Catholics and Unions

The following column appeared in the Washington Post featured column Catholic America:

Catholics and Unions

When I was growing up, it was almost part of the catechism that Catholics backed labor unions. We were taught that papal encyclicals on social and economic justice put us on the side of legitimate demands from workers. That centuries-old support received new clarity in June of 2009 when Catholic health workers and the U.S. Bishops delivered "Respecting the Just Rights of Workers."

In the spirit of the papal social encyclicals, this new document puts the American Church in support of union rights for the 21st century, which logically includes teachers in Catholic schools. The release of the bishops' document follows on the heels of the unionization of Catholic workers in Boston where employees of Caritas Christi joined the SEIU en masse. Now that the federal government is controlled by Democrats in the White House and in both houses of the Congress, it is fair to ask what unionization means to Catholic America.

The withering of Catholic support for unions became significant during the 1970s when the erosion of religious vocations ripped away a major part of the labor force in Catholic schools and in Catholic hospitals. Lay workers were hired to take their places. Secular salaries drove up the cost for Catholic schools and hospitals, forcing significant numbers of institutions into insolvency. In defense of their interests to adequate pay and benefits, many lay workers within church-run institutions demanded labor unions. But these increased demands for unionization came at a political moment dominated by union-busting presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.The political climate conditioned the response from individual bishops. Among those who resisted unionization, the policies went from NIMBY ("not in my back yard") to downright hostility in declaring that unionization would "mean the end of Catholic education in the diocese."

Now the underpinning of that anti-union stance has been blown away. Cardinal McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington and a leading player in the writing of the bishops' new document, said: "Because Catholic health care is a ministry, not an industry, how it treats its workers and how organized labor treats Catholic health care are not simply internal matters. They are also not just another arena for labor conflict and tactics, but ought to reflect longstanding Catholic teaching on work and workers, health care and the common good."

In other words, the church's relationship to its employees is not calculated merely as a bottom-line entry in a ledger, but part of the Church's mission to make God's Kingdom come.

Viewing union support through that pastoral and Catholic meaning makes it hugely different from the sort of blind ideological pandering that might be generated by a political machine. The Church supports good unions, not just any union. At the core of the consistent papal teaching is the end to destructive enmity between workers and owners.

In this new document, Catholic hospitals bind themselves to respond to a higher authority and become a model for all employers while simultaneously affording workers participation in management decisions. Greater power to management participation by unions is also at the heart of the restructuring of the American auto industry, wherein unions hold significant shares of ownership at Chrysler and General Motors. This trend is in accord with papal teaching.

What needs to be added here is how closely the bishops' document adheres to the provisions in the still-to-be-passed bill for worker's free choice of a union. Even without being forced to do so by legislation, the bishops have adopted a measure that puts them squarely in the pro-union column when it comes to hospitals and health care. The forthcoming encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI is reported to reiterate these premises, updating the church's stance on issues that have arisen with globalization. Moreover, it is likely to be a topic in the pope's meeting with President Obama in Rome on July 10th.

After many years as a scholar of Catholicism, I have come to realize that we Catholics often contradict our image as a monolithic religion and often are pulled in opposite directions by competing statements from pope, bishops and clergy. At least now we know that the pro-union direction is the Catholic choice, not NIMBY.