Blue Collar-Roman Collar-White Collar: U Catholic Involvement in Labor-Management Controversies.

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 breed 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 according to Pope Leo XIII in 1891 They were repeated and enlarged on the subject of 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 temple 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 prolonged 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 justify the rights of workingmen and women to mobilize the community forward their behalf, and to labor for 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 brace the "Roman collar" of the churchman.

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

The part also documents the 17-year-long toil with J.P. Stevens before ACTWU won recognition for 3500 workers at 10 plants in North Carolina, southward 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 one extremity to the other of Appalachia.

Some familiar figures stride by means of the pages of this study--among them Msgr George Higgins of the National Catholic Welfare colloquy 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 talk to name just a few

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

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

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