Robert Kennedy, author of Acton’s CSTS volume, The Good that Business Does, weighs in on the Wisconsin/Ohio flap over public sector unions and collective bargaining in this interview with ZENIT. A sample:
The Church has certainly been a champion of the right of workers to form labor unions but has never argued that unions have the liberty to undermine the common good.
Like many other kinds of organizations in many other sectors of society, unions can lose sight of their responsibility to respect the common good in the pursuit of their legitimate objectives. A union, no less than a business trade association, can position itself to exercise disproportionate influence in public life….
A well-ordered society, in the Catholic view, is one in which the appropriate independence and freedom of each sector — labor, business and government, for example — is preserved for the sake of the common good. If this balance breaks down, the common good is likely to suffer.
