The Working Catholic: No Contract, Yet by Bill Droel

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.

On Martin Luther King Jr., His Movement & His Mentors by Dr. Matthew Fox, Ph.D.

 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.     The immense sacrifices of that movement—including King’s and others’ martyrdoms—are in jeopardy today, sixty years later. Racism does not just disappear, it morphs into new forms. Each generation has to step up to challenge it in its own way.

   

 

Mahatma Gandhi (center) during his first public non-violent resistance action, the 24-day Salt March of 1930, which protested the British monopoly on salt. Source unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto (the first official presidential photographer). Wikimedia Commons.

 

Matthew Fox

Rev. Matthew Fox, PhD, author, theologian, and activist priest, has been calling people of spirit and conscience into the Creation Spirituality lineage for over 50 years. His 36 books (translated into 74 languages), as well as his lectures, retreats, and innovative education models, have ignited an international movement to awaken people to be mystics and prophets, contemplative activists, who honor and defend the earth and work for justice. To learn more, visit matthewfox.org

We Expect More in 2024

 

The habit of hope is fortified by the realization 

that creation continues 

despite time restriction and 

indeterminate causes.  

A blossoming winter flower - Amaryllis.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The Working Catholic: Sacramental Neighborhoods by Bill Droel

Robert Moses (1888-1981) was the public works czar for Metro New York. His projects included highways, bridges, parks and more. He also spearheaded a few Upstate projects. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (Random House, 1974) is the definitive biography. A gripping chapter is titled “One Mile.”

There is a slight bend in a short section of what is now the Cross Bronx Expressway (IS95). In December 1952 residents in East Tremont neighborhood got a letter from Moses. It gave a vacate order of 90 days to over 5,000 people living in 1,530 units. Those residents organized and through months and then years they proposed a straightaway route for the highway that would require minimum displacement. They provided expert testimony, attended countless meetings, raised money, met with many officials and persistently lobbied for their plan, but to no avail.

Neighborhoods are sacraments (lower case s). A sacrament contains what it signifies. It conceals what it reveals. Modernity is premised on growth, efficiency and individual initiative. Meritocracy is its companion. That is, the assumption that successful people deserve what they attain; struggling people are flawed. Catholicism, by contrast, says that God is Truth (capital T) and that all the small truths (lower case t) are avenues to and from God. Catholicism thus embraces responsible science, reason, experimentation, striving and accomplishment. However, the Catholic sacramental imagination differs from the modern premise in that Catholicism believes in a cooperative, organic society in which each person has a stake and in which each person can contribute something. Many modern elites (conservatives and liberals) overlook or are even hostile to the organic/sacramental nature of neighborhoods. These sophisticates might include urban planners, speculators, elected officials, financiers, block-busting realtors, some engineers, some developers and more.

The unnecessary curve in the Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed more than buildings. Family life was disrupted. An effective process of assimilation was eliminated. As Caro writes, people who loved our country “would be an alienated, hostile, a hating force within it,” at least for a time. And maybe to the whole point of the Bronx episode, the curve also meant that arbitrary authority can overpower reasonableness, community sensitivity and the sacred.

This tale does not imply that no highways should be built or in other examples that gentrification is an unqualified evil. It does mean that like with a matchstick house the meaningless removal of one small part depletes a neighborhood and a city. And as we now realize, on a bigger scale careless efficiency and so-called progress gravely damages an entire layer of our environment—likely to the death of our planet.

For about 200 years Catholicism in our country made major investments of money, material, staff and leadership in urban neighborhoods. Not every parish shiningly served as a sacrament which reveals God amidst streets and alleys, stores and homes, parks and social centers. (A subsequent column will consider the complexities of race relations.) But the investment certainly helped make Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and other cities closer to the image of God.

A neighborhood’s greatness arises from relationships; from its hospitality to new arrivals, to students and workers, to the elderly and dispossessed, to young parents and to the poor. From an unlikely mixture of urban characters come poets, bus drivers, teachers, restaurateurs and citizens. Neighborhoods are incubators of culture. The neighborhood is a place where women and men come to make their way in the world. As relationships are nurtured and respected, the neighborhood gives life to the next generation.

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

Info on the Middle East Crisis by by Jim DeWall

 

The October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel at an Israeli music festival that killed 1,200 Israelis and numerous Americans was a horrible occurrence that led to the months-long Israeli Hamas war. Without a clear understanding of why this occurred, most people lay the blame solely on the Hamas Islamic Jihad terrorists. Even though the Hamas terrorists are clearly to blame for this atrocity, it is smart to be aware of what led up to it. Israel and Palestine were created in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II. The Palestinian people settled in the West Bank, adjacent to Israel. Today, there are 2.75 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza, which is 58 miles west of the West Bank and on the Mediterranean.

   Israel made the decision in the 1970s to begin to establish settlements in the West Bank, seizing and occupying land in Palestinian territory. By 1980, there were just a few thousand Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. By 1990, that number had grown to 90,000, by the year 2000 to 200,000, by the year 2010 to 300,000 and by the year 2020 to 400,000. Today, there are approximately 650,000 Israeli citizens who live in the West Bank on land taken from the Palestinians. There are 130 settlements or towns in the West Bank housing all the Israeli occupiers. People have been encouraged to move to the West Bank settlements by the Israeli government, which gives a tax incentive to its citizens to move there. The settlers have seized privately held Palestinian land and evicted the Palestinian residents who had been living there. The Israeli government has built freeways throughout the West Bank to connect the settlements, roadways which can only be driven on by vehicles with Israeli license plates. Many Palestinian farmers can't access their own farmland because the Israeli freeway divides the farm in half and the farmers can't cross the freeway.

 For years, the animosity between the two peoples has led to racial hatred and constant confrontations. Many Israeli settlers, in order to expand their settlements, have seized more land and cut down Palestinian olive orchards, the only source of income for many Palestinian farmers. Over 9,000 olive trees have been cut down in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers since August of 2020, according to the International Red Cross, trees that take decades to grow. Since 2013, there have been 45 resolutions adopted in the United Nations condemning the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Almost every nation in the world has approved these resolutions, with the exception of Israel, the United States and a few other nations. The United States has abstained on or vetoed all 45 resolutions in the Security Council or the General Assembly, always siding with Israel. It is not hard to understand why the 4.75 million Palestinians and the Palestinian Hamas terrorists hate the Israelis. These are some of the reasons for the terrible strife in the Middle East and why the Israeli Hamas war began.

Jim DeWall is a writer from Colorado.

Is Time running Out?

 

Aristotle: time is the measure of motion, not a thing in itself.

Painting by Gretchen Merkle

CREATION CONTINUES EVEN WHEN NOT MEASURED BY THE NUMBERS OF TIME

Headline:  UN:  World racing past warming limit                                                        [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Tuesday, November 21, 2023] 

Is there any hope?

                                                        Statue of Julian of Norwich outside the Norwich Cathedral

Julian of Norwich:  "It is necessary that sin should exist, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.”  

Thomas Aquinas links hope to trust because trust “furnishes a certain vigor to hope.  For this reason, it is the opposite of fear, as is hope.”

 Matthew Fox:  Trust and magnanimity revitalize us with energy and enthusiasm for good and great tasks that in turn bring about hope.  [p. 96-7, Julian of Norwich:  Wisdom in a time of pandemic and beyond, by Matthew Fox, 2020.]

 

The Working Catholic: Race Relations by Bill Droel

 

Efforts these days to improve race relations are of related types. There is virtue signaling, as in ubiquitous TV ads featuring a mixed-race couple or the obligatory progressive statements from businesses and national religious denominations. There is social therapy, as when church-sponsored groups examine and then admit to their racism. Thirdly, justifiable racial grievances are expressed through marches and rallies that unfortunately lack any specific goal.

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), considered the dean of community organizing, was known for his confrontational yet non-violent tactics, his sharp-edged comments and his exaggerated personality. Alinsky was a person of “keen sociological imagination” and “thoughtful action,” as Mark Santow details in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race (University of Chicago Press, 2023).  Alinsky never wavered from a commitment to equal dignity, regardless of race or ethnicity. Yet he was not ideological. He did not crusade for integration per se. He believed that if people have confidence in their own agency and in the democratic process, they will usually make better choices and support true pluralism. The problem, as Alinsky saw it, was the lack of power at the local level. There were too few viable mediating institutions through which people could effectively engage others. Thus, Alinsky dedicated his career to forming peoples’ organizations.

In 1938 Alinsky (then 29-years old) left his job at a university institute to, with Joseph Meegan (1912-1994), organize Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (www.bync.org) in Chicago’s stockyards area. This is the first of Santow’s case studies. BNYC had a promising beginning. However, BYNC feared a possible influx of Black residents. The declining stockyards weakened the neighborhood economy. The older housing stock might appeal to Blacks. Thus, BYNC launched a conservation program. On the surface its beautification theme and its opposition to panic peddling and its campaign to upgrade infrastructure was constructive. The unspoken premise, however, was retaining white families in the area and prohibiting integration. Those white families and their institutions (principally churches) felt their defensiveness “was sanctioned by public opinion, economic sense and the law.” Many of those whites, Santow explains, did not realize how government housing programs were designed to “resist integration [through] subsidized suburban home ownership for whites while consigning Blacks to segregated urban neighborhoods.” (See The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, W.W. Norton, 2017.)

A disappointed Alinsky avoided public criticism of BYNC. He only slowly admitted that, in Santow’s words, his effort “contributed to both the ability and willingness of [BYNC] to engage in racial containment…to protect and preserve an island of segregation.” Today BYNC says it “substituted an emphasis on community and economic development for Alinsky’s confrontational methods.”

In 1940 Alinsky formed his Industrial Areas Foundation. About 20 years later IAF returned to Chicago’s neighborhoods, starting with Organization for Southwest Community (Santow’s second case study).

Though OSC is overlooked in most chronicles of Alinsky, including the website of his foundation, the section on OSC in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race is the most interesting. The area in 1959 was white with some upwardly mobile Black residents around its perimeter. IAF never said that integration was a goal of OSC. In fact, its organizers patiently and persistently solicited those mistrustful of Blacks. But many of those active in OSC were at best ambivalent, suspecting the goal was to move Blacks into the neighborhood.

OSC unraveled. Member groups exited. First, over an internal proposal to abolish term limits for officers. It was opposed by a faction who thought the hidden reason for the proposal was the retention of racially tolerant clergy officers. More groups quit OSC when its leadership drafted a letter to support an Illinois State bill on open occupancy. The measure could help neighborhood stabilization by giving Blacks more housing choices, particularly in the suburbs. But again, some OSC groups wanted nothing to do with racial improvements.

To judge by the Chicago neighborhood examples, Alinsky’s success was quite limited. Yet his moral stature, now 50 plus years since his death, remains high. Alinsky was consistently willing to risk failure in order to act in the real world. For Alinsky, too many people are “dismissive of messy compromises and far too enamored of the power and sufficiency of legislation and goodwill,” Santow concludes. Moralizing from the sidelines about race (or other issues) is cowardly.

Alinsky was constantly evaluating: Maybe a single neighborhood lacks enough power to deal with larger divisive forces. In 1970 his IAF organized a metropolitan organization, Campaign Against Pollution, soon called Citizens’ Action Program. Today the IAF has 63 county-wide or metro-wide organizations in the United States. Each is multi-issue and, like Alinsky, each believes that racial and ethnic relations improve as its member groups strive for the widest public conversation possible.

 

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