Too—low salaries will force school closings, workshop told - Carol Fowler - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, March 23, 2001

By CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

Catholic leaders who fear that raising the salaries of teachers in Catholic schools might cause some schools to close must face the fact that a teacher shortage will force closings if salaries do not improve, the director of personnel services for the Chicago archdiocese said March 12.

Carol Fowler, who coordinates the work of 14 agencies that oversee human resources functions in one of the nation's largest archdioceses, spoke on "Justice in the Workplace" at a national gathering in Chicago of women in diocesan leadership positions.

The three-day, invitation-only meeting was convened by the U.S. bishops' Committee on Women in Society and in the Church.

Fowler, who is president-elect of the National Association of Church Personnel Administrators, said the Chicago archdiocese has about 6,000 teachers in its Catholic schools, "and we pay them terribly" -- about half the salary of teachers in local public schools.

Whenever there is a serious move to fix the problem, she said, "we come up against [the question of] how many schools will we have to close." But it is more likely that school closings will come when there are no longer teachers willing to work for low pay, she added.

"We're not going to survive unless we do something about it," Fowler said.

Her workshop presentation focused on issues of compensation and benefits for church employees and opened with a quote from Pope John Paul II's Laborem Exercens that said "a just wage is the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole economic system."

"It seems to me that what applies to the world should also apply to the church," Fowler said.

Even though the church is exempt from certain labor laws -- such as unemployment compensation and the Family and Medical Leave Act -- in some jurisdictions Fowler said she did not always think it was just for the church as employer to take those exemptions.

On canon law's requirement that workers receive compensation adequate to support a family, Fowler said views differ, on whether this means married employees should receive more than single ones.

The position of the National Association of Church Personnel Administrators was in support of equal pay for equal work, she said, but it holds that "benefits can be differentiated according to family status."

One way for dioceses "to start to address the inequality of benefits" was to offer a menu of benefits from which employees could choose, Fowler said. For example, a single employee who did not need health care for dependents could choose long-term disability insurance.

Pension plans vary widely from diocese to diocese, but many still operate on the outdated assumption that female employees will not be dependent on their own pensions but are "second-income women" whose retirement will be funded mainly by their husbands' pension plans, Fowler said.

Asked about the likelihood that pension plans could become portable from one diocese to another, Fowler said, "Dioceses don't want to lose control of millions of dollars in pension plans."

A solution might be the use of "defined contribution plans," to which both the employer and employee contribute but which stays under the control of the employee, she said.

Fowler also urged dioceses to provide employees in ministerial positions with annual "retreat time." In the Chicago achdiocese, she said, each such employee receives five days of retreat time every year.