Blue collar-Roman collar-white collar: U.S. Catholic involvement in labor-management controversies, 1960-1980. - book reviews

AFL-CIO American Federationist, The, April 18, 1987 by Gene Zack

Blue Collar-Roman Collar-White Collar: U.S. Catholic Involvement in Labor-Management Controversies, 1960-1980

For nearly a century, the Catholic church has stressed the dignity of workers, their right to a fair share of the wealth they help to produce and the responsibility of management to treat them with the dignity to which they are entitled as human beings.

These mandates of social consciences had their origins in the Rerum Novarum encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. They were repeated and enlarged upon in 1961 by Pope John XXIII in Mater et MAgistra, and were further underscored two decades later in the Laborem Exercens encyclical of Pope John-Paul II in 1981.

The way in which the Catholic church in America has responded to these exhortations is explored by FAther Sullivan, a professor in the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and himself an activist in the long and many-faceted struggle of the Clothing & Textile Workers against the J.P. Stevens Textile Co.

The church's role, in Sullivan's view, is to defend the rights of workingmen and women, to mobilize the community on their behalf, and to serve as a bridge between the disparate worlds of workers and their employers. Hence the title--"blue collar" signifying unionists, "white collar" signifying management and, linking the two, the "Roman collar" of the churchman.

Sullivan's case histories begin with the long struggle to end the "bracero program," under which farm workers were imported from Mexico to work in miserable surroundings and under almost slave-like conditions as stoop labor in the huge corporate farms in America--the factories in the field of the 1960s. Following on the heels of this action was the church's support of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers who battled greedy management and hostile public officials throughout the agricultural Soutwest.

The book also documents the 17-year-long struggle with J.P. Stevens before ACTWU won recognition for 3,500 workers at 10 plants in North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama; the two-year ACTWU battle that led to a contract for 2,000 members at Farah Manufacturing Co. in San Antonio, Tex.; and a number of bitter contract disputes involving the unaffiliated Mine Workers throughout Appalachia.

Some familiar figures stride through the pages of this study--among them Msgr. George Higgins of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio, Tex., Bishop Sidney Metzger of El Paso, Tex., Msgr. Francis Lally of the U.S. Catholic Conference and Rev. James L. Vizzard of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, to name just a few.

The study ends with some guidelines for parishes and dioceses about ways to get more deeply involved in preventing the escalation of labor-management disputes and to see that they are resolved within the framework of CAtholic social doctrine that stresses the rights of working people and their families.

No review would be complete without an expression of regret as to the typography employed in the study's compilation. Conceding that we live in the computer age, it is unfortunate that the material is presented in a difficult-to-read format, apparently the output of a word processor, rather than professionally typeset pages.