The Working Catholic: Union Reform by Bill Droel

Subsidiarity is a Catholic social principle that celebrates the multiplicity of small institutions that buffer a person from the mega-forces of big business and big government; institutions like the family, the parish, an ethnic club or the precinct. Brian Dijkema, writing in National Affairs (Winter/18), correctly and refreshingly includes labor unions among those mediating institutions that help families navigate in our wider society and global economy. I say “refreshingly” because in recent times several social policy thinkers who acknowledge the crucial role of civil society are cool toward unions. They are pro-family, pro-church and pro-soccer league, but they don’t want the countervailing efforts of unions.

Dijkema, who is with Cardus (www.cardus.ca), a Christian think tank in Hamilton, is aware that the “social institutions that define a rich human life” are in decline, leaving us with a more-or-less random collection of “atomized individuals.”  Dijkema thus offers general suggestions for the renewal of local institutions, which in this essay he applies to unions.  

Organized labor should embrace the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and its companion, the principle of solidarity. Dijkema does not mean that union leaders should be Catholics. He means that Catholic tradition (and other religious traditions) has resources that can help unions attract and retain a younger generation. Dijkema seems to assume that today’s churches are carriers of these social resources—an assumption those of us involved with parish life question at times. In any case, he is correct that unions and churches can be mutually beneficial. If that is, they approach each other with clarity; not merely in a utilitarian way to get more people at a union rally or to sell more tables at a church banquet.

 

Dijkema details a contrast between the dominant approach of unions today and an approach that uses solidarity and subsidiarity. In the dominant approach, unions pour money into electoral campaigns. Instead they need to use money and energy “to recapture the imagination of local communities.” In the dominant approach union leaders think power comes through elected officials whereas power can emerge from deliberate encounters between and among grass-roots leaders. Unions, Dijkema says, turn too eagerly to government entities to set wages (a national minimum wage or a local living wage) instead of fighting for a union’s proper function of collective bargaining. Many of today’s unions, Dijkema charges, want “a big play” in the arena of government and/or corporate partnership, a win that will give the union new life. But short cuts don’t last. Unions, like churches, cannot grow “without the requisite work of building the many small, social relationships that act as the strongest binding agents for voluntary associations.” That requisite work means hundreds of one-to-one conversations among a mix of like-minded people, precisely the dynamic of subsidiarity and solidarity.

Dijkema makes some worthwhile suggestions. For example, he thinks unions would benefit from articulating a philosophy or theology of work. Such a project would also, I would add, benefit churches as they seek to attract and retain young families.

However, Dijkema’s either-or tone detracts from his message. Why should a union choose between a national campaign on wages and proposals to “address the challenges faced by young families”? Why, as Dijkema implies, is every campaign that involves government a distraction? If unions and other fair-minded groups do not oppose the misnamed right to work laws, for example, there will only be fewer intermediate groups and more atomized individuals. What if unions did not participate in Fight for $15 campaigns? What mechanism would there then be for teaching young adults about immigration, labor history and more? 

Dijkema concludes with a quotation from Pope Benedict XVI (aka Joseph Ratzinger) on a pure remnant church. Dijkema then proposes “a smaller, simpler and less socially prominent labor movement.” Whatever Benedict XVI’s context, sectarian Catholicism is a contradiction in terms. Advocating for a small church is Catholic heresy. A baptized Catholic, for example, cannot casually become non-Catholic. The entrance doors are wide open, especially during Lent. Given the state of unions in the U.S., it is hard to understand how a smaller labor movement would in any way make for a richer society.

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

FROM SLAVERY TO SWEATSHOPS

 William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament, headed the movement to end slavery in the British Empire.  He succeeded.   Slave trade was abolished in 1810 and slaves in the empire were emancipated in 1833.

Wilberforce was an excellent orator and a Methodist man of faith. He used the Bible to elicit compassion and justice for those enslaved. The world still suffers the legacy of the evil from slavery; slavery defines the United States.  Rascism is so common that it is hardly recognized, but William Wilberforce is considered an icon in the struggle for human equality.

The movie, The Long Shadow, produced and narrated by Frances Causey, suggests that the Abolition Movement in England was a reason for the American colonies breaking away from the British Empire.  In 1772, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, publicly opposed slavery as well as Adam Smith – father of free trade capitalism.  Faith groups such as the Quakers, Unitarians and the Moravians opposed slavery as well.  Former slaver and friend of William Wilberforce, Capton John Newton, was against slavery from his experience of the horror on his ships and his subsequent conversion.  Newton became an Anglican priest and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. 

The fear of losing slavery, which was the basis of the colonial economy and source of wealth for the ambitious revolutionaries, was an incentive for military action to separate from the British Empire.

 

I was surprised when I asked a woman from Kenya who was educated in the United Kingdom what she thought of Wilberforce.  She commented, “Oh, he was just another colonialist.”  She had a point.  Wilberforce was instrumental in setting up a colony in Sierra Leone, and insisted that missionaries be allowed in India to preach the Christian Gospel.  His efforts in Haiti undermined England’s colonial rival France.    

The Christian Gospel of Wilberforce’s understanding lacked the broad vision of analysis that ferrets out causes.  The move from mercantilism to free trade capitalism was not the answer for poverty stricken workers, black and white, who had no voice in changing the colonial system.

In the 1960’s the Black Panthers considered African Americans as an internal colony of the U.S.  Donald Trump and the Republicans with their policy of re-segregation are re-establishing that internal colony.

The 1886 Haymarket hero Samuel Fielden explained in his autobiography which he wrote from Chicago’s Cook County Jail that as a young worker in England he sympathized with U.S. slaves.  He emigrated to the U.S. and visited the southern U.S. after the civil war and the emancipation. He saw the situation of black workers as being no better than the lives of slaves.  “…the Negro was held in as absolute bondage as he was before the war.”

Our current situation of racism, income inequality, world poverty and violation of the earth’s resources demonstrates that Wilberforce, immersed in Evangelism and the culture of the British Empire, provided only a beginning in seeking justice for the modern industrial world.  The collapse of the industrial world that we now experience and the ‘end of work’ requires Amazing Grace for new creativity to save the planet and achieve justice for all.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amazing Grace, William Wilberforce and the heroic campaign to end slavery, Eric Metaxas.

The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, ed. Phillip S. Foner.

Black against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.

The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin.

Movie: The Long Shadow, Frances Causey, film maker and investigative reporter