Catholic Identity Invoked to Evade Worker Justice
Three Catholic institutions have made the news recently for their mistreatment of workers.
- St Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady NY doesn’t want to pay the pension benefits it owes to retired nurses.
- Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin doesn’t want to pay Unemployment Insurance taxes for its workers.
- Marquette University does not want to bargain with a union organized by their contingent faculty.
What else do they have in common? All three are abusing their religious identity to get away with it – using their First Amendment religious freedom rights as a shield to violate the rights of workers with impunity.
The nurses and other employees at St. Clare’s were expecting a substantial pension benefit in their retirement. In most private sector jobs, your pension is safe because the federal ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) law requires employers to set aside enough money in a trust to cover future benefits. Religious institutions – including hospitals – have opted out, citing their religious freedom. It appears that the administrators at St Clare’s (and other religious hospitals) never set aside those funds and left retirees holding an empty bag. Check out Church Pensions Sidestep Oversight in the Wall Street Journal for details.
Meanwhile, if the Diocese of Superior gets its way, its Catholic Charities will no longer pay into the Wisconsin state UI system and any future workers laid off will be denied state unemployment benefits. The Diocese is saying that because of the First Amendment, they are not required to participate in Unemployment Insurance and want to opt out. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court balked on this claim but the Diocese is taking its demand to the US Supreme Court.
Finally, Marquette University is refusing to bargain with a union formed by its contingent faculty. They say that as a religious institution they are not required to honor the National Labor Relations Act and that they refuse to bargain collectively with their faculty. They are not the only Catholic college to take this stand.
The First Amendment’s religious freedom protections are a precious gift, allowing Catholics and all Americans to observe the dictates of their conscience – but no well-formed conscience is telling administrators at these institutions that they ought to deny employees their promised pensions, refrain from participating in Unemployment Insurance, or to bust unions. Invoking your religious freedom rights to evade basic requirements of worker justice is cynical and likely to scandalize the faithful. How can we ask Catholic business leaders to recognize workers’ right to organize when Catholic colleges won’t? How can we expect them to honor their promises to retirees when Church institutions don’t? How can the Church advocate for the unemployed while seeking to evade its own obligations towards them?
it is a shame that catholic institutions are using their religious affiliation to cheat their workers
Shame on you! What would Jesus do?
You are acting like trumps administration.
Are there organized campaigns among the employees of these institutions which we can support?
The Marquette faculty have organized with CWA. Messages to Marquette urging the administration to bargain with the union are welcome. The Catholic Labor Network has written a letter to the university President to this effect.
It doesn’t matter what the civil law forces a Catholic institution to do. What matter is what the magisterium of our Chirch teaches, and to conform our Catholic institutions to be a light in the darkness of our world on living out that teaching.
Paying into unemployment insurance, establishing pensions for workers, and honoring the right to join worker associations to participate in collective bargaining are part of our magisterium, and that is why these Catholic institutions should do these things. It has nothing to do with the free exercise of religion.