A pro-labor priest reflects on Labor Day
In these highlights from an interview with Catholic San Francisco Assistant Editor Rick DelVecchio, Jesuit Father George Schultze, an adjunct faculty member in moral theology and director of field education at St. Patrick’s Seminary and University, reflects on Labor Day in light of Catholic social teaching. Father Schultze considers the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s teaching on the relationship between moral principles and political choices. He gives a close reading of Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical on the economy, “Caritas in Veritate” (“Charity in Truth”), which underlines the Church’s traditional support of unions but urges unions to look beyond their narrow interests to advance integral human development globally. Spiritual, not just material, growth is essential to human development, the Holy Father states.
Father Schultze, who grew up in a middle-class union household in Mountain View, describes himself as “a baby boomer who has with age become aware of the demands of life and the responsibility it requires on the part of all of us – workers, employers, and consumers.” He supports worker rights but is vocal about his disagreements with unions on political choices and sometimes tactics. But at a time when workers enjoy a declining share of U.S. economic productivity, Father Schultze also is critical of capital’s role in the nation’s growing income inequality. The questions and answers presented here have been edited for clarity. Contact Father Schultze at georgeeschultze@aol.com.
What are your thoughts on Labor Day in light of Cardinal Bernardin’s teaching?
Catholic social teaching is really a seamless garment, as Cardinal Bernardin was often quoted as saying. Where we do find some confusion today in the area of the dignity of the human person and respect for life, is that there is a wholeness in how we see life from its conception to a natural death. And that means that in the promotion of work life and a good economy we are concerned about the housing of people and the education of God’s sons and daughters, and the health care they receive, but we’re also concerned about life from its conception; God has given children to us, they are foreigners in a foreign land, and we treat them with respect, so abortion is always wrong. People wrongly infer from the “seamless garment” metaphor that abortion is just one issue among other social issues. Cardinal Bernardin was staunchly pro-life. From the womb we pass into the period of education and adult life and work life, retired life, to the point of death. A good unionist understands this and the union itself promotes the wages, the benefits, retirement and all of the other needs that a human being has in his or her life. This means that unions and their members have to take an active role in promoting life.
How does the Holy Father treat these issues in his economic encyclical?
Openness to life is the center of true development according to Pope Benedict. When a society moves toward the denial or suppression of life it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good. So whatever we do as workers, as members of a larger economy, it’s essential that we see our relationship to Christ. I think the tension that we feel is that we are Christian humanists, we are acknowledging the reason we possess but we are also acknowledging our dependence on Christ, on God, and this distinguishes us from secular unionists who don’t see that relationship to the transcendent. And the tension we face as Christians is we do have desires to have good homes and adequate incomes but at the same time the tension on the other side is how do we transcend ourselves, that living is not only about us, but that good living is universal, so we are not only self-centered and egotistical.
Nowhere is this tension more deeply felt than on marriage and family issues. What are your thoughts?
One of my concerns about the labor movement is that many of the more progressive unions have begun to promote same-sex marriage, to invest resources into changing our society’s understanding of marriage. The California State Federation of Labor and at least three Bay Area labor councils came out against Proposition 8 and the parental notification initiative – initiatives that the bishops supported. I would have to go back to my basic understanding of who we are as human beings and perhaps play on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about divorce, he said that in the beginning, meaning in Genesis, man and woman were made for each other. The two are bound together. It’s the primordial sacrament of our faith, and we can defend it by our natural law understanding of procreation and the complementarity that happens in the family of a man and a woman, the creation of new life, the birth of children and their formation. My basic disagreement with the labor movement is that the activists feel that it’s simply a civil right, that somehow having children and being in a same-sex household makes it all the same. In fact it doesn’t. You need a man and a woman to create life. Children have a right to a mother and father. If we further diminish or dilute what we understand marriage to be, we are going to see a further pulling apart of the social fabric.
Another disagreement you have with unions is on school vouchers.
By and large public employees have been doing better for awhile. Private employers providing retirement plans to their employees have declined at least 20 percent in the last 10 years. And that’s not the case in the public sector. Public sector employees are often lifetime employees. In the case of teachers, they’re tenured in some cases. They’re very hard to move because of the monopolistic position they hold. And this is where I would also make a political point with the National Education Association and the California Federation of Teachers. They adamantly oppose school vouchers in California. We live in a pluralistic society. You’d think they would permit pluralistic education. But again and again the teachers unions will fight any attempt to provide vouchers that would be supportive of parochial schools. So they allow no choice when it comes to education, and yet these same unions are putting money into Emily’s List, same-sex marriage causes and other areas where a great many Californians are simply not on the same page. In some cases they want their cake and eat it, too. They’re whipsawing the public, and this is unfair.
What can individual unionists do if they disagree with their unions’ political choices?
There is a Supreme Court precedent-setting case called Communication Workers of America vs. Beck. It happened in the mid-1980s, and the Supreme Court ruled that a union member can ask that his or her portion of dues not be used for political purposes. Some researchers have estimated that up to 80 percent of dues – although this is probably an extreme number – are being used for political purposes, not for direct collective bargaining agreement purposes. So that’s something Catholics should realize. It would be useful for them to know if they ever want to challenge the use of their dues for causes that aren’t supporting their Catholic values. The unions have a form they can ask you to fill out saying you’d like to have your dues money not be used for political purposes, for ideological purposes. It’s the law.
In addition to your disagreements with unions on moral issues you have had your differences with them on tactics.
The problem with some labor organizers is that they want you to come out and support them but it’s simply a short-term relationship to get something done. There is no reflective thinking about what does this mean, like the Holy Father is doing in his encyclical. It’s like, I need these people because my union says we need them as members and the employer is unjust and you’re a priest, get out here. I’ve told them, no, I couldn’t do it, because I think labor sometimes strong-arms. At the same time I support the Employee Free Choice Act because the National Labor Relations Act is not protecting workers. Labor organizers and employers can be equally nefarious in trying to get a win. At times some organizers will tell you Catholic social teaching says to support worker associations and then when it comes to culture-war issues their unions go off in a direction diametrically opposed to Church values. The question is: are you my friend or my enemy? Some people say we can be friends but maybe we have to be enemies at other times. That’s baloney.
You are tough on unions but also a harsh critic of unequal income distribution in the U.S. economy.
We’re all workers, whether we’re employers or employees. But sometimes there are structural injustices that occur, and one that recently crossed my computer screen is the great inequity in terms of salaries. There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that said highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay. This means that a third of the total pay in the United States went to highly paid employees. And at the same time banks, having engaged in unsound and unwise decisions around mortgages and lending, are asking the public to bail them out. Again and again whether it’s the outsourcing of work without dialogue with workers as happened in the 1980s with plant closures or the failure of businesses to accept the workers’ right to representation, people on the employer side, too, at times engage in unethical or unwise decisions in terms of the common good. We have to be evenhanded in all of this. There are many good employers and we’re dependent on them and they are experiencing great tension and turmoil during this downturn, but at the same time we have to work for justice as the pope’s recent encyclical says.
By Rick DelVecchio
From September 4, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
