Louisville Process Theology Network

Church and Labor

“Why do roughly 70 percent of European workers have
collective bargaining coverage while only 13 percent of their American
counterparts do?

Religion is a surprisingly big part of the answer. In Europe,
politics evolved hand in hand with forms of Christianity – especially
Catholicism – that were sensitive to ‘labor’s dignity in a religious sense.’

As a result, in many parts of Europe, natural associations
such as family, churches, and labor unions were incorporated into public
structures and protected from market competition because they were seen as
‘vital instruments of common good.’

In the United States, however, politics and religion
developed separately --- the Constitution, after all, establishes a strict
division between church and state. And that is one of the main reasons unions
are so enfeebled, observes Lew Day, author of ‘God’s Economy: Faith-Based
Initiatives and the Caring State.’

American culture just isn’t set up for unions. In the United
States, individual rights are the bedrock of politics, not natural associations.
That unions exist at all is due in large part to influential Catholic Americans
inspired by the labor protections the Vatican began to endorse in the late
19^th Century.

Collective bargaining and fair wages and hours can be traced
to their activism. Other union friendly policies they supported got the axe in
the decades following the New Deal.

Unions in the United States are further hobbled by the fact
that the majority of progressives, the most labor friendly group in US politics,
maintain a studious distance from religious causes. Only a handful of groups,
such as Sojourners and Faith in Public Life, have melded religion and the
pursuit of progressive social welfare policies.

If progressives really want to see labor unions flourish,
Daly says, they need to re-think their commitment to ‘pervasive institutional
and legal secularism.’ Progressives should draw on ‘the authority of the social
faith’ they inherit from the great religious forebears of collective bargaining,
social insurance, and the just wage.

Unions are weak in the United States for a plethora of
reasons, he says, but progressive should not ‘underestimate the potential for
coordinating family, labor and religion in a new common path.’"

From ‘Democracy: A Journal of Ideas’, Fall 2011