The Working Catholic: Child Labor by Bill Droel

 

It is a fallacy to believe that if teenage members of a family spend more time on a job, the family will necessarily gain upwardly mobility. Nor is it true that our economy prospers when young people neglect their studies for the sake of income. Yes, employment trains teenagers and young adults in public disciplines plus gives them some outlook on social psychology. However, excess hours on the clock are not beneficial.

The current though relative labor shortage does not justify what N.Y. Times reporter Hannah Drier brought to light about child labor in articles from late February 2023 until early May 2023. Several companies are using children in restricted jobs for excessive hours and sometimes failing to pay them justly—835 companies last fiscal year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Packers Sanitation Services based in Kieler, WI, as one example, had 102 teenagers on overnight shifts cleaning back saws, brisket saws and head splitters in meat processing plants. Packers, which is owned by Blackstone investments, was fined $15million.

Drier found children illegally employed in retail, construction and manufacturing plus in sawmills, in an industrial laundry and in a slaughterhouse. Some were on the overnight shift and underpaid. Hearthside Food Solutions based in Downers Grove, IL contracts with popular brands to package food. Drier found many children at its Michigan facilities. Hearthside blames its staffing agency.

 There are many ways to address a labor shortage, reports John Miller in Dollars & Sense (6/23). Raise wages and improve workplace conditions, though “both would drive up costs.” Immigration reform would also put more adults into the job pool legally. A few columnists and several trade associations favor another remedy: child labor.

“Ten states, six in the Midwest, have considered proposals” to loosen child labor restrictions, Miller details. A 1938 law (the Fair Labor and Standards Act) specifies conditions for employing teenagers after school, on weekends and holidays for reasonable hours in non-hazardous settings like cashier, caddy, hostess, usher, lifeguard, school janitor, delivery person, clerical and the like with leeway on family farms and in family shops. Despite these reasonable guidelines the pro-family governor of Arkansas recently signed legislation to eliminate a simple permit that required a child’s age verification, parental approval and a non-hazardous situation for employment. The N.Y. Times comments: The new law “is not to protect those children from exploitation but instead to make it legal.” Iowa is likely next.

The full story, as Drier writes, includes the plight of unaccompanied migrant children of whom about 130,000 came into the U.S. in the past 12 months. These fearful young people are easily exploited. Some are put in dangerous jobs. Most are underpaid and some are cheated out of their pay entirely. Not all these young adults come to the U.S. with full knowledge and will. Some are trafficked by cartels and then sold to construction subcontractors or to agricultural entities. Some are forced into prostitution or thievery.

What is our federal government doing to protect children? Well, the administration of President Joseph Biden is eager to clear out shelters near our border. Day labor agencies and even traffickers, posing as hosts, have moved some of these migrant children into dangerous and exhausting jobs. The Department of Labor, Miller mentions, is “severely understaffed.”

A retired Department of Labor official provides The Working Catholic with details. He was stationed in Chicago for ten years and then 18 more in Florida. There is “an immediately apparent difference” between southern states that have a so-called right to work law and those states with viable unions. Further, many northern states have local laws pertaining to child labor and sometimes fund apprentice training programs. “Active union presence serves to minimize child labor violations,” he says.

“Violations are typically not easy to see,” his narrative continues. Investigations occur after-the-fact and “must be developed from employer records, which is not easy. The Department of Labor is a civil enforcement arm, not criminal. Thus, the documented cases must then be adjudicated by the Department of Justice.”

What can law-abiding businesses and citizens do? Use union labor. If not, stipulate in writing that a contractor all not allow its subcontractors to use child labor. Second, support a local worker center. Arise (www.arisechicago.org), a sophisticated worker center here in Chicago, takes up cases of wage theft and other labor violations. Escucha Mi Voz (www.escuchamivozia.org) is a Catholic-based worker center. It helps people from ten language groups. Child labor in meatpacking is one of its concerns. Women religious, as on many issues, are leaders in anti-trafficking. They publish an informative newsletter, detail some action steps and supply reflection material. Their website is www.sistersagainsttrafficking.org. Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) is based in New York City. It conducts research and reports on the topic.

 

Bill Droel (National Center for the Laity, PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629) is eager for any reports on child labor.

 

The Working Catholic: Immigration by Bill Droel

 

The immigrant “can sense that the United States is of two minds,” writes Hector Tobar of the University of California in Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation (Farrar, Straus, 2023). “Like the indentured servants, the Poles, the Germans and the Chinese people of other centuries, she knows there are factory owners and affluent families on the other side of the fence or the ocean who really want her to make it across… She knows that she has something that is prized on the other side.” At the same time the “walls, barbed wire and restrictive immigration laws announce they hate her kind.”

A country by definition must have borders. A phrase like open borders, if taken literally, erases the existence of nation states. The trick is to maintain an orderly system so that tourists, students, temporary workers, immigrants and refugees can safely enter a country and by their labor, knowledge and consumption they can contribute to their surroundings.

The current number of foreign-born people living in our country is the highest it has been in about 100 years; 45million by one estimate, reports Idrees Kahloon in The New Yorker (6/12/23). Many are immigrants who have become full-fledged legal U.S. citizens (about 970,000 within the past 12 months). Other foreign-born residents are guest workers (in Silicon Valley, in hospitals, in vineyards and on farms) and students (in technical fields, medical research and business) and others are immigrant/refugees--those who are in the legal process and those who have drifted into society without status.

The current influx actually began over 60 years ago when Congress changed its immigration limit and its general ban on those from Asia, details Dexter Filkins, also writing in The New Yorker (6/19/23). Our society’s need for more skilled and manual laborers attracts foreigners. More arrive under our policy of family preference or chain migration by which one immigrant can assist family members. Several factors push families toward the U.S., including drug violence, natural disasters, a bad economy at home, oppressive politics, the profitable smuggling/trafficking business (coyote cartels) and more.

Arrivals in the U.S., as Hector Tobar describes, have always encountered nativism. Some current U.S. residents say that their life would be better if immigrants were not unfairly given social services. Some residents also say that their own ancestors had to learn English, but that today’s arrivals don’t do so. They also say that new arrivals take away jobs that longer-standing residents would like to have.

  Data can counter these points, but the objections are not really about what they are about. The concern about jobs, for example, is only valid for a limited time in a specific place where “cheap labor can hold down wages for some workers,” says Filkins. However, the demand for employees in our country far exceeds the current supply. In the bigger picture immigration has no effect on jobs or wages. It is employment sectors that set wage scales and it is free trade and tax policies that send jobs overseas. Yet no one opposed to today’s immigrants is persuaded by the facts.

Migrants and refugees crossing our country’s southern border are resented more than well-educated technicians and doctors and trades people arriving from Asia or Eastern Europe, though each foreigner encounters nativism.

“Determining the exact number [of refugees is] remarkably difficult,” Filkins explains. There are possibly 11million undocumented people in the U.S. today; not all of whom intend to stay or will be allowed to stay. Even now our government does not know how many migrants it has sent back. The legal process for entry is backlogged and caught-up in conflicting court rulings. There are over two million pending cases just for those who claim refugee status. They are legally entitled to wait in the U.S. for a hearing on their case, but they have no right to a public defender. The wait time for the initial hearing is now five years. If the decision is unfavorable to the refugee, they can appeal. The wait time for that appeal hearing is another five years.

Reform of our dysfunctional immigration/migration system is, as any objective observer realizes, slow-going. A policy of exclusion, Filkins explains, is impractical. No matter how big a wall is built, people are not deterred from fleeing misery and staking their hope on our beautiful country. Total exclusion also damages the U.S. economy plus betrays the story of our country and it is inhumane. Three parts must come together simultaneously for acceptable reform. 1.) Tougher boarder security. 2.) More funding for local police in states like Texas and Arizona plus in cities that welcome migrants; more social services and processing assistance; more immigration judges. 3.) Better legal opportunities for immigrants, enforced fairly.

At the moment both Republican and Democrat leaders tolerate the frustrating chaos because they can blame one another. Additionally, Democrats and Republicans share the ambivalence of our citizenry. They want more immigration because it bolsters U.S. productivity. They want less immigration because more of it fuels resentment and politicians get the blame.

A final consideration: No matter the administrative chaos and the political muddle of the moment, there is an ethical obligation to assist the immigrants/migrants among us. To be continued…

 

Droel serves the board of National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

God, Make Me a Channel of Disturbance: The “Reverse St. Francis Prayer”

 

Faith Community Jericho Walk to support immigrants

at the Milwaukee ICE office (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) 

 every Thursday, 9:00 a.m. 

God, make me a channel of disturbance.

Where there is apathy, let me provoke.

Where there is compliance, let me bring questioning.

Where there is silence, may I be a voice.

Where there is too much comfort and too little action,

grant disruption.

Where there are doors closed and hearts locked,

grant the willingness to listen.

When laws dictate and pain is overlooked . . .

When tradition speaks louder than need . . .

Grant that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it.

Disturb us, O God,

to be with, as well as for, the alienated;

to love the unlovable as well as the lovely.

God, make me a channel of disturbance.

[author unknown]

 

"The Silliness -- and Clear and Present Danger -- of Today's SCOTUS: from the Daily Meditations by Matthew Fox (July 7, 2023)

 We are meditating on justice as a spiritual virtue and we are examining a particularly stunning action of the recent Supreme Court.  This court just passed a law saying it’s okay for a gay-hating religious believer who is a businessperson to deny a gay couple her service. 

But it turns out that the person named in the lawsuit, Stewart, never asked the plainiff for her services as a web-designer because he is not getting married and furthermore he is not gay.  He has stepped up ad said he never approached her since he himself is a web designer and would not need her services, and because he has been happily married to a woman for 15 years.

   Says one commentator:

Smith is so motivated by hatred of LGBTQ+ people that she invented an imaginary grievance, lied about it repeatedly through the various tiers of the court system, and eventually got license to deny service to a gay couple who doesn’t, technically, exist.*   Thus the Supreme Court, all decked out in its black finery and aristocratic self-importance, bathed in its solemnity and righteous black robes, took on this case without checking on whether the party involved was real or not.  Is this a Mickey Mouse supreme court or what?  Silliness, corruption, aristocracy (“let them eat cake”) and stupidity reign.   Six judges got suckered into legalizing a more-than-stupid precedent in their eagerness to support homophobia and religious prejudice.  Smith’s lawyers, demonstrating no shame (fascism rarely demonstrates either shame or a sense of humor), shrugged their shoulders: “No one should have to wait to be punished by the government to challenge an unjust law,” said one.    The conclusion?  It’s okay to invent a grievance and make up adversaries and go to certain courts and win.  Is this Supreme Court now a game, a political puppet show?  And those pulling the strings of six puppets?  I think we know.    What follows is neither humorous nor silly.  It is a dangerous “license to hate.” Can an atheist businessman refuse to serve Christians?  Can a liberal refuse to serve republicans, a Muslim refuse to serve Jews--or vice versa?  Can a gay busnessman refuse to serve (homophobic Christians?)  A slippery legal slope indeed. Said one legal scholar:  "This ruling blows a gaping hole in priior protections from discrimination" including race and religion and offers a "green light" to any business owners wanting to refuse service.  Where's the justice in a court like this?

The Working Catholic: Experience Counts by Bill Droel

 Catholic philosophers of the mid-20^th century (the Personalists) improved upon an older top-down notion of truth. Yes, truth comes from God. However, revelation does not come entirely from above. God’s truth (the Incarnation) is for all time embedded in human experience. The newer approach appreciates that God’s truth arises from and corresponds to real, important questions within our daily lives.

For many years Catholicism assumed that God’s truth came down from on high. Then, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it was interpreted and proclaimed by way of the Church, through our bishops. This approach rightly meant that standards were fixed. However, the certitude of its interpretation presumed that a few people could know the full, static will of God. The interpretation sometimes delved into quite arcane matters, using technical terms and distinctions foreign to common people.

Our society currently adheres to an opposite view of truth. It is called utilitarian relativism or cost-benefit analysis. Truth in our society depends on the perception of an individual or on a circle of executives or a team of news editors or a vocal group of students or some trend among celebrities. Standards depend on the situation and the estimated outcome. For all its popularity, relativism is unsustainable. It favors opportunists who play the short-term game. It leaves too much to individual interpretation. It can easily define deviancy down.

The mid-20^th century philosophers who improved our understanding of God’s revelation did not endorse relativism in any way. The new bottom-up approach does not mean that truth is derived from feelings or even from a thoroughly audited vote or any other type of soft relativism.  Faithful to Scripture, the bottom-up approach compliments the responsibility of bishops to teach the truth.

  In summary, Christianity’s former bias toward abstractions, prototypes, blueprints, static policies, previous absolute formulae, cookie-cutter solutions, standard procedures, preset rules, protocol, agency policy and old-time programs now must consider real life experience. The new approach warns church leaders to abandon their older, tiresome habit of answering questions that no one asks. The new approach celebrates creativity, research, expansion, complexity, dynamism and, what Pope Francis calls “a culture of encounter,” one-to-one and group-to-group dialogue across neighborhoods, cities, ethnicities, ages and genders. An accumulation of experience combined with sustained reflection improves our understanding of God’s truth, says the newer approach.

A substantial number of baptized Catholics now reject the church. Among other reasons, many do so because the church’s presentation of God’s truth does not resonate with them. To repeat: This is not to say that the content of the older presentation is wrong. The disconnection is because church leaders often insist on a method and terminology that is foreign to young adults. For their part, young adults don’t bother to construct an alternative spiritual method and language for our time.

A starting place, in my opinion, is the discovery of God’s truth as contained in music, drama, science, engineering, sex, commerce and other so-called worldly activities. Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471) is the author of the still popular The Imitation of Christ. Though parts of this book might be helpful, its bias (and that of several contemporary Christian teachers) must be rejected. God “instructs [us] to despise earthly things, to loath present things,” Imitation of Christ advises. No. God from all eternity has been at ease with human joy and striving. God’s church cannot therefore be aloof from or opposed to the world. The secular is sacred in a real sense.

A church that relates to the deep concerns of young adults cannot be equated only with clergy and other church employees. The church is all of us who go about doing our best on the job, in the community and for our family. The church is those of us who want to have a meaningful life; to put our questions into a context. The church is two friends who meet at the diner and share their sorrow, frustration, joy and insight. Our own experience contains some of God’s truth. How do we process that experience? Where do we find regular forums in which faith in daily life is explored? What language is there for us to take our isolated incidents and frame them into meaningful experience? Where are the storytellers to help us?

To be continued…

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

The Working Catholic: Leisure by Bill Droel

 I put away the clock and now I enjoy the time.

            Saving Time: Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell (Random House, 2023) is not a time management book.  It is not about leaning in or about making the most of the weekend. It is not about the work-life balance. It is not a how to or a self-help book. Saving Time is part memoir, part philosophy and a smaller part travelogue with photos.

            Ever since Eve and Adam were evicted from the garden, things had to get done. But humankind has not always and everywhere been on the clock. A mercantile economy and then capitalism brought us the clock. According to capitalism busyness equals goodness. (This notion is sometimes called the Protestant ethic.) To do reasonably well requires sustained effort. To be stuck in place implies laziness. Both the upwardly mobile and those who struggle to make ends meet judge their lives in individualistic terms. Both the successful and the struggling tend to overlook our culture’s controlling circumstances. Both the secure and the precarious are stressed by the clock. The wealthy go to a therapist to deal with their stress. For them, coping often means putting in more work. The working-poor can deal with clock stress by forming a union, as is happening in this Covid-19 era. However, an unhealthy escape from stress is resentment, sometimes in movements like MAGA.

            Odell is aware that liberation from clock slavery requires more than a change in attitude. Thus her book deals with economic class, race relations and particularly with culture. In that regard Odell draws upon Josef Pieper (1904-1997) and his classic book, Leisure: the Basis of Culture (Faber & Faber, 1952). Proper leisure, says Pieper, is not the same as recharging one’s battery for more work. Nor is leisure an experience to be consumed.

            True leisure, Pieper continues, is an emotional/spiritual posture for its own sake, not as refreshment for other types of work. Leisure is a vertical relationship, not a chronological segment like Saturday or Friday evening. Leisure is wonder and joy. It is appreciating our connection to transcendence. 

            Unfortunately, leisure in our current culture is commercialized. It is often as much work as one’s job. Waiting for the Weekend (Viking, 1991) by Witold Rybczynski details how people pervert genuine leisure by spending Saturday “working on their backhand” or “putting in the work” to improve their putting or “working in the garden.”

It is possible for a person to cultivate a true leisurely disposition, but not much will change without a new culture. Christianity was once a major cultural force—admittedly for the bad at times, but often as an alternative to the daily grind. Christianity, like Judaism, used to insist on an alternative Sabbath—no labor, minimal commerce, some worship, singing, reading and family outings. Young adults today, understandably, are not much attracted to main line Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholic Christianity and Orthodox Christianity. Even evangelical Christianity has lower communitarian appeal to young adults. With important exceptions, it is often an individualistic identifier with low content. As a cultural force, evangelical Christianity is overly connected with negative politics.

St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) has been called "the last Christian."  Before the 13th century few people needed any time-keeping device other than direct observation of the sun and moon.  But when the mercantile economy emerged in Europe, people wanted to keep appointments.  So a clock tower was installed in public square.  St. Francis turned his back to those clocks to remind people that a life fixated on clocks (be they now an app on one's mobile device) is not ultimately satisfying.  St. Francis had no tight schedule.  He rebelled as best as he could against specific programs, utilitarian transactions, measurable goals and the like.  St. Francis had no office, no work-life balance.  In a sense, St. Francis did nothing.  He communicated by way of gestures.  And for some reason his vertical posture was attractive to young adults.  His spiritual movement was a counter-cultural force.  

Is it possible for today’s young adults to create a less frantic life in imitation of St. Francis? Not unless the goal is for young adults to quit their jobs, abandon their mobile devices, roam about begging and maybe repairing a building here or there--all the while dressed in a long hooded jacket.  Wait.  Young adults are garbed in hoodies.  Perhaps the St. Francis spirit is percolating from within.  

Droel is editor for National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

Robert Hanssen, Opus Dei, and the Opposite of Generosity (June 7th Matthew Fox Daily Meditation)

 Yesterday, as we began our meditations on Generosity, Robert Hanssen died in prison.  He was serving 15 consecutive life sentences for betraying his country.  

 In 2001, Lesley Stahl reported on “The Secret Life of Robert Hanssen.” The former FBI agent was convicted of spying for Russia, and began serving a life sentence in 2002. He died in prison this week at the age of 79. (60 Minutes)Hanssen has been called the most damaging spy in American history who betrayed pro-American spies to Russia and got many of them killed.  Assigned to a counterintelligence unit in New York, he sold highly-classified national security information to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash plus bank funds and diamonds (!).

At first I thought to write about Hanssen would interrupt our meditations on Generosity.  But in fact, he sheds light on generosity because he demonstrated the opposite, and a spiritual term is often best approached by going to its opposite first.

 Following are some opposites of Generosity:  acquisitive, avaricious, begrudging, close fisted, costive, greedy selfish, unkind, cruel, harsh, mean, stingy, selfish and ungenerous.  

Since Hanssen did it for the money, it would seem he excelled at all these in addition to being hypocritical and disloyal to his country and his profession.  

Leonardo Leo and the right couldn't control the justices they put on the Supreme Court.  So they created a captured court -- one that explains Clarence thomas' benefactors.  Chris Hays reports.  (MSNBC)  

I wrote about Robert Hanssen when I wrote my book on The Pope's War, a history of the papacy under Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II both of whom championed Opus Dei.  Hanssen was an active member of Opus Dei.  As is the current archbishop of Los Angeles who recently stepped down as head of the Catholic Bishops of the U.S.  and also Leonardo Leo who has been called the "third most important person in America." 

Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist society is personally responsible for the six most extreme supreme court judges and was recently in the nes for being photographed partying with Judge Clarence Thomas and his well-known benefactor, billionaire republican Harlan Crow, in the latter's backyard. 

The head of FBI during Hanssen's tenure was Opus Dei.  Opus Dei bishops and cardinals appointed under the previous two popes were greatly responsible for killing liberation theology and base communities in Central and South America.  

An insightful investigation into the controversial Opus Dei sect, founded by a priest of the Franco regime and now extending its influence across the world. Journeyman Pictures  

Opus Dei was founded by a fascist priest, Jose Escriva, and its members saddled up with dictator Franco for decades.  Opus Dei goes where the power is--especially finance, media, governmental institutions and courts.  

They got their founder, a proven misogynist who once said he admired Hitler, canonized a saint faster than anyone else in history and succeeded in canonizing Junipero Serra.  They very fond of money (and diamonds) and the power that goes with it.  

______________________________________________________

Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Pope's War:   How Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How it Can Be Saved, pp. 106-124.