Dear Parishioners,

Happy Labor Day weekend! Labor Day is a creation of the labor and union movements in the U.S. It first appeared in 1882 as a "worker’s holiday" planned for demonstrations and picnics by the Central Labor Union of New York City. It developed into a nationwide demonstration to exhibit the strength and energy of the trade and labor organizers, and later as a yearly national tribute to the contributions working people have made to the prosperity and well being of our nation. Today those motives are pretty well lost and forgotten. Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer, a time for families and friends to gather, and clog the highways, picnic areas and backyards. The labor movement itself, despite reaching a high of 21.7 million members in 1978, has never really fully taken hold in America. In 1995 less than 15% of American workers belonged to unions, despite the fact that nearly all workers and all Americans have benefited from the victories of Labor movement. Here are a few items that unions fought for and made possible (Do any of these apply to you?): the 40 hour work week, unemployment insurance, pensions, and workman’s compensation. This summer Fr. Andrew Greeley wrote a column with the challenging and controversial title "Unions for Everyone." Excerpts are in today’s fold out. They make for interesting Labor Day reading.

Your Pastor,

Brian T. Joyce

The move of the American Medical Association into unionism is a sign of the times. HMOs and insurance companies are almost as bad as gunmakers and tobacco companies – they are innocent of serious ethical concerns. Doctors are well advised to try to organize against them.

Does the prospective unionization of the medical profession represent a sea change in the attitude of Americans toward unions? Liberalism of the era before the 1960’s placed unions high on the agenda of good things. Post-1960’s liberalism, upper middle class in its origins and membership, has condemned unions. They don’t seem to have noticed that the unions, both the industrial unions like the steelworkers and the white color unions like the teachers have done more for minority workers and for women than all the affirmative action programs in the country.

A couple of decades ago I had an argument with some high-tech workers for IBM. The computer maeketplace was going to become competitive, I contended. Then IBM would seek leverage by cutting its work force. Only collective bargaining could stop them. They laughed at me. Who needed a union when the salaries and benefits were so wonderful at IBM?

I wonder what they think now. IBM, like many other companies, has worked a perfectly legal swindle on the employees’ pensions that is called "cash balance," which, in effect, deprives older employees of much of the pension money they thought they had accrued. There’s nothing they can do about it. The pension plan with which they were hired was a non-binding promise, not a legal contract.

However legal the "cash balance" plans may be, I think they, are in the strict sense of Catholic social theory, a crime that calls to heaven for vengeance, defrauding the laborer of wages. However, not worrying about unions, IBM feels it can ignore the possibility of vengeance from on high. One wonders why companies choose these tactics in a time of the greatest economic boom in American history. The answer seems to be that it improves their profit picture and pleases the stock market. Greed, in other words—we can never make enough money.

Unions, whatever their flaws, are necessary today for the same reason that they were necessary in the first half of this century: They protect the individual worker (now even the medical doctor) against the untrammeled greed of the large corporation (and the small corporation, too, for that matter). It used to be that unions were necessary especially in times of recession and depression. Now it turns out that they are necessary also in times of prosperity.