Bishop: Faithful and workers can unite to advance justice

For the past 20 years, I have had the privilege to serve as co-chair of the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition. The significance of this organization is that it has sought to re-establish the historic linkage between our faith communities and the working men and women of our nation.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a close relationship developed in the United States between religion and labor. In the second half of the 20th century, however, those bonds became frayed over differences of opinion on moral issues, like abortion and gay rights; social issues, like aid to non-public schools and the Equal Rights Amendment; and the secularizing trend within the labor movement.

Another factor was the perception on the part of some in the religious community that most of the injustices suffered by working persons had been resolved, and that unions had either outlived their usefulness or become themselves corrupt and self-serving.

Before unions

Unfortunately, too many of us have forgotten the experience of our immigrant parents and grandparents who spent 10- and 12-hour days sewing shirts and blouses in airless sweatshops...digging coal in dark, unsafe mine shafts...or planting corn and wheat in unyielding ground -- and receiving a pittance for their labor.

We tend to take for granted the hard-earned rights they won in areas like collective bargaining, workplace safety, equitable wages, overtime and vacation pay, and health and retirement benefits.

Worse still, we are often oblivious to the plight of the new class of immigrants and the growing number of homebred low-income workers, those invisible people who clean the dishes in fancy restaurants; make the beds in high-class hotels; serve as aides in our hospitals, nursing homes and daycare centers; pick the crops in our orchards and fields; and make sure the starch is in our white shirt or kept out of it.

They work in factories whose doors are locked to prevent theft but which bar exits in the case of fire. They pluck poultry in conditions that not only breed disease but also lead to deadly accidents. They travel as migrant workers encountering too many noxious pesticides and too little potable water.

Their plight is captured well in "Nickeled and Dimed: I'm Not Getting by in America," Barbara Ehrenreich's poignant account of struggling to make ends meet as a low-income worker in today's society.

Middle class

It is not only the workers at the low end of the economic scale who are coping with the shameful realities that underlie the American economy. Many in the middle class are now threatened as well.

We are simply not creating enough jobs, and those which are being created for the most part are not high-end employment. For example, job growth presently is about 80,000 per month, which is not even enough to cover the new workers entering the job market, no less the nearly nine million Americans who are officially unemployed.

And when the Economic Policy Institute compares the average wage of industries that are creating jobs with those that are losing jobs, the analysts cite a big discrepancy. The jobs lost paid about $17 per hour, compared with $14.50 per hour for those being created.

Gaps opening

Equally interesting is that a significant gap is developing between the growth of employee productivity and employee compensation.

For example, in the technology-driven boom of 1995þ2000, the average annual growth of employee compensation was a dismal 0.7 percent, while worker productivity grew more than three times faster at 2.48 percent.

An economy that fails to distribute the fruits of rising productivity to those who have helped to create it by increasing wages and benefits is an unjust economy. Yet this is exactly what is happening in the present economic environment.

Global issue

Further, after years of shipping manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. to absurdly low-wage venues, we are now exporting increasing numbers of "white-collar" technical and professional jobs as well.

"Off-shoring" and "out-sourcing" are two of the favorite euphemisms for shipping work overseas. Industry executives prefer to use the term "global sourcing."

Whatever you call it, there is now the expansion of moving not only manufacturing jobs but also higher-paying professional jobs to foreign markets.

Overseas work

As The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert notes, "Years ago, when concerns were being expressed about the shipment of factory jobs to places with slave wages and hideous working conditions, proponents said there was nothing to worry about. Exporting labor-intensive jobs would make the U.S. companies more competitive, leading to increased growth in employment and higher living standards. They advised U.S. workers to adjust, to become better educated and skillful enough to thrive on a new world of employment where technological skills and the ability to process information were crucial components.

"Well, workers whose jobs are now threatened at companies across the United States are well educated and absolute whizzes at processing information. But they are nevertheless in danger of following the well-trodden path of their factory brethren to lower wage work or to the unemployment line" (The New York Times, Dec. 26, 2003).

A way to fight those and other workplace challenges in an age of globalization is for employees to organize. And this pressing need is where the fundamental values of our faith communities and those of the labor movement coincide, and where a renewed and revitalized alliance must be forged.

Six issues

While each faith community has its own expression of values and principles for supporting this alliance, let me cite those of the Catholic community in the United States as articulated by the U.S. Catholic bishops in our 1986 pastoral letter, "Economic Justice For All."

Drawing upon sacred Scripture and the social teachings of our Church, we bishops cite six key ethical principles as a basis for a just economy:

1. Every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person. The economy should serve people and not the other way around.

2. Human dignity can be realized and protected only in community. The obligation to "love our neighbor" has an individual dimension, but it also requires a broader social commitment to the common good.

3. All people have a right to participate in the economic life of society. It is wrong for a person or group to be unfairly excluded or unable to participate or contribute to the economy.

4. All members of society have a special obligation to the poor and vulnerable. As sons and daughters of God, we are challenged to make a fundamental "option for the poor" -- to speak for the voiceless, to defend the defenseless.

5. Human rights are the minimum conditions for life in community. In Catholic teachings, human rights include not only civil and political rights (freedom of speech, worship etc.), but also economic rights. As Pope John XXIII declared, all people have a right to life, food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, education and employment.

6. Society as a whole -- acting through public and private institutions, such as the churches, mosques, synagogues and labor unions -- has the moral responsibility to enhance human dignity and protect human rights. In addition to the clear responsibility of private institutions, government has an essential responsibility in this area.

Timely emphasis

The focus of our pastoral letter on the dignity of the human person, and on the spectrum of rights and responsibilities that belong to a person simply because he or she is human is especially timely today, given the grave and spreading tendency to reduce the human person to the level of a thing, a pawn, a commodity, a unit of production, a mere instrument for medical or scientific progress.

It is also timely given the drift both in corporate America and internationally to hire as few people as possible, keep wages as low as possible, provide as few benefits as possible, and work employees as long and as hard as possible.

Thus, drawing upon the moral principles of our faith heritage and the track-proven, practical expertise of the labor movement, I am convinced that we can and must work cooperatively and collaboratively to address constructively the pressing problems confronting contemporary workers both at home and abroad, especially low-income earners.

Granted, the problems are daunting and no magic-wand solutions exist. But, by strengthening the partnership between labor and religion, we can rediscover the biblical vision of work as a gift enabling us to be co-creators with God in building up the kingdom of justice in our day.

(More Labor Day ideas about the nexus between faith and work appear in the print version of The Evangelist.)

(9/2/04)