In the West Park and Parma neighborhoods where I was raised, there were two pieces of paper deemed essential: one’s baptismal certificate and one’s union card. Mine were blue-collar neighborhoods where dads tended to work in one of the trades, at Republic or US Steel, or the Chevy plant. While my father wasn’t a blue-collar worker for most of my life, most of my uncles were. My boyhood memories of the Electricians Local 38, Pipefitters Local 120, and Plumbers Local 55 were of family days at Cedar Point where we got little plastic footballs with “Local 38” stamped on them, of Christmas parties at the pipefitters’ hall, and of spending time after the St Patrick’s Day parade with the Wireman’s Shamrock Club. It was a world where being a “union man” was a badge of honor we aspired to and determining whether something was “union made” was the first step in discerning our purchases.
Looking back I can recall some of my uncles heading down south during one of the recessions in the 1970s because jobs had dried up in the Cleveland area. Their union found them work in the Atlanta area for six months and negotiated a schedule of ten days on, four days off, so that they and their union brothers could come home to be with their families. As technology changed, unions offered them additional training. Their families got great health insurance. And they made enough money to move to the suburbs and earn their piece of the American Dream.
This weekend we celebrate Labor Day. Born as a day to honor working men and women—and their unions—it was seen early on as America’s alternative to the more socialist-inspired May Day celebrated throughout the rest of the industrialized world.
While the heyday of organized labor has passed from its prime in the 1950s-70s, and while some union leaders have misused the power that comes with organized groups, we all remain indebted to union men and women.
Be it a manageable work week which makes “work-life balance” an achievable goal, to having a safe environment in which to ply our trades, to the simple recognition that any use of our talents and abilities for the greater good of our communities is noble, we all have unions to thank. But in perhaps an even more profound way, we Catholics are indebted to those who organized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for their indirect contribution to our social teaching.
One of the earliest unions in North America was the Knights of Labor. Founded by Terrence Powderly, it provided workers a unified front in voicing their concerns. Reaction to this was mixed among Catholic Church leaders, and American bishops struggled with a response: support the rights of workers to organize or condemn the materialist philosophy that sadly underpinned labor movements throughout the world.
In 1887 James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore championed the workers and petitioned Pope Leo XII for a response to the growing cause—making a case for responsible unionization. Leo concurred and would go on to develop his response more richly in his encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), in which he not only affirmed the rights of workers, but those of management and capital as well. It was what historian Jay P. Dolan would call “the first step in the formation of a Catholic social-gospel tradition.”
In that landmark work, Leo outlined what would become known as Catholic Social Teaching. While the Church had always been concerned about the needs of those on the margins—the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, and the stranger—and while Church leaders, lay and cleric alike, fought for justice—most energy was devoted to the charitable easing of the effects of social injustice, not so much their root causes.
With Rerum Novarum—again prompted in large part by the work of American laborers—the Church had a philosophy of social action and social justice that has become, in the words of former General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. Pedro Arrupe S.J. (quoting the documents of the 1971 Synod of Bishops), “a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel” (Men for Others, 1973), and what the U.S. Bishops call “an essential part of Catholic faith” (Sharing Catholic Social Teaching, 1998).
The vision behind Rerum Novarum would grow into the well-articulated series of principles of Catholic Social Teaching, but the principles are already within the document in embryonic form. Acknowledging the dignity of work and the rights of workers which flow from their innate human dignity, Pope Leo also affirmed the responsibilities that accompany those rights. Labor organization was seen as a function of the communal aspect of human life (what would develop into the principle of solidarity) and the rights of people to make their voices heard (the principle of family, community, and participation). Underlying the encyclical was a concern for those who had little or no voice (the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable). While concern for the environment was yet to be a theological priority in the late 19th Century (and we are reaping the results of that oversight today), the encyclical would lay the groundwork for the principle of care for God’s creation, primarily as a concern for the well-being of people.
All of this challenges the ethos of individualism, of the “self-made man,” we so prize in American culture. Jesus called us to something more (Mt 18:20, Jn 13-34-35). Catholic theology therefore speaks of the principle of communion, which underpins its doctrine of work and all of Catholic Social Teaching. This idea notes that we all have a desire for happiness, especially eternal happiness. In achieving that goal, the philosophy stresses our interdependency, our need for each other, our need for
Union.
Happy Labor Day.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.