Church maintains that labor movement can help everyone

The following article appeared in The Sentinel, the offical newspaper of the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon:

Church maintains that labor movement can help everyone
By Fr. Robert Krueger

A housekeeper cleans her first of 15 rooms for the day at the Portland Hilton.Sentinel photo by Ed Langlois

For Ana Judith Pérez, a single mother concerned with the future of her four children, making ends meet is a challenge, despite having a stable full-time job in Oregon.

Born in Nicaragua, and with experience living in Guatemala before traveling to the United States in search of a better tomorrow, this 42-year-old mother clearly knows that in this country she can work and move her family forward. But she knows it is not easy and she has to endure long workdays to be able to put food on the table.She emigrated in 1993 because all of her family was already in this country. All that time, she has worked in hotel housekeeping, currently at the Portland Hilton.Pérez moved her way up to become an office clerk and likes her work and her employer.

She earns about $850 per month.

The hotel cleaning team is made up of 80 room attendants, out of which only eight are Hispanic, from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala. The rest are immigrants from the Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam and China. Each worker was once required to care for 16 rooms in 8 hours, a tiring load. Because of the need to do work quickly, many suffered accidents, like falls or cuts.

Then Ana and others decided to join a union which formed in 2005. Unite Here! represents workers from the Expo Center, Convention Center and Performing Arts Center, in addition to employees of hotels like the Hilton, with close to 1,000 members in all.

Pérez says belonging to the union made everyone’s working conditions better. Now, the work load has been reduced to 15 rooms per worker in an eight-hour shift.

For her salary and job security, she thanks the union — and is glad the hotel management agreed.

Pérez calls immigrant workers an invisible force, keeping everything in order, night and day.
“What would they do without us?” she asks herself.

She now knows too well the issues workers face in the U.S. It is different from what she imagined, but still full of potential.

After graduating from college last year, 23-year-old Charlie Ashton moved to Portland, ready to see where life would take her.

“I love the city and I really wanted to come and work here,” Ashton says.With a bachelor’s degree in psychology, anthropology and sociology from Eastern Oregon University in LaGrande, she found a full-time job as a residential skills specialist at Rosemont School in North Portland. That’s a facility run by Portland Public Schools which provides education and housing for troubled teen girls. It’s housed in a former convent and girls’ school in North Portland.
Ashton and other Rosemont employees work for Morrison Child and Family Services, which hires employees to fill non-instructional positions.

For her, work is not about the money. Despite the stress and rigors, Ashton finds her job rewarding because she knows she is affecting lives in a positive way.

But she and others in her position make about $11 per hour. That means they sometimes face difficulties balancing their monthly budgets. It also means that, despite holding down full-time work, they cannot yet move into the middle class dream of stable home ownership and enough money for family or college.

Ashton gets by, sharing a two-bedroom income-restricted apartment. She’s not interested in spending much money on clothes, nightlife and technology. Her biggest splurge is a monthly gym membership. Her only debt is when she needs to make an emergency credit card payment.
“I’m not in the mindset of making more money as long as I make enough not to have debt,” Ashton said. “If I know I can’t afford something, I just tell myself I won’t do it.”

However, Ashton, with the help of the SEIU 503 union group, has worked to make life on the job better for her and other employees. Since the union organized last fall and took effect in July, employees at Rosemont will be able to use more work hours to take job-related continuing education classes, rather than compromising work hours. Safety and staffing level standards will be maintained so that employees are protected in case of physical injury and shifts are not short of workers.

From their stories, it is clear that struggle is the lot of many full-time workers in our country. They struggle to provide basic necessities of life and health for themselves and their families, sometimes working an extra job, and, often lacking health insurance, find themselves limited to hospital emergency rooms for health care. Some have been paid less than the agreed-upon wage or even paid less than required by law for number of hours they have worked. They struggle to cope with conflicting demands, about which they have no say, to provide a high-quality product or service while burdened with an excessive workload, restrictive procedures or inadequate training. Sometimes they are forced to work in conditions that endanger their health or risk the well-being of the people they serve.

In order to strengthen their ability to achieve justice in the workplace, many workers seek to organize a union. They realize that unless they are organized they face a large power imbalance in favor of the employer in any effort to negotiate for their needs. Yet very large numbers find this goal unachievable. The right of workers to organize is established in U.S. law, but that law has been so weakened over past decades that it is now difficult for workers to succeed when employers resist (which about 90 percent of employers do).

Margaret Butler, director of Portland Jobs with Justice, says injustice in compensation and working conditions and lack of negotiating power are the experience of many American workers. Portland Jobs with Justice is a coalition of 85 labor unions and community groups that act in solidarity with workers in efforts to obtain their rights.

Butler tells the story of how one employer changed worker sentiment from 80 percent for union to 20 percent, through a campaign she calls intimidation.

“The power remains with the employers,” she says.

Butler also said that U.S. workers work more hours, have less vacation and other time off than workers in the rest of the developed world. However, U.S. workers benefit little from the high productivity of the workforce. Growth in profits is transferred mostly to the wealth of the highest on the income scale. She also is critical of global capitalism’s placing American workers in competition with the lowest paid workers in the world in a global race to the bottom.
“Workers give a third of their life to their work—this demands that justice be done there, in our workplaces,” she said.

When workers attempt to organize and bargain collectively with their employer for just wages, benefits and working conditions, they exercise their unequivocal moral right rooted in a long Judeo-Christian tradition of justice. That tradition extends back to the medieval guilds, to Jesus in the New Testament, even as far back as the Hebrew prophets and the covenant of Moses. The tradition has been articulated in modern times in papal encyclicals and other church documents, beginning in 1891 with the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII. This consistent and strong Catholic moral teaching is rooted in the human dignity of the workers. Through their work, people are understood to fulfill their humanity. They exercise their creativity and self-expression, provide for their own and their families’ secure livelihood, participate in decisions toward fashioning a quality product or delivering a quality service and contribute to the common good of society. In so acting they are co-creators with God of their world. They have a fundamental right to the comparable power in the workplace that can ensure the attainment of these goals. They have a right to organize for that power.

It is also Catholic teaching that their choice of the union that will represent them is their own and in no way their employer’s. Furthermore, in Catholic theology there is a hierarchy of law; divine law and the moral law that flows from it supersedes civil law. Therefore, U.S. labor law must not be used to inhibit or frustrate workers’ attempts to obtain their rights based in moral law as is frequently attempted by employers resisting an organizing effort.

How important is the support of the community to the success of workers’ struggle for their rights? Butler says, “It is vital. In many cases it has been the pressure of the public support of the outside community for workers in organizing efforts and contract negotiations that has tipped the balance in the workers’ favor. There is a further benefit to the community when its workers are organized and well compensated; workers’ lives are more stable, they are more able to participate in community life. The economy and tax base are stronger and so are education and other services.”

Catholic social justice tradition has not been doctrine alone, but has also included action for worker justice. At the high point of the labor movement in the last century, clergy and lay people alike were actively involved. Worker justice was preached in the pulpits. Parish halls were places where workers gathered to learn the skills of organizing and negotiating. Catholics were prominent among union organizers. Laity and clergy joined workers at rallies and stood with them in strikes. Catholic high school students studied papal encyclicals on the rights of workers in their social studies classes.

Catholics understand that they are called by, and required to act according to the moral law and to support justice in their community. There is no reason to exclude justice for workers from this moral focus.

Recently, Archbishop John Vlazny made a strong contribution to our community’s awareness of responsibility in the matter of worker justice. He approved a unanimous recommendation of the Archdiocesan Presbyteral Council — “That the document, ‘A Fair and Just Workplace: Principles and Practices for Catholic Health Care,’ be used as an archdiocesan response to labor organizing initiatives in the archdiocese.” The document was developed by a committee of the U.S. bishops.

He further suggested in a letter to priests, deacons, and pastoral ministers that this action “provides all of us an excellent opportunity for education among our parishioners about the importance and content of the long tradition in Catholic Social Teaching in support of worker justice as well as some of the obstacles that workers face in exercising their rights.”

Msgr. Charles Lienert, pastor of St. Andrew Church in Portland and an advocate for workers’ rights, suggests what people and parishes might do to support workers in their struggle for justice.

“Follow the recommendation of Archbishop Vlazny to study the document, ‘A Fair and Just Workplace’ (available on the USCCB website),” Msgr. Lienert suggests. “Its discussion of Catholic social teaching and workers issues is comprehensive. Speak about worker justice from the pulpit and make it a subject of the community’s prayer. Build a culture of being knowledgeable about and friendly toward workers and their needs. When appropriate, become active in support of workers in organizing efforts and contract negotiations by attending rallies, writing letters, making phone calls and being worker advocates in conversation with others. Pay attention to legislative activity at the state and federal level that involves workers’ concerns and when needed contact Legislators.

“An important issue that will need our support both in Congress and the state legislature in the near future will be the Employee Free Choice Act, which holds out the hope of restoring balance of power in labor organizing,” he adds.

People or parishes seeking resources about any of this are welcome to contact the Archdiocesan Office of Justice and Peace and the Faith Labor Committee of Portland Jobs with Justice.
Focus on the struggle of workers for their rights might give the impression that labor relations are expected to be adversarial. In reality the Catholic vision of labor relations involves mutual respect among all parties. The ideal is that labor and management work in partnership to plan for and develop quality goods and services. In this vision it is recognized that workers, who with their skill, are the efficient subjects in the process and not mere instruments of production as Pope John Paul insisted.

As subjects, they have much to contribute as partners in the effort. Speaking to such a partnership, Alice Dale, executive director of Service Employees International Union, Local 49, outlined SEIU’s evolving approach to alliances for quality care with hospitals where workers are represented by SEIU.

She said, “The approach is based on our overlapping mission and shared values and goals—offering the highest quality care, improving funding, solving the problem of the uninsured, wanting a well staffed, highly trained, invested and ‘mission driven’ workforce.”

When a true partnership exists between labor and management all involved experience satisfaction, a superior result is achieved, the common good is served, and workers’ organizations are recognized to be a valuable resource.