for liberty. They raised money to donate a statue symbolizing their appreciation for our country. They wanted the spirit of their gift to keep moving in the sense that the United States would support and sustain liberty among freedom-seeking people around the world.
A preview of the gift appeared at the Philadelphia Expo in 1876, but it took until 1880 before a complete statue was delivered to the United States embassy in Paris.
It wasn’t until 1886, however, that the statue was dedicated in New York’s Upper Bay. In the meantime a private fundraising campaign in our country was needed to secure the statue’s site, particularly to finance its pedestal. Part of the fundraising was the auction of a 14-line sonnet, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). Her ancestors were Jewish-Russians who emigrated here before our Revolutionary War. At the time her poem was commissioned, Lazarus, sufficiently known in literary circles, was volunteering at Emigrant Aid Society on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The poem was mostly neglected but in 1903 it was written on a bronze tablet and only in 1945 was it mounted on the statue’s pedestal. The poem and the statue came to represent the generosity of our country’s residents. So thankful, in fact, that we generously open our hearts to “…your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The statue’s symbolism of thanksgiving is, of course, reinforced by its proximity to Ellis Island, where from 1892 to 1954 many freedom-seeking immigrants entered our country, including my grandmother. (For the record, Ellis Island is mostly in New Jersey and Liberty Island itself is in New York.)
Each generation of arrivals enriched our country with creativity, social capital, unique culture, patriotic service and faith. These are their gift to subsequent generations. Thus our table prayer on November 27th 2025, is not only one of thanks for God’s bounty, and thanks for the privilege of residing in this country, and thanks for the family and friends gathered, but also thanks for our ancestors and for those new arrivals who keep the gift moving.


P.S. Fr. Gary Graf of Chicago is walking all the way from the boyhood home of Robert Prevost/Pope Leo XIV in Dalton, Illinois to Ellis Island to raise awareness about the plight of today’s immigrants. Follow him at www.ourladyoftheheights.org.

Poverty Is Not Just About Money

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Poverty Is More Than Lack of Money by Bill Droel

Unconditional cash assistance to the poor may not do any good. That is a conclusion from a rigorous study, Baby’s First Years (www.babysfirstyears.com).

An experiment, supervised by eight researchers, gave $333 per month for 48 months to 1,000 needy families from the Twin Cities, Omaha, New Orleans and New York City. A control group received $20 per month. Results were additionally compared with the population at large. (No government money was involved.)

The experiment yielded no evident improvement in children’s language skills or their cognitive development. Neither the child’s health nor social and emotional behavior was any better than in families lacking the subsidy. The parents receiving the $333 experienced no reduction in stress. Most of these parents were single mothers. Most were Black, Mexican-American or recent immigrants.

The researchers were disappointed in the lack of improvement because they had read positive accounts about the federal cash subsidies given during the worst of Covid-19.

Contrary to some interpretations, it is important to point out what the study does not show:

  • There is no evidence whatsoever in this study nor in many others that Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs are worthless.
  • There is no evidence in this study that the participants were lazy or that they spent the cash foolishly.
  • There is no evidence in this study that a work requirement would improve family life.

Critics do raise reasonable questions about the study:

  • Might inflation and higher rents make its 2025 outcome less encouraging than the reported results of the earlier Covid-19 subsidies?
  • Might the sample size have been too small, or the duration of the benefits too short, or might measurement of the children look better as those children grow older?

Columnist David Brooks (N.Y. Times, 8/3/25) refers to the First Years study to conclude that “if a child’s social order is broken, federal money will not help.” To properly flourish, he continues, “all humans need to grow up in a secure container, within which they can craft their lives. The social order consists of a stable family, a safe and coherent neighborhood, a vibrant congregational and civic life, a reliable body of laws, a set of shared values that neighbors can use to build healthy communities and a conviction that there exists moral truth.”  Instead, looking at our society we “see families splinter or never form, neighborhood life decay, churches go empty, friends die of addictions, downtowns become vacant, a national elite grow socially and morally detached.”

How to combat poverty? We must refute our culture’s presumption that all problems are caused by an individual’s defect. It is equally erroneous to assume that most individuals have the capacity to improve if they simply so choose. “To understand the cause of poverty we must look beyond the poor,” writes Matthew Desmond in Poverty, By America (Penguin Random, 2023).

The most significant factor for a child to have a “secure container” is a two-parent household. It can be any configuration—two married parents, either different gender or the same gender, likewise two stable unmarried parents or foster parents or grandparents. But a simplistic conclusion about single parenthood is wrong. If, for example, everyone was to get married, poverty would not disappear. Single parenthood is not in itself “a major cause of poverty in America,” as Desmond puts it. Marriage alone does not create the orderliness that children need. Marriage is a big positive for families in the context of other securities. When the poor have real economic opportunity and other buffers, “marriage typically follows,” Desmond concludes.

The other significant factor for a child’s security and growth is parental involvement in their education, no matter in this case if that parent is single or in a stable relationship. Thus, society’s job is to allow parents the wherewithal to supervise homework and to meaningfully interact with teachers. Society withers when economic inequality with its large sector of precarious employment makes a healthy home life too difficult. Our economy and culture must thus be reformed in ways that permit parents to network with one another through school sports or student clubs, through relational congregations, through effective community organizations, through bona fide unions and the like.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

No Partisan Endorsements

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Catholic Churches Do Not Endorse Candidates by Bill Droel

Catholic churches will not take advantage of a new provision in the U.S. tax code.
Since 1894 all charitable groups that obtained a 501 (c) 3 tax letter have been excused from paying federal taxes, and usually local taxes. In 1954 there was an addition to that IRS policy. Named the Johnson Amendment after its sponsor, Senator Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973), the change specified that tax-exempt groups could not endorse partisan candidates. Critics in recent years, including President Donald Trump, have called for the elimination of the Johnson Amendment. Early this July the IRS said that churches (though not other non-profit groups) can indeed endorse candidates.
     The new provision is symbolic. Reading between the lines, it is meant to make legal what evangelicals do anyway. Evangelical pastors and congregational leaders routinely give pulpit time to candidates during local and national campaigns. Many evangelical media outlets comment on the desirability of candidates and elected officials.
Catholic churches will continue to adhere to the Johnson Amendment for reasons practical, pastoral, and theological.
     The practice of Catholic churches staying out of elections is not because “politics has no place in church.” Just the opposite. Can you think of anything more political than the ancient Roman administration executing the Creator and Redeemer of the entire universe?
     Catholic churches, newspapers, and internet media, guided by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enter politics without favoring particular candidates. Catholicism and the Constitution agree: a separation of religious institutions and government institutions is beneficial to both. The engagement between Catholicism and politics in our country occurs in the voluntary give-and-take between Catholic groups and society, and more significantly between individual Catholic citizens and our democratic processes. In practice this means that Catholic churches and Catholic officials teach morality as it pertains to issues like the environment, the sanctity of each life, or the tragedy of war. They must do so. They are not, however, by their ecclesial standing competent to instruct the laity on candidate preferences or on the intricacies of specific pieces of legislation. When priests, bishops, deacons and religious—in their official roles—wade too deeply into partisan politics, they violate Catholic ecclesiology.
     Bishops and most Catholic priests in our country are U.S. citizens. They lose no rights or duties or privileges of citizenship because of their job. For example, a priest at the ballpark among his friends can grouse all he wants about any politician, or he can praise a specific bill in the legislature. Clergy and religious should freely vote in elections. The mistake occurs when, in the church or at a parish function, a priest asserts his partisan opinion as if it were the Catholic teaching.
     When priests, bishops, deacons and religious—in their official roles—wade too deeply into partisan politics, they upend the order of Catholic sacraments. The sacrament of baptism gives a person the responsibility to practice the beatitudes, to exercise the works of mercy and to live a vocation as homemaker, neighbor, spouse, citizen or worker. A baptized person needs no further permission from the rectory or chancery to improve society. Just as the sacrament of ordination adds nothing to a person’s competency to teach mathematics, so too a priest or religious can lobby a legislator based on his or her own citizenship. One’s education and experience might yield competency in worldly affairs, but ordination in itself does not.
     When priests, bishops, deacons and religious—in their official roles—wade too deeply into partisan politics, they squander their moral standing. Yes, Catholicism has absolutes. At the same time, the wise Catholic—both Church officials and laity—knows that no one appreciates righteousness. Principled, yes. Arrogant, never.
     The spirit of the Johnson Amendment well suits Catholicism. Our democratic process, though strained nowadays, still contains avenues for influencing the common good. There is no need for clergy to take shortcuts that likely do more harm than good.

Droel is with the National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

Papal Labor Controversy

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Pope Leo XIII and Controversy in the United States  by Bill Droel

Our new Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name to pair his interest in our high-tech economy with Pope Leo XIII’s (1810-1903) interest in the industrial revolution. Today’s social questions, particularly “developments in the field of artificial intelligence pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” says Chicago-born Leo XIV.

In his 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor, Leo XIII famously endorsed labor unions as one bulwark against the harshness of industrial capitalism. To do so, however, Leo XIII had to clarify his thinking and put aside an opinion about the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor.

Founded in 1869, the Knights of Labor was a large movement in the U.S. It was quite decentralized, with many chapters throughout the country. It also counted a few chapters in Canada and Great Britian. The Knights of Labor rarely achieved labor relations contracts. More often its job actions resulted in an isolated pay raise or a safety improvement. It was better known for campaigns, including support for an eight-hour workday and prohibitions on child labor. The Knights of Labor attracted Catholics, probably most of its members. Its longtime president, Terence Powderly (1849-1924), was Catholic.

The Vatican was long suspicious of secret societies. The fear was over plots of violence, of anti-Catholic indoctrination and of dark rituals. Catholic leaders in Europe favored fraternal groups and guilds over which there was a level of Catholic influence. In 1734 Catholicism formally prohibited membership in the Masons. In subsequent years, bishops penalized Catholics known to be Masons or members in other secret societies. For a time, the Knights of Labor used secrecy to help prevent employers from firing its members. Thus, Cardinal Eleazar Taschereau (1820-1898) of Quebec explicitly condemned the Knights of Labor in 1884. Five U.S. bishops were prepared to ban the movement in this country. Leo XIII considered joining them.

Cardinal James Gibbons (1834-1921), a bishop since age 34, knew the situation of working families. “The Savior…never conferred a greater temporal boon on [people] than by ennobling and sanctifying manual labor, and by rescuing it from the stigma of degradation which had been branded upon it,” Gibbons said. Christ “is the reputed son of an artisan, and his early manhood is spent in a mechanic’s shop… Every honest labor is laudable, thanks to the example and teaching of Christ.” Gibbons was not about to allow a condemnation of the Knights of Labor to stand. He met with Powderly and negotiated changes to the Knights of Labor, including dropping The Noble Order from its name. He then fashioned an argument in favor of the union, saying “It is the right of laboring classes to protect themselves, and the duty of the whole people to find a remedy against avarice, oppression, and corruption.”

In early 1887 Gibbons went to Rome and impressed upon Leo XIII the danger of losing working families to the faith if the pope were to condemn labor unions. Gibbons was persuasive. The pope blessed labor unions. Leo XIII said that unions and government intervention can be countervailing forces against the “misery and wretchedness” that industrial capitalism tends to press “unjustly on the majority of the working class.”

Gibbons’ effort on behalf of the Knights of Labor is considered the great achievement of his leadership in the U.S. To be continued…

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), which distributes a new edition of Leo XIII’s On the Condition of Labor; $7.

The Other Pope Leo

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The Other Pope Leo by Bill Droel

Pope Leo XIV, originally of Chicago, chose his papal name to recall Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903), particularly his critique of the industrial revolution, titled On the Condition of Labor. The current Pope Leo is likewise interested in today’s social questions, including the looming effects of AI. “In our own day,” says Leo XIV, “the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The downside of the industrial revolution was increasingly evident during the 19th century. For example, there was in the early 1800s a movement among textile workers in Great Britian, called Luddites, who rebelled against specific machines that threatened their wages and the quality of their craft. Their protest sometimes included destruction of machines. Soon enough, however, factory owners and law enforcement put an end to the movement.

Social critics Karl Mark (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) advocated for a different economic system, famously in their 1848 Communist Manifesto.  Meanwhile, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) portrayed the terrible negatives of the industrial revolution in his popular novels. Pope Leo XIII added Catholicism’s voice in his May 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor.

Although Leo XIII is credited as the pioneer of modern Catholic social thought, he was not the first. For example, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811-1877) of Mainz was an outstanding social, political and spiritual leader of the 19th century. In highlighting concepts like the common good, like employees as stakeholders and like solidarity, he laid the groundwork for a mature Catholic reflection on modernity.

The same year as the Communist Manifesto (1848) von Ketteler gave his analysis in six Advent sermons on poverty and inequality. These were refined in an 1864 book, The Laborer Question and Christianity.

Von Ketteler, member of an aristocratic family, opposed materialistic communism but was deeply troubled by the harsh effects of industrial capitalism. Von Ketteler thought some state regulation plus action by labor and charitable groups could temper extreme capitalism. Thus, von Ketteler advocated for the end of child labor, for limiting hours in a factory, for Sunday as a true day of rest, for disability insurance and temporary unemployment insurance, for state health and safety inspectors and for more cooperative enterprises. The key to a better capitalism was to break the belief that an individual is “the absolute master of things that he [or she] owns,” he preached.

Catholicism says private property is a right. But drawing upon St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), von Ketteler explained that only God has “full and genuine property rights… When making use of his [or her] property a person has the duty to bow to the God-given order of things.” It “is a perpetual sin against nature [to hold] the false doctrine that property confers strict rights.” Catholicism “protects property,” von Ketteler said, “but wealth must be distributed…for the sake of the general welfare.”

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892), the second Catholic archbishop of Westminster, was long interested in family life, education, church-state relations, the working class and more. He was ordained as an Anglican in 1833 and later that year married Caroline Sargent (1812-1837). He was only 27-years old when she died. Manning became disillusioned with the Anglican Church in part because it was oblivious to the working poor. In 1850 Manning was received as a Roman Catholic.

Marx and Engels published their Manifesto in 1848. Von Kettler gave his Advent sermons in 1848. And in 1848 Manning added his objections to the industrial economy. He said that Christians need to be with the “poor of Christ, the multitude which have been this long time with us and now faint by the way…in mines and factories.” Manning, like von Ketteler, anticipated Leo XIII.

Manning was sympathetic to the situation among dockworkers. He mediated during the famous 1889 strike at the Port of London, stating that the employers’ refusal to negotiate was not a private matter but a “public evil.” Union members considered the outcome of their job action a grand victory, which in turn gave momentum to the British labor movement and particularly to organizing lower-wage workers. Manning’s impact on the Catholic social conscience was not limited to the union members. Many Catholics in the middle-class and upper-class of that time became attentive to urban/industrial poverty because of Manning.

Von Ketteler and Manning were spiritual ghostwriters for Leo XIII’s On the Condition of Labor. They and others may provide the same service to Leo XIV when, I predict, he soon issues a major document about the condition of post-industrial workers.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes a new edition of On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII; $8 includes postage.

Two Labor Days

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The Working Catholic: Labor Day History by Bill Droel

The original Labor Day parade was held in 1882, in New York City. It was sponsored by the Knights of Labor. Its organizers were two Catholics. Though not related, they shared the same last name. Matthew McGuire (1855-1917) was a machinist from New Jersey; Peter McGuire (1852-1906), working in Chicago at the time, was a carpenter. In 1894 Labor Day became a national holiday and was set on the first Monday of September.
St. Joseph, also a carpenter, is associated with Labor Day in round-about fashion. The saga begins here in Chicago where on May 1, 1886 a federation of labor unions began a campaign for an eight-hour workday. A subsequent rally in our now trendy Haymarket area turned violent when someone threw a stick of dynamite. Police then fired wildly into the crowd. Four workers and seven police died. Seven workers were sentenced, four of whom were hanged in November 1886.
In July 1889 communist leaders in several European countries designated May 1st as Labor Day to honor the Chicago Haymarket workers. (Illinois Labor History Society; www.illinoislaborhistory.org)
In 1956, to offset the communist influence on Europe’s Labor Day Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) established May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Some U.S. bishops immediately asked to observe the new St. Joseph feast on the first Monday of September in our country only. Permission was granted, but nonetheless instead of the September date the May 1st date for St. Joseph took hold in the U.S.
Ed Marciniak (1917-2004), a Chicago labor activist, saw in the two dates a significant difference in worldviews. People in the U.S. “have never developed a strong class consciousness,” as did those in communist-influenced Europe, he wrote. Working families in Europe drifted away from Catholicism because Church officials there and in Latin America got too much “in league with the wealthy against the poor.” By contrast, U.S. Catholicism “has never had…a hostile working class.” (Since 1968 many Catholics in our country have left the church behind. They walked away out of indifference or lately in disgust, but not out of economic or political hostility.)
An economic system predicated on “class struggle…will be inadequate and distorted,” Marciniak concludes. So maybe having two dates in our country (May 1st and first Monday in September) contains a hidden blessing. (Learn more about Marciniak in Ed Marcinaik’s City and Church, National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $20).

Why Have a Union?

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Why Unions at Good Companies?
The Working Catholic by Bill Droel

“Why did the new, worker friendly workplaces prove unable to keep their employees happy enough not to have to pay union dues?” So asks a Chicago Tribune editorial (4/10/24). The editors have in mind Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, the camping equipment retailer REI plus several museums and theatres here in Chicago and elsewhere. After all, Trader Joe’s has a 7% annual pay increase, a 401K, a health insurance option, employee discount on groceries and more, the Tribune informs us.
Many executives and managers plus the Tribune editors have a mistaken premise. Employees who desire a union are not entirely motivated by discontent, particularly regarding their wage. The desire for participation is an increasingly important factor in union activity among nurses, tech engineers, hotel staff, autoworkers and more. These employees organize in part to keep their good company good.
Then too perhaps the Tribune and others are mistaken that these companies really are progressive. The companies in question undermine their image once the word union enters their domain. The noble employers quickly reveal another side. They retaliate. They threaten to close a store or an entire plant. They harass outspoken employees. They make side-deals with passive employees. They begin legal action against employees who promote their cause with t-shirts and tote bags that display the company name or logo. Such employers conclusively reveal their true character when they retain a union-busting firm. They continue their hostility by avoiding conversations and negotiations with employees.
Paternalism is not respectful. Grand mission statements are hollow without genuine involvement of all the workers.
Catholic labor relations doctrine can help. It states that a decision for or against a union belongs to the employees without paternal or maternal interference from their employer. Every honest company, no matter the circumstances, should share information with its workers through regular conversations, attractive pamphlets and newsletters plus supplying understandable summaries of the data given to investors. But a union vote is to be without harassment.
Catholic doctrine does not say that any one or another company must have a union. Nor does Catholic doctrine endorse this union for this company. Again, the choice belongs to the employees.
Catholic doctrine does say that a healthy society has the collective participation of workers in some form. Democratic unions are a normal way to secure participation.
Catholic doctrine instructs employers and employees to behave ethically. Retaining a union-busting firm violates Catholic doctrine and is objectively sinful. Instead, employers are advised to seek reputable assistance in their labor relations. Those employers who bargain tough are well within bounds.
For more on this topic, obtain St. John Paul II’s Gospel of Work (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $8)

Reform Capitalism

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The Working Catholic: Social Doctrine Part 16 by Bill Droel

It was news when this past April employees at a Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, TN voted overwhelmingly to join United Auto Workers (www.uawregion8.net). The vote is noteworthy because the South is generally not receptive to unions. It is not only noteworthy in the present. We may “someday look back at the Chattanooga vote as a milestone on the road back to the more or less middle-class society” in the U.S., writes Paul Krugman in NY Times (4/26/24).
The vote’s back story is also intriguing. It has the potential to advance Catholic social thought in our country, specifically the Catholic principle of economic participation and its extension, the industry council plan. In older Catholic textbooks this is called solidarism. In Germany it is co-determinism or works council. In France it is enterprise committees; in Belgium it’s delegates for personnel; and it is joint consultative committee in England.
In his 1937 encyclical, Of a Divine Redeemer, Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) wrote about the industrial council plan. Several Catholics in the U.S. promoted the idea during and after World War II. Its basics are explained in Ed Marciniak’s City and Church by Chuck Shanabruch (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $20). A council meets regularly to discuss industry products and planning. Membership includes executives, employees, middle-managers, government officials, and maybe consumers. Some topics can be off-limits, like wages. The plan does not supersede a union. In fact, its intention is to focus collective bargaining. The plan does not encourage collusion among competitor companies, including price fixing. In fact, the plan’s goal of cooperation enhances production within democratic competition. The industry council solicits and implements ideas from all the participants in a company or an industry. Its outcome lessens the need for government meddling.
As the industry council plan spreads, Marciniak said, neo-liberal industrialism or post-industrialism will be tempered. “Society has lost its organic character,” Marciniak wrote in 1954. Society “is gradually being torn apart by class and racial conflict.” The industry council plan, he emphasized, “is not benevolent paternalism, but rather a real partnership in which working [people] will become co-responsible with management in solving the economic problems of industry.”
Please note: The industry council plan does not hang on the cloths line by itself. It is one contribution to multiple reforms that take shape gradually. Second, the plan is not of, by and for Catholics. There is no need to ever invoke Pius XI or Marciniak. The council’s meetings do not require an opening prayer.
Back to Tennessee. VW, headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, participates in a works council. VW wanted to implement that model in its Chattanooga plant. However, U.S. labor law seems to require a union before there can be a works council. In 2011 some workers in Chattanooga began a union drive at VW. They lost a vote in February 2014. Reasons for the defeat included the oddity that VW’s Tennessee employees at that time were paid a few cents more than Northern workers represented by UAW. Additionally, some VW employees in Chattanooga lacked confidence in the UAW executives up in Detroit. Along came Shawn Fain, who in March 2023 won a reform campaign to be UAW president. He then led a rolling strike simultaneously at GM, Ford and Stellantis. By October 2023 a framework for a favorable contract was in place.
The success of the UAW’s strike in 2023 and more specifically its 2024 success in Tennessee raise the possibility of a works council in the U.S. Stay tuned.
Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a printed newsletter on faith and work.

Big Tech

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The Working Catholic: Big Tech by Bill Droel

The popular use of a term sometimes differs from its original use. Such is the case with Luddite, which now usually refers to someone who fiercely opposes most technology. Blood in the Machine by Brain Merchant (Little Brown, 2023) takes us back to the term’s origin: the Luddite Movement in England from 1811 to 1816.
Textile workers were opposed to certain types of automated machines, not wholesale opposition to all technology. They also believed that employers deceived them about manufacturing changes. The workers damaged some factory machines, but eventually lost their battle when military force was used against them.
In our day, some tech companies warrant resistance over their treatment of employees and consumers. Those companies include the social media–Meta (Facebook), Tik Tok, and X (Twitter) and others. Plus, the big tech retail giant Amazon and probably the app-based delivery/rider companies.
The harmful side effects of these companies derive from their operating philosophy, as summarized by Adrienne LaFrance in “The Despots of Silicon Valley” for The Atlantic (3/24). The authoritarian titans of tech are dangerous, she writes. They believe “that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept…[and that] the power [of tech experts] should be unconstrained.”
LaFrance continues: The tech giants “promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly.”
Our Congress is concerned about the side effects of big tech. Both House and Senate routinely summon one or another tech executive to address those concerns. Those hearings are perhaps a modest start. Collective and individual action on the part of the public is urgently needed. A few groups are on the case. For example, Collective Action in Tech (www.collectiveaction.tech/unions) maintains a list of organizing efforts among employees in the big tech sector. Mothers Unite to Stall Technology (www.mothersunite4kids.org) advises parents on the harmful effects of mobile devices and more. (Ironically, these citizen efforts rely on tech platforms to spread their ideas and this column appears on a website.)
Citizens should keep basic principles in mind. First, as Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) warns us, all technology individuates. Contrary to the propaganda of the social media platforms, communication through mobile devices puts users further apart. One’s so-called friends on Facebook are likely not genuine friends unless honest and vulnerable face-to-face contact also occurs. Second, as Marshall McLuhan preaches, “the medium is the message.” That is, the content is less relevant than the hardware (the device itself, the satellite and the earthbound transmitters and cables). Merely having a TV in one’s home changes the household environment, no matter the content of one or another TV show. A mobile device in one’s pocket changes one’s outlook, no matter who is texting whom.
These principles and others should, by the way, cause reflection on the part of church leaders—particularly those in liturgical denominations. For example, a camera inside a church in itself makes the worship a little bit more entertainment and a little less participatory liturgy. Say it this way: There is no such thing as reality TV or reality streaming. The image from a camera signal sent up to a satellite and back down to a TV, a computer or a mobile device is not reality. It is a projection, and it necessarily individuates. Be honest: Do you drink coffee or surf channels while watching TV Mass?
Droel is the author of Public Friendship (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $6)