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Blue Collar-Roman Collar-White Coll...

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

For nearly a hundred the Catholic church has forceed the dignity of workers, their right to a fair share of the wealth they help to exhibit 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 through Pope Leo XIII in 1891 They were repeated and enlarged with in 1961 by Pope John XXIII in Mater et MAgistra, and were further underscored couple decades later in the Laborem Exercen encyclical of pontiff John-Paul II in 1981.

The way in which the Catholic ecclesiastical authority in America has responded to these exhortations is explored by dint of FAther Sullivan, a professor in the Dept of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and himself an activist in the in extent and many-faceted struggle of the Clothing & Textile Workers against the JP Steven Textile Co

The church's part in Sullivan's view, is to plead the rights of workingmen and women to mobilize the community forward their behalf, and to be of use to as a bridge between the disparate worlds of workers and their employer Hence the title--"blue collar" signifying unionists, "white collar" signifying management and, linking the sum of two units the "Roman collar" of the churchman.

Sullivan's case histories begin with the extended struggle to end the "bracero program," in a less degree than which farm workers were imported from Mexico to work in miserable surroundings and in a less degree than almost slave-like conditions as stoop labor in the very great corporate farms in America--the factories in the field of the 1960 Following forward the heels of this action was the church's support of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers who battled voracious management and hostile public officials from one extremity to the other of the agricultural Soutwest.

The part also documents the 17-year-long have a contest with J.P. Stevens before ACTWU won recognition for 3500 workers at 10 plants in North Carolina, toward the south Carolina and Alabama; the two-year ACTWU battle that l to a contract for 2000 members at Farah Manufacturing Co in San Antonio, Tex; and a number of bitter contract disputes involving the unaffiliated Mine Workers from first to last Appalachia.

Some familiar figures stride [i]or[/i] part of to the other the pages of this study--among them Msgr George Higgins of the National Catholic Welfare interview Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio, Tex Bishop Sidney Metzger of El Paso, Tex Msgr Francis Lally of the U Catholic colloquy and Rev. James L Vizzard of the National Catholic Rural Life conversation to name just a few

The subject of attention ends with some guidelines for parishes and dioceses about ways to learn more deeply involved in preventing the escalation of labor-management disputes and to diocese that they are resolved within the framework of CAtholic social doctrine that stresse the rights of working populace and their families.

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

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