Ms. [SHARON] HOURIGAN: I saw the teachers that were, you know, sitting in broken chairs and, you know, falling out of them half the time, and they would spend their money on supplies for the classroom. They would take their free time to tutor the kids, and it was just incredibly appalling to me that after all of this time, after 30 years of this kind of service, that they would be treated so shabbily ”” just appalling.
[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Denying the union was not a risky venture because the diocese knew the law, as it is now, is on its side. In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Catholic teachers were not protected by the National Labor Relations Act because they weren’t included in it. But when the act was written, the vast majority of Catholic teachers were nuns and priests. Now it’s different. Today nine out of 10 teachers are lay teachers.
In a last ditch effort to get union protection under state law, the Pennsylvania House is debating legislation, known as House Bill 2626, which is similar to laws already enacted in three states. It would force the diocese to bargain collectively with teachers’ unions in religious schools of all faiths and allow them to bring grievances to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board ”” a bill the diocese strongly opposes.
Prof. [BRIAN] BENESTAD: If the Catholic schools are required to recognize the union, then you’re going to have government, you know, intervening in the school, making decisions about whether the bishops’ invocation of doctrine is really genuine.
This is a hard one. When you have clergy and religious doing the teaching, they take vows of obedience and submission, but their bishop or order has an enduring responsibility to see that their material needs are met for the rest of their lives. No bishop assumes such a responsibility for secular teachers in schools under his charge.
By the same token, it seems reasonable to suspect that many of those who gravitate to leadership of teachers’ unions may have other agendas than simple bread-and-butter issues. Most bishops are grappling with school systems of which Catholic parents expect a great deal and yet for which they are increasingly unwilling to provide the necessary funds. To tie the hands of a bishop in terms of school consolidation is to run the risk of complete collapse.
To ask a bishop to be both a party to negotiations over terms and conditions of service for secular employment and also the spiritual overseer of those affected does seem like a conflict of interest, however. Bishops are human and have likes and dislikes of which they may sometimes not even be conscious. Perhaps a way could be found to negotiate that involves a “management” representative from another diocese and a formula that stops short of formal union recognition but allows for teachers to be represented by spokesmen of their own choosing.
Parenthetically, I would note that after a semester of teaching at a local university that exploits its large part-time complement (most of whom teach the maximum number of courses that will still allow them to be classified as part-time) with rates of pay half what they give their full-timers and no part-time benefits, I’m much more sympathetic to the idea of teachers’ unions than I used to be.
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