One of the news articles on the death of Cardinal O’Connor states:
“O’Connor grew up in a Philadelphia row house hearing his father - a gold-leaf painter and union man - quote from the pope’s encyclical on labor. The cardinal once quipped that he wanted his casket to have a union label, and when the archdiocese was caught in a hospital workers’ strike, he stood fast against hiring nonunion replacements.”
Can anyone fill me in on the Roman Catholic Church’s views on trade unions and collective bargaining? Which papal encylical is being referred to, from which pope, and when would it have been published?
I never knew there was any official RC stance on unions. The archbishop of LA, Cardinal Roger Mahony has taken anti-union stances against unionized workers in Catholic-run cemeteries.
However, Mahony was a backer of the janitors in their recent strike in LA against office building service companies.
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII published “On the Condition of the Working Classes”, a ringing affirmation of employees’ rights, including the right to organize to improve their lot.
There have been several papal encyclicals on labor, but the one Cardinal O’Connor referred to was probably “Laborem Exercens,” written by his friend (and boss), John Paul II.
Somewhere along the line I was taught, as part of Catholic orthodoxy, that Catholic employers must (that is, must) pay their employees a “living wage.” This implies that a Catholic employer who does not pay a living wage to her employees is a sinner and will not go straight to heaven. It also implies that a non-Catholic employer who does not pay a living wage to her employees is doing wrong so that in a dispute between employees (whether unionized or not) and an employee who does not pay a living wage, a Catholic would have to side with the employees (the “good” side) against the employer (the “bad” side).
The Catholic Church here and in other countries in the thirties and fourties organized unions to the right of the established unions, which in this country was the CIO. This was because of the leading role of the communist parties in the labor movements of the time. This action split and weakened the labor movement and played into the hands of the empoloyers.
Which explains why the unions of the 1950’s and 1960’s were the strongest they had ever been. I’m not sure how simply establishing unions that were politically not as far to the left guaranteed that they were “weaker”. I suspect that encouraging both labor and management to be just a bit closer to the center, where they can actually work together to accomplish something, is somewhat more beneficial to all than establishing extreme positions so that they can only fight to the death and both die.