1 Comment Rev. Sirico was recently quoted in an article by Our Sunday Visitor titled, “Unions, yes. But when the Church is the employer?” The article utilizes various historical examples to describe the relationship between United States Catholic Church leaders and institutions with their employees. The article seeks to demonstrate a strained relationship between Church leaders and their employees by citing historical examples, such as the 1949 gravediggers strike in New York.
When Catholic social teaching is discussed in the article, Rev. Sirico weighed in:
But Father Robert Sirico, president of the free-market think-tank, the Acton Institute, said there is a popular distortion about how Catholic social teaching views unions. Even in the 1949 gravedigger strike, Father Sirico said, Cardinal Spellman acted only after the union had already rejected a 3 percent raise offer. There were also 1,000 bodies waiting to be buried in the cemetery. “This should be a clear example of the legitimacy of breaking a strike,” he said.
Father Sirico said that if there is any problem in the Church institutions’ dealings with workers, it is that employees are often kept on even if their performance is deleterious to the mission. He said it is incumbent upon Church administrators to make efficient use of their money since the faithful has entrusted them with those resources.
Click here to read the full article.
To read more on Catholic social teaching on unions please click here to read Rev. Sirico’s Acton Commentary, “Catholic teaching’s pro-union bias,” which was also published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 1, 2011.
I belonged to a union for 30 years. I find the unionism at work today a different animal – aspecies not just concerned with it’s own future and it’s members perhaps benefits, but without any vision towards anything else. I was a member of a Federal union (letter carriers) and there were always limits – like the right to strike, like wages which were raised BELOW a 2% barrier. In other words it was a large union, but yet bound within the confines of competition – The Postal Service could not let it’s workers pay go beyond what it’s competitors shared.
That same level of competition does not exist for teachers,
workers for the state agencies or the university programs run by the state. The point here is that of limits or restraint.
I prfer thinking that soemthing else here is at work – especially when it comes to my Christian/Catholic Faith.
What’s ultimately at work here are big govt. and big business working together. The small/local are proving unable to compete against such large organizations – organizations which not only represent the govt. but which get govt. support.
In all of the insanity around us nothing better demonstrates this than the the like mindedness of wall Street and overboard govt. spending. Who but Wall Steet and it’s bankers underwrite and sell the bonds which are sold to finance such insane and taxpayer unfriendly projects which have limited need. I’m talking of ‘new school construction” and university run away projects. In each case tuition and property taxes have gone to the moon – which was an INTENDED PURPOSE ANYWAY – it forces private institutions into a difficult position.
From a Christian/Catholic position big govt/big business runs counter to the teaching of Subsidiarity – the teaching that the individual and the community are equally part of the discussion. The individual today is without rights…the community has lost it’s position to the state.