Hands - a gift of the Creator for creation.
"It is interesting to see how much like human hands the wings of the angels are." [Matthew Fox, regarding a painting by Hildegard of Bingen, "All Beings Celebrate Creation" in Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, p. 77.]
The photo shows the hands of new parents, Bill and Joanne Lange, and their baby daughter. Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1973.
n recent times employees for some
well-known companies have voted for a union at their store or warehouse. These
apparent employee victories do not, however, signal improved labor relations in
our country.
It is difficult for
employees to achieve a pro-union vote. The parent company retains union-busting
lawyers and consultants who, in round one, teach executives and branch managers
how to disrupt an organizing effort by making side promises to a few quiet
workers, discrediting the leaders, telling the public that costs will increase
and more.
In round two (after a
pro-union vote) the local manager might continue to intimidate employees with
threats of layoffs and decreased benefits. Meanwhile the company challenges the
vote. When the company loses its challenge, it proceeds to appeal the decision.
More months go by.
In round three the paid negotiators
for the company move “with spectacular slowness,” reports Steven Greenhouse for
The New Republic (2/24). They pick an
out-of-state meeting place. They ridicule the thoughts of the unpaid employee
team. They take long lunches and often break-off negotiations for weeks or
months at a time. The goal is to wear
down the employee team and to discourage their fellow workers.
It was December 2021 when
baristas at a Starbucks in Buffalo voted for the first-ever union at that
company, Starbucks Workers United (2495 Main St. #556, Buffalo, NY 14214; www.sbworkersunited.org). There is no
contract as yet in Buffalo. About 30% of newly formed unions have no contract
even after three years, Greenhouse details.
Why does Starbucks invest
in expensive union-busting lawyers and consultants over one, small outlet near
Lake Erie? “Because reaching a good contract will obviously provide enormous
incentives for workers in their nonunion stores to organize,” Greenhouse
explains. Yet knowing of the delays in Buffalo, baristas in 385 Starbucks shops
around the country have recently voted for a union. By the way, Starbucks can
afford its lawyers. Its cash registers ring up more than $30billion per year.
Profit is up less than Starbucks would like—an increase of about only
$2.6billion per annum. Starbucks says its
slow profit performance is due to the raises it gives employees. (Those raises
can be interpreted as another tactic to stare off unions.)
Howard Schultz served as CEO of Starbucks for
14 years, retiring in 2000. He came back for nine more years at the helm. After
a second retirement, he came back once again for two more years, leaving the
position in April 2023. Schultz has a net worth of about $5billion. He owns
about 2% of Starbucks.
Schultz is a prominent neoliberal. He is big
on individual free choice, though free choice doesn’t seem to include choosing
a union. "I was convinced
that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen
to their concerns. If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn't need a
union," Schultz says.
Among its presumptions, the neoliberal
“ideology holds that both parties to an employment contract hold equal power
and can easily walk away,” writes Anthony Annett for Commonweal (1/24). The presumption assumes that “if a worker feels
mistreated, she can always quit and find another job.”
Catholicism values freedom, but “the notion
that employers and employees enjoy equal power” is nonsense, Annett writes. He
provides references. For example, Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) explains the
principle of a just wage and notes that if through necessity or fear of a worse
evil, an employee accepts harder conditions because an employer or contractor
will give no better, the worker is a victim of force and injustice. (On the Condition of Workers #34, 1891)
Our
2024 Catholic Compendium of the Social
Doctrine puts it thus: “The simple agreement between employee and employer
with regard to the amount of pay to be received is not sufficient for the
agreed upon salary to qualify as a just wage.” In Annett’s words, “Mutual consent
alone does not guarantee a fair contract.”
What can be done to make organizing and
negotiating at Starbucks and other places efficient and just? Some suggest that
the technicality of organizing store-by-store give way to a company-wide vote
on a union. Catholicism proposes the industry
council plan (what in Germany is called co-determinism)
in which a quasi-legal body of representatives of executives, employees,
consumers and government set some sector-wide standards. Another idea is currently
banging around our Congress. The PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize), among
its reforms, might include a penalty for employers who unnecessarily stall negations
with a new union. The bill was first introduced and passed in the House in May
2020. Its latest version (HR #20), introduced in February 2023, awaits proper
voting.
Readers of this column might sign a pledge of
solidarity on the website of Starbucks United (www.sbworkersunited.org).
And why not freely choose another coffee shop until Starbucks acts in good
faith?
Droel
edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a free newsletter on
faith and work.
Today we celebrate one of the greatest Christian saints of all time: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King had at least three mentors: Jesus, Howard Thurman, and Gandhi. One thing that made him great was his deep ecumenism, insofar as he humbly learned from a Hindu saint, Mahatma Gandhi, how to apply Jesus’ teachings to battling injustice—using a method called non-violent resistance.
Under King, that resistance brought down almost a century of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other evil structures that perpetuated racism
and slavery even after the Confederacy lost its Civil War. Marching, facing firehoses, police dogs and police on horseback, filling jails, beseeching courts, politicians and presidents, ordinary citizens and church-goers of the movement MLK Jr. led, applied Gandhi’s spiritual practice that had taken down the British empire in India, without firing a shot.
Father Bede Griffiths, a wise monk and observer of India who lived fifty years in an ashram there, said this about Gandhi: He “was deeply influenced by the gospel, not only directly through the New Testament, but still more indirectly through Ruskin and Tolstoy.”
Through its Indian adaptation, “the social gospel of Christianity” |
underwent “a most significant transformation.” Gandhi demonstrated how the principles of the Sermon on the Mount can be applied to social and political life in a way which no one before him had done: he made the beatitudes a matter of practical concern in a way which few Christians have realized. Or accomplished. One Christian did realize it: MLK Jr., with a powerful team behind him, implemented and adapted Gandhi’s practice based on the Sermon on the Mount, to American history. Courage as well as vision and intergenerational moral outrage steered to a greater good, accomplished what the civil rights movement achieved.
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The habit of hope is fortified by the realization
that creation continues
despite time restriction and
indeterminate causes.
