The Church’s Union Challenge

Among the challenges for those possessing a free-market mold of prudential mind is the Church’s continuing support for labor unions. Some of us see public-sector unions as the source of perpetual strife within our communities, private-sector unions as a force behind fading American industries, and both as a stultifying political clamp. In general, we hear in the hum of organized labor tones that are incompatible with individual initiative and freedom.

Such anti-union views fit awkwardly with the Church’s encouragement of solidarity, which seeks to join individuals toward a charitable common cause. To that end, Benedict challenges supporters of unions to shift their focus to “wider concerns.” “[N]ational labour unions, which tend to limit themselves to defending the interests of their registered members, should turn their attention to those outside their membership,” especially oppressed workers in developing countries.

Catholic theology enters the political mix with the holding that God works through the individual conscience. What organized labor does, in the ideal, is to combine the power of individuals to construct a stronger, more substantive assertion of human conscience. In the workplace, the purpose is to counterbalance the economic power of business leaders or the political power of government officials.

The problem is that these sources of power are not parallel. A company gains influence by increasing the importance of its products and services to the market. The source of a business’s power is therefore manipulable as a means to an end and constrained by regulation, competition, and employee morale. The source of a government’s power is the entire society, and we rightly constrain its actions through civic structure. The parallel dynamic and constraints for unions are complicated by the doctrine that people — union members — must always be ends in themselves, with inviolable rights to pursue their own interests. And it’s a much more comfortable (and remunerative) project to extort money from local communities than to fight foreign tyrannies on behalf of a distant workforce.

A more important consequence of creating powerful union entities is that they must filter all of their human power through the determinations of union leaders, whose consciences become targets for corruption. Their members, in turn, become the means by which the union leaders acquire their seats at the leadership table, where they may pursue their own interests and political agendas.

For all this risk, union action still doesn’t change conscience; it changes calculation. Owners and political leaders who operate their organizations in conscientious fashion need not face workers’ frustrated assertions of power, and those who do require such assertions are not likely to make the net most moral adjustments to it. In the private sector, they will partner with unions in advocating the passage of their costs onto others in the form of taxes, regulations, and mandates, hindering competition and harming non-union workers. In the public sector, they directly decrease services and increase taxation.

In the related context of global governance, Pope Benedict rightly insists on “subsidiarity,” because government, he writes, “must be organized in a subsidiary and stratified way, if it is not to infringe upon freedom.” God works slowly through the many, but the tools of evil engorge from the top down, so we must divide power to balance temptations and allow human conscience to flourish.

Although the structure of unions appears subsidiary and democratic, with local branches and tiered elections, they are explicitly organized in opposition to non-members on whom they seek to impose terms, whether businesses or taxpayers. A better model, more conducive to human integrity, would make it possible for workers to form collectives, but without increasing the ease with which they may be collected by somebody else. In other words, the local union would be self-initiated and exist wholly within the organization. The relationship with the employer would thereby be cooperative and specific to its mission, without the baggage of politically connected national labor movements.

Such a model of unionization the whole of the Western Church could unite in exporting to developing nations without fear that the corrupting would overwhelm the corruptible — whichever side is which.

A carpenter by day, Justin Katz is administrator of AnchorRising.com, an independent media and conservative analysis blog, and a monthly contributor to the Rhode Island Catholic.