"...for the Union Makes Us Free!"
And God said to Adam and Eve: Get out and get a job! Actually more poetically worded in the original. Since the days of gathers and hunters, labor has become as varietal as wines: slave labor, peasant, unskilled and skilled, professional, volunteer, artistic, athletic and mental
from the writings of Fr. Bill O'donnell, the "O'D."
Church Bulletin – Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 5, 1999, Yr.‘A'Why the Union?
The "Holy Day" of Labor, every first Monday in September, celebrates organized versus unorganized labor. Labor leaders in the Bay Area call me their ‘Labor Priest'. Head of labor in San Francisco keeps dogging me to publish the ‘prayers' I give on picket lines, demonstrations and rallies, because they are generally based on the insistence, indeed God insisting, that every worker has a right to be respected and appreciated. To grow into full humanity the worker must be compensated to the degree that he and she can have a living deserving of their God given dignity. When the employer out of greed cheats the employee out of a decent living, then all are offended, God, the victim, and the ‘boss' as well for playing the cheat, thief and exploiter. Society becomes sick from this moral imbalance. And it's this lopsided gimping along that is the primary cause of violence. Hate begets hate and escalates, until some justice prevails
And can never prevail except for the employer who honors workers' dignity, and not cop-out with ‘I pay the prevailing wage'. Business competition doesn't allow for respect for the worker; that brings us to unions that CEOs hate, being forced to share control over wages and working conditions
Sometimes my ‘prayer' is provocative; for example: let us pray for the bastards; a bastard is a person who knows no father, nor mother and therefore knows no brother nor sister. We pray for the wisdom and the power to get the bastards to see how destructively unconnected he or she is from humanity; it's our vocation to convert them to fatherhood, motherhood to sisterhood and brotherhood; that's our calling; and when the bastards refuse to see the light, then we have the moral obligation not to cooperate in management's inhumanity; translated: strike; boycott
Fr. Luigi, 77, worked in the Vatican for thirty years and became a ‘whistle-blower' when he co-wrote an expose of the lying, cheating and various clerical misbehavings, sexual and pecuniary. His primary intention as he states in his book "Gone With The Wind In The Vatican" is to encourage reform. He charges- careerism, the secretive selection of bishops, Freemasons in the Vatican and the lack of a union for Vatican employees
Now if I were Pope I would let the employees form a union, which they undoubtedly would, and then watch the other reforms fly. Granted unions are as subject to corruption as any human organization, but from my experience, the best chance of reformation is unionization
Life for me began with farmworking, cowboying, ditch digging; finally parish priest work. (Teamsters once asked me about organizing priests; I opined: never; we're middle management. All our clerical workers, yes; they need organizing. The Temos declined; sacrilege or politically unfeasible they felt)
My gospel basis for fighting along side Labor? I sweated this out of Jesus' Last Supper prayer "that all may be one" and "where there are three gathered in my name, etc."...............The O'D
Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – September 5, 1999...Yr.‘A' Workers Rights Labor Day, a day for plain talk like the waitress in the story that presidential candidate, Bill Bradley, told recently to a union convention. Two factory workers, finishing their night shift went into a cafe nearby for breakfast. The waitress who look like she'd been there for thirty years approached her two customers with: "Well, what are ya havin'? One said: "Danish and coffee". The other guy said: "Bacon and eggs, please and a kind word!" She shrugged while writing their orders and left for the kitchen. When she returned she gave one guy the Danish and coffee and the other the bacon and eggs with: "Anything else ?" The bacon and eggs guy asked: "No kind word?" The waitress on leaving their table paused and then replied: "I wouldn't eat those eggs, if I were you!" It's plain talk time being Labor Day weekend as well as in the spirit of gospel
Homily – Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 5, 1999, Yr.‘A'Workers' Rights
Since the mid-1800s the giant corporations have seized the country's democratic institutions. In 1873 Chief Justice Ryan of Wisconsin's Supreme Court warned: "There is looming up a new and dark power...the enterprises of this country are aggregating vast corporate contributions of unexampled capital...not for economic conquests only, but for political power...which shall rule- wealth or man; which shall lead- money or intellect; who shall fill public stations- educated and patriotic freemen, or feudal serfs of corporate capital?" President Lincoln in the 1860s: "I see a crisis in the future...that causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Today for an example The US Department of Agriculture includes toxic food growing and production practices under the label of organic which destroys soil fertility. No private citizen lobbied for this
The only real constituents of Congress are corporate persons who buy the votes that will profit them. Corporations now have more rights than you or I. They don't have to influence the political process, they are the political process. They got a law passed that allows their corporations to sue local and national governments who interfere with their business. One company has sued Canada for $251 mill. for the "crime" of banning a toxic gasoline additive
The individual is hardly a citizen any longer, but consumers, workers and taxpayers. Use to be you can't fight city hall; now it's more like you can't fight the corporation
Corporations claim free speech rights, but not for citizens. (Oprah Winfrey was sued by the American Cattleman's Association for saying on her show she would never eat another hamburger); corporations claim property rights, political corporation rights as well as personhood rights; unlike actual persons, they have no duty or responsibility to place, people or the Constitution. Tell the average person that corporations are considered persons, they'll think you're nuts. This makes people responsible to corporations rather the other way round as intended by the Constitution that corporations are responsible to the people
So powerful have corporations become that they define the culture as well as the economy. They define how we resist them. They define our aspirations. They write our history; they get us to speak their language. Corporations keep citizens groups always on the defensive, fighting corporate abuses one at a time, rather than challenging corporate authority to govern; all we do is fight the symptoms
What's all my ranting today have to do with gospel? Today's gospel is relevant. If your brother/sister sin against you, for example your employer, resist; go to the boss; if not satisfied, go higher; Go to your union. No union? Get legal advice. Talking to a carpenter recently and he was complaining how he got fired. "What reasons did the boss give?" I asked him. He said: "I don't have to give you a reason. Get off the property". "You have no union?" I ask him. He said: "I hate unions." I said: "The next boss can do you the same way if you hate unions." Treat him (corporations) as you would a gentile or tax collector (Matthew, this gospel writer, was a tax collector and he knew well how they abused the citizen). This advice Jesus gives might be moral justification for the strike and or boycott
"Where there are two or three gathered in my name"...Legally in this country there has to be five employees before they have the right to a union. Incidentally farmworkers and domestics have no right to form their own union. Cesar Chavez won that right in California and Harry Bridges in Hawaii, but in the rest of the nation corporations have no legal duty to recognize farmworkers who want their own union
The social and religious struggle essentially comes down to: Are we orphans of Corporate America or Children of the Kingdom?
On this labor Day weekend I don't know how to talk any plainer.
