The Catholic Labor Network

The Main Lesson from Chavez’ Downfall

Bill Droel — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:06:34 +0000

A charismatic leader can be important to a social improvement effort. The betterment will not last, however, if things devolve into a personality cult. The tragedy of Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) is a case study in the danger of a well-intentioned movement that allows a leader to become a quasi-divine, unaccountable force.
It is wrong to presume that farmworker unions did not exist until the saintly pioneer, Chavez, created the National Farm Workers Association in September 1962. Nor was it ever accurate to think that Chavez single-handedly brought the experience of Mexican-Americans to national attention. In fact, the laborers initially involved in striking grape vineyards were Filipino-Americans, not primarily Mexican-Americans.
Further, Chavez was not a self-developed champion, as was once imagined. In the early 1960s two priests, Fr. Donald McDonnell (1923-2012) and Fr. Thomas McCullough (1922-1989), with the permission of their bishop, became missionaries-at-large to California’s poor. They came upon Chavez and instructed him in theology and agriculture issues. In the late 1940s Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), founder of Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation, got involved with Mexican-American homeowners in California. In 1953 he hired Fred Ross (1910-1992) as his West Coast director. Ross structured the groups as the Community Service Organization. Ross identified Chavez as a leader. Within a year, Alinsky hired him too. After nearly a decade with CSO, Chavez turned his attention to farmworkers.
Larry Itliong (1913-1977), a Filipino-American, preceded Chavez in farm worker organizing, and even he was not an originator. The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers, affiliated with the CIO, was long active in the State of Washington, Alaska and California. Itliong was involved with UCAPAW and in the 1940s he led strikes among asparagus pickers. In 1959 an Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee was formed in the merged AFL-CIO. In the summer of 1965 Itliong led a successful AWOC strike in the Coachella Valley, southeast of Los Angeles.
In September 1965 Itliong gathered hundreds of workers into Filipino Community Hall in Delano, California for a vote to strike the area’s grape growers. It was a bold move and Itliong realized he needed help. As is common with ethnic groups, Filipino-Americans and Mexican-Americans did not easily mingle in the community. Plus the two ethnic groups competed for jobs. Yet Itliong approached Chavez to join in the strike. Until then, Chavez spent his time talking with farmworkers but had yet to launch any job action. Chavez realized the opportunity and joined forces with the Filipino-Americans. Thus began the now famous Delano Grape Strike and National Boycott. Four flags were prominent in the first demonstration: the U.S. flag of course plus the flag of the Philippines, of Mexico and the flag/banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In time the group’s named was changed to United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and then to United Farm Workers Union. Itliong served the new union, including as director of national boycotts. However, Itliong was soon overshadowed by Chavez.
Jill Cowan recently spoke with Itliong’s relatives for New York Times (7/25/26). They and others say Itliong was muscled out of the way by Chavez and his loyalists. Aquilina Sariano of Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles draws the correct lesson from the disconcerting disclosures about Chavez: Society tends to “venerate individuals instead of the messy collectives who make change.” There is no need to swap Chavez’ name for another name on buildings and signs. The goal remains justice for workers.
Unlike Chavez, charismatic leaders do not normally engage in deviant behavior. Still, when a pastor, a community organizer, a union official, or another group leader exhibits excessive fondness for attention, let it serve as a warning that the goal of social improvement is giving way to self-promotion. Social improvement needs those who project confident qualities that will attract and retain busy and creative followers. Yet, the genuine change agent must stay out of the limelight and nurture the collective mission. “Loyalty to Chavez” superseded the development of farmworker leaders and the external mission of the organization, Mirian Pawel concludes in her excellent biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Droel is an editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

Catholicism and AI by Bill Droel

Bill Droel — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:50:54 +0000

With hammer in hand, Martin Luther (1483-1546) struck a significant blow against clericalism and for the laity in the world by insisting on the universal call to holiness. A cobbler’s work is as valuable to God as is a priest’s, he explained. The vocation of a homemaker is no further away from God than that of a priest in the pulpit.
Subsequent leaders of the Reformation lost sight of Luther’s significant contribution on the primacy of baptism and the centrality of lay spirituality. Instead, those leaders preached the “utter depravity” of each person and claimed that the world was a playground for the devil. Temptation lurked all around. This pessimistic turn in Protestant thinking only reinforced the heaven and earth dualism, the difference between clergy and laity.
Gradually, Protestants found a way to balance the good that people can do in the world and the persistence of worldly evil. For example, successful industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) pointed to the philanthropic responsibilities for monied Christians, in his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth.”
Max Weber (1864-1920), a founder of sociology, popularized the balanced approach in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin, 1904). Certain Christian virtues (like thrift, competence, loyalty, efficiency, measured charity) reinforce habits that are important to success in a capitalist economy, he wrote. Unfortunately, the Christian side of this philosophy has been eclipsed these days by a laissez faire style of capitalism that prizes utilitarian ethics, individualism, and consumerism.
What does Catholicism have to say about work?
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were greatly disturbed by the downside of capitalism: crowded housing, dangerous occupations, child labor, in a word, misery. Their radical proposals included the abolition of private property.
Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) came to the defense of private property in his 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor. Leo XIII added, however, that capitalism must have restraints, like government regulation, labor unions, professional standards and more.
In his Theology of Work (Regnery, 1966), Fr. Marie-Dominique, OP (1895-1990) further developed Catholic doctrine about the laity at work. His perspective, like that of other contributors to Vatican II (1962-1965), was pegged to an industrial economy with its impoverishing downside.
Before his election as pope, Saint John Paul II (1920-2005) was a stonecutter in a limestone quarry. He was employed in a chemical plant and as a railroad maintenance man. He was a dramatist and a theater promoter. He was also quite fluent in the Marxist perspective on work. As pope, he wrote a September 1981 encyclical, On Human Work. It stands as a masterful Catholic reflection on the philosophy and theology of work.
Kate Ward of Marquette University brings the topic into our post-industrial context with Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (National Center for the Laity, 2026).
Ward begins with a contrast between a work-until-you-drop mindset and a Catholic worldview. Our current economy is premised on what she calls workism. It values activity in the world exclusively by “outputs that can literally be counted.” Workism is associated with long hours on the job, with unpredictable job schedules, with side hustles (aka entrepreneurship or gigs).
By contrast, as she details, Catholicism uses “an inclusive definition of work.” For starters, Catholic theology regards work as “more than what we do for pay… Unpaid work is work.” It is “any activity through which humans transform the world.”
Ward heaves aside the pessimistic idea that work is a punishment for sin. Adam and Eve were (in one translation) “dressing paradise” before the Fall and they continued to work thereafter. Rather than a punishment, work in and of itself contributes to holiness.
Though Catholicism maintains ideals about work, it is realistic; work–on the job, around the home and in the community–is irksome. Nonetheless, keep in mind that through toil and accomplishment the “primary importance” of our activity “is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces,” Ward urges.
Injustice finds its way into the world of work—again, on the job, in the home and in the community. Inadequate wages are a prime example. Yet, a person’s employer might be paying “the best they can afford,” Ward interestingly acknowledges. She goes on to explain the concept of indirect employers. These are the entities that set the terms within which a person’s direct employer (like a small business owner, a non-profit agency, or a franchise) operates—factors like government regulations, the sector’s expectations, the corporate office that controls significant variables.
Ward concludes Making a Life with applications of Catholic doctrine to caregiving, to art and leisure. She also examines food preparation from farm to table. Like all products of work, a meal is “a larger reality that can be called sacramental.” It stands “for something larger; the labor that produced it.” That labor is an extension of God’s ongoing creation and thus a meal (like other products or accomplishments) contains grace.
Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name, he says, precisely to build upon the Catholic theology of work begun in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Specifically, Leo XIV says Catholicism must reflect on an AI-economy. Kate Ward’s Making a Life is a good start to such reflection.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII (free), On Human Work by Saint John Paul II ($7) and Making a Life by Kate Ward ($18).

Catholic Schoolteachers and Unions in 2026

Catholic Labor Network — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:27:56 +0000

Since Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church has endorsed the right of workers to form trade unions and bargain collectively. In their 1986 Pastoral letter on the economy, Economic Justice for All, the US Bishops were explicit in stating that those employed by Catholic institutions, including Catholic schools, enjoy the right to form unions. So in theory, it should be easy for the 150,000 teachers and professional staff at our nation’s nearly 6,000 Catholic schools to form unions.

In practice, this is not the case. While millions of their public school counterparts belong to either the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), only a few thousand Catholic schoolteachers enjoy the protection of a union contract.

In the beginning, it wasn’t this way…

In the 1960s and 70s, teachers across the United States organized in unions to protect their rights on the job, and Catholic school teachers were no exception. Across the Northeast and Midwest in particular, Catholic school teachers flocked to unions until they hit a brick wall in 1979 called NLRB v Catholic Bishop of Chicago.

When the union organizing wave came to Chicago, Cardinal Cody was having none of it, regardless of what Catholic doctrine said about workers’ rights. And he argued that the National Labor Relations Board couldn’t make him respect the teachers’ right to organize, because his religious freedom under the First Amendment exempted him from its jurisdiction. The Supreme Court agreed that the NLRA did not cover parochial school teachers, who lost their protections under US labor law. The teachers could organize only at the sufferance of the local Bishop, and very few Bishops were enthusiastic enough about Catholic Social Teaching to tolerate a schoolteacher union. NEA and AFT walked away from organizing the Catholic schools as a hopeless cause.

In a few cases – most notably, New York – states attempted to step up and protect the schoolteachers’ union rights. And in several locations where unions had become established before 1979, Bishops were sufficiently respectful of Catholic Social Teaching to refrain from busting the young unions, leaving the nation with a string of isolated teachers’ unions, mostly based in Diocesan schools.

The biggest single concentration is found in the Archdiocese of New York, where the Federation of Catholic Teachers represents teachers at some 87 Elementary and High School Teachers throughout the Archdiocese that bargain as the Association of Catholic Schools. The FCT is affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) and is currently working without a contract as the two sides try to reach agreement at the bargaining table.

Most of the remaining union teachers came together in an independent union, the National Association of Catholic School Teachers (NACST). Why an independent union? The NEA and AFT have endorsed abortion rights and oppose school vouchers; as an independent union they can chart a more appropriate course for a Catholic teachers’ union on these issues. The largest affiliate is Association of Catholic Teachers Local 1776 in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Other major affiliates are located in Hartford, Connecticut; St. Louis, Missouri; Camden, New Jersey; and Cleveland, Ohio.

If you are a Catholic school teacher who is interested in organizing a union or association in your place of work, you have your work cut out for you! But you are doing the right thing, even if your principal or Bishop doesn’t appreciate this at first. We invite you to contact the Catholic Labor Network, where we will put you in touch with NACST or the FCT for a consultation.

Loyola Marymount University Update

Catholic Labor Network — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:22:47 +0000

During the last week of February, a delegation of members of the Catholic Labor Network, non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty from Loyola Marymount University, LMU students, and partners from Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) gathered in prayerful solidarity to deliver a printed copy of the petition to the Jesuit leadership at LMU.

They were received by Edward (Eddie) Siebert, S.J., Rector of the Jesuit community at Loyola Marymount University and Secretary of the Board. Fr. Siebert greeted the delegation, listened attentively to the concerns shared by faculty and students, and accepted the petition on behalf of the community.

The delegation respectfully requested that he pass the petition along directly to President Poon and the members of the LMU Board of Trustees. Fr. Siebert declined that specific request.

While this was not the outcome we had hoped for, the exchange was marked by civility and honest engagement. We are grateful for the opportunity to speak face-to-face and to bear witness to the dignity of the NTT faculty and the Church’s social teaching in a spirit of dialogue.

As our petition stated, Catholic Social Teaching is clear that the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively is not a political concession but a moral principle grounded in human dignity. The Church has affirmed this teaching consistently, and the Catholic Labor Network exists precisely to help our institutions live more deeply into that identity.

The LMU non-tenure-track faculty continue to seek a return to the bargaining table in good faith. Their desire is not conflict but dialogue–not division, but a university community that reflects its Catholic mission in both word and practice.

Catholic Labor Network Regarding St. John’s University (NY)

Catholic Labor Network — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:19:12 +0000

For as long as the Catholic Labor Network has existed, St. John’s University in Queens, New York, has served as a witness to Catholic Social Teaching on labor and work by engaging in collective bargaining with the union chosen by its faculty, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Thus we are shocked and saddened to learn that the University leadership has elected to terminate this practice and announced it will no longer recognize or bargain with the union.

Since Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church has endorsed the right of workers to form unions and bargain collectively. Lest there be any confusion, the US Bishops clarified in their 1986 Pastoral letter on the economy, Economic Justice for All, that employees of Catholic institutions enjoy this right. “All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with the institution through whatever association or organization they freely choose [353].”

This clear teaching is why the other leading Catholic institutions in New York City recognize and bargain with unions representing their employees:

The Archdiocese of New York Catholic Schools bargains with the teachers represented by the Federation of Catholic Teachers, OPEIU;
Archcare bargains with CNAs and Home Health Care Aides are represented by SEIU 1199
Catholic hospitals across New York bargain with the New York State Nurses Association and SEIU 1199; and
Fordham University bargains with clerical employees represented by the OPEIU, adjunct faculty are represented by SEIU 200, and graduate assistants are represented by CWA 1104.

The Catholic Labor Network urges St. John’s to honor Catholic Social Teaching and follow the example of these other Catholic institutions and return to the bargaining table with the unions selected by the St. John’s faculty.

The Political Machine

Bill Droel — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:13:12 +0000

Machine Politics and the Church by Bill Droel

The Catholic church and the political machine had a symbiotic relationship in Chicago and elsewhere for many years. So argues Dominic Pacyga in his latest book: Clout City (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Chicago politics was “a mixture of the sacred and the profane, a combination of cultural and religious roots and more worldly pursuits,” he writes. “Chicago is a secular, capitalist city, but one with a religious core.” Pacyga includes synagogues and Jewish organizations on the religious side. Both the machine and the church/synagogue were compassionate alternatives to the Protestant establishment, popularly called downtown or big corporate.

Within his timeframe, 1870 to 2023, Pacyga profiles many of the key actors in the machine, most of whom were Democrats. The machine’s efficient years were 1930-1965 when it was largely associated with Richard J Daley (1902-1976), who served 21 years as Chicago mayor and 23 years as the party’s chair in the county. His son Richard M Daley, now in his mid-80s, subsequently served 22 years as mayor.

The machine was hierarchical. The boss relied on faithful commissioners to oversee city services. With rare exceptions the boss also controlled the city council. The council member (called the alderman in Chicago lingo) was paired with a ward committee person. The next level (covering maybe four to a dozen blocks) was the responsibility of a precinct captain, whose day job was often with the city.

The machine had a practical communitarian mindset in contrast to society’s dominant philosophy of individual achievement. A collective mentality was nurtured, in part, by ethnic and religious culture, says Pacyga. He uses De La Salle High School in Chicago’s near southside as an example. It was “a political incubator” for machine politicians, Pacyga details. Five mayors including the Daley’s graduated from De La Salle. Plus, the school educated two county presidents and “countless other politicians, judges and city officials [and] numerous businesspeople, police officers, firefighters and a host of city workers.” That high school stressed order, hierarchy and loyalty. It “encouraged Catholic attitudes toward fairness, duty and sin, often in deep contrast to the rampant individualism and unbridled capitalism” of Chicago.

Of course, the machine had corruption. However, neighborhood people overlooked it, as long as the community at large benefited from jobs, emergency assistance, license considerations, snow removal, trash collection, fire and police protection. The machine “existed side by side with an approach to political governance that derived from and centered on the communalism of Chicago’s immigrant and working-class communities.”

A similar description of New York’s machine, called Tammany Hall, is found in Terry Golway’s Machine Made (W.W. Norton, 2014). Again, political corruption was taken for granted. But for New York’s immigrants, especially those from Ireland, Tammany was able “to mediate the capriciousness of laissez-faire capitalism.” It delivered jobs and social services to working families in a respectful manner, untainted by paternal noblesse oblige.

As in Chicago, the New York machine relied implicitly on a foundation in the Catholic experience. Golway devotes several pages to Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), describing him as “aggressive and political to his very marrow.” Hughes, originally from Ireland, explained the feeling of Irish and other immigrants: For the first five days of my life, I was “on social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire. Then I was baptized as a Catholic and became a second-class citizen.”

In time the machine model of urban politics disintegrated, Pacyga says. The corruption became too enriching for too few while service delivery declined. Further, the post-1960s reform movement within the Democratic Party drew its leaders into elite circles. They associated with tech barons and favored focus groups over the word on the street. The Democrats supported several cultural causes foreign to the Catholic sensibility. Suburbanization was the big factor in the machine’s decline. As immigrants left the city, they took on aspirations of the upper-class. Their Catholicism, if it remained at all, was like the individualism of evangelicals.

Nowadays, does a local politician or a pastor have any influence on one’s difficulties with health insurance or with internet providers or with immigration policies or employment opportunities? Does the notion of community have any traction in a society where the sum of striving individuals is the ethical norm? Is a government or church model based on services in any way compelling to today’s young adults? Should there be a new machine and what form would it take?

Droel edits a printed newsletter on faith and work: INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

St Clare’s Hospital Retirees Win Damages in Pension Fight

Catholic Labor Network — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:10:58 +0000

It’s a sad reality that too often Catholic institutions deny their employees their just rights, and do so with impunity because our cherished First Amendment freedoms prevent the federal government from sanctioning them. We hear about this most often when Catholic schoolteachers or adjunct faculty seek to organize in unions. Employees of Catholic hospitals enjoy the protections of the National Labor Relations Board – but their pensions are not regulated by the ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) laws that protect other private sector workers.

ERISA requires most employers to set aside sufficient funds in advance in a trust to pay workers’ retirement benefits, so if the company goes bankrupt the workers still get their pension. But in 2017 the Supreme Court ruled that religious hospitals are not necessarily bound by ERISA, and administrators of Catholic hospitals have been known to fill their employees’ pension accounts with IOUs. In the event of a bankruptcy, dedicated hospital workers are left holding the bag, and the bag is empty.

That’s what happened at St Clare’s Hospital in the Diocese of Albany. The hospital closed in 2008 with a badly underfunded pension plan. In 2019 the pension fund ran out of money and more than 1,100 nurses, EMTs, orderlies and others lost their much-needed pension checks. The workers filed a civil suit against the St. Clare’s and several officers of the corporation, including recently retired Bishop Scharfenberger. Last week a jury awarded $54.2 million in civil damages to the defrauded workers. Bishop Scharfenberger, assigned 10% of the liability, promptly filed for bankruptcy himself.

For more on the story, read this account in the National Catholic Register.

Disturbing Development at St John’s University

Catholic Labor Network — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:10:20 +0000

For decades, St John’s University in New York City stood as an almost unique example of a private sector university whose tenured faculty enjoyed collective bargaining rights. Today it appears that this shining example of labor relations on the model of Catholic Social Teaching is in danger, and the consequences could threaten the union rights of thousands of Catholic school teachers across New York state.

Back in the 1970s Catholic school teachers across the country began to organize in unions – as is their right under Catholic Social Doctrine. However, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago took a hard line against the lay faculty, refusing to recognize their union and claiming exemption from the National Labor Relations Act under the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. The irony of claiming religious freedom in order to violate the tenets of the faith was seemingly lost on the Supreme Court, which duly ruled that Catholic school teachers had no legal protections under the NLRA. Catholic school teacher unions became the exception rather than the rule, existing only where the local Bishop tolerated them out of fidelity to Church teaching.

In a handful of states, state legislatures stepped into the gap where the NLRA had stood. The most prominent is New York, which gave the state’s Public Employee Relations Board jurisdiction over the Catholic schools (and universities) no longer covered under the NLRA. Teachers can vote for or against unionization in PERB elections and teachers at large Catholic school systems like those of the Archdiocese of New York or the Diocese of Buffalo enjoy union rights and contract protections. But developments at St. John’s could endanger those rights.

When the AAUP filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against St. John’s with the PERB over a contract bargaining dispute, the university went further than denying the university was engaged in an Unfair Labor Practice, raising the issue of First Amendment protections. If the university is successful in litigating this point, the faculty at St John’s and at Catholic schools across New York state could lose their union rights altogether.

For more on the dispute at St John’s, read this account by Brian Fraga in the National Catholic Reporter.

Bipartisan House Majority Votes to Restore Federal Employee Union Rights

Catholic Labor Network — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:09:48 +0000

On December 11, a bipartisan majority of House members voted to approve the Protect America’s Workforce Act, a bill that would restore the union rights of hundreds of thousands of federal government employees. The vote was 231-195, with 20 Republicans joining all the House Democrats to pass the legislation.

The bill was necessary because in March 2025 President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order stripping most federal employees of their union rights, citing a dubious claim of “national security.” The Catholic Labor Network responded with a letter to the President urging him to reconsider and respect the rights of workers to organize. To date, the Catholic Labor Network has not received a response from the administration.

The Protect America’s Workforce Act now moves to consideration in the Senate.

Nurses at Texas Catholic Hospitals Vote for Union Representation

Catholic Labor Network — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:09:12 +0000

In an election held December 9th and 10th, registered nurses at St. Joseph Health in Texas’s Brazos Valley voted to join National Nurses United. The union reports that it will now represent “some 750 registered nurses who are part of St. Joseph Health Regional, with hospitals in Bryan and College Station, and three critical access facilities: St. Joseph Health Burleson Hospital in Caldwell, St. Joseph Health Grimes Hospital in Navasota, and St. Joseph Health Madison Hospital in Madisonville.”

Congratulations to the nurses on their win! We pray that the hospitals, part of the CommonSpirit network, and the nurses quickly reach agreement on a first contract.