The Catholic social tradition–enemy of the state?
Here’s a provocative take on unions, collective bargaining, the social net, and the decline thereof in the United States. The author, Lew Daly, writing in Democracy, has much to say about the Catholic social tradition as the impetus for their development in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and the role of conservative politics, market liberalism, and the separation of church and state for their demise in recent decades.
A taste: “The twist at the end of this story is that collective bargaining is, ultimately, a victim not just of America’s right-leaning politics and market liberalism, but of America’s pervasive institutional and legal secularism—our so-called “wall of separation” between church and state. Contrary to the mythology of American religious exceptionalism, no democratic country (not even France, at least in some key respects) has been more extreme in its policing of the church-state divide and its privatization of religious faith, and at the same time none has been more hostile to the collective rights of labor and labor’s dignity in a religious sense. It is no coincidence that the country with the strictest separation of church and state also has the lowest collective bargaining rates. In the United States, religious bodies were increasingly excluded from public life even as collective bargaining, as a public right, went into terminal decline.”
Thanks for this link. It’s one of those articles that makes me stop and think…because I don’t know yet what I think about its conclusions.
Luke said exactly what I want to say.
The notion of Corporatism is one I haven’t encountered before. The comparisons with Europe are quite interesting. It’s a very useful exercise that makes one realize that things didn’t inevitably have to turn out the way they have, and they’ve turned out differently elsewhere. I guess, if we wanted to pursue corporatism in the US, we’d need to grow an authentically American variation of it.
To my mind, one huge gap in solidarity today is between *workers* in the economy – non-professionals, many/most of whom do not have college degrees, and many of whom are minorities – and the professional classes. To portray the have/have-not split between workers and the super-rich, as President Obama does on his more strident days, is to miss the point. That represents the kind of old-world-order thinking from which the labor movement must extricate itself, in my opinion. From the point of view of solidarity, the more germane split is between workers, upon whom the current economic woes have been catastrophic, and the upper middle classes of professionals and managers, who have not suffered nearly so much. Kids growing up in the middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbs have absolutely no thought that they might end up as workers; they are being groomed for professions.
I’d think that the labor movement itself in its current manifestation in the US would need a good deal of reform and renewal if it really wanted to pursue the author’s corporatist/solidaritist vision. If the labor movement doesn’t evangelize that vision, nobody else will. But I don’t hear organized labor in the US articulating anything like that kind of a vision. My perception of its policy priorities is that it consists of card check and protecting public-sector pension funds. Perhaps those are important – certainly the pensions are important – but they don’t seem to add up to the author’s holistic vision.
As a practical matter, both political parties would need to do some soul-searching, istm. In the case of Republicans, it would require some minimal commitment to values of solidarity, which is inimical to the libertarian thread that is quite influential in the party. For Democrats, it might be even harder, because unlike the GOP, it is financially beholden to the labor movement as it exists today, rather than a renewed and reformed labor movement that would realize some of the solidarist and corporatist goals that the author seems to envision.
Margaret, your link is to the second page of the article. Here’s the first page:
http://www.democracyjournal.org/22/the-church-of-labor.php?page=1
Thanks David, fixed.
Great little article. Thanks for linking to it.
I wonder, though, whether Lew Daly – like the Church, perhaps – may not be speaking of a society that’s passed from the scene. Corporatism speaks to large families – literal or metaphorical – but large families have been atomized out of existence by the communications and transportation revolutions. You can’t effectively organize labor when jobs and even the companies that offer them are constantly morphing from one thing into another. We may be living in times when corporatism isn’t relevant as a model of real life. (Whether or not real life would be healthier for humans if it were relevant is beside the point in this context.)
And that’s no doubt one of the problems the Church is having now. There’s no longer the strong sense of a family of believers that used to obtain. We’re all individual believers, believing as it suits us, forming, dissolving, re-forming, and re-dissolving little ad hoc groups if we find that helpful in our individual wanderings.
David S – just to take the devil’s advocate role – the author may argue that you are reversing cause and effect. Thus, you may argue, ‘corporatism isn’t possible any more because the ties that bind extended families have broken down, because of the communications and transportation revolutions, and the mobility of employers.’
Could it really be the other way, though? i.e. ‘Because of America’s dismal lack of support of the principles of corporatism and solidarity, the communications and transportation industries, and employers as a whole, have been permitted to develop in an unconstrained fashion that has had extremely deleterious effects on extended families – in fact, has weakened and broken the ties that bind them together.’
Here’s an example that may illustrate the sort of corporatism and solidarity as practiced in Germany (a country Lew Daly cited in the piece under discussion):
“Get workers to invest in jobs.
“About 14 million Americans are out of work. If we cut that figure by 6 million, we’d have 5 percent unemployment — close to the rate in good times.
“Our country has some 1.4 million companies that individually employ 100 or more workers and collectively employ about 80 million workers. President Barack Obama could call on the workers and shareholders in these companies to voluntarily hire 7.5 percent more workers and do everything possible to maintain the higher level of employment going forward.
“How, one might ask, would all the new workers be paid? Existing employees could agree to a 7.5 percent wage cut in exchange for immediately vested shares of their companies’ stock of equal value. If their companies aren’t incorporated, company owners could segregate a portion of the company’s profits to be paid, over time, to those workers taking the immediate pay cut. This plan asks workers to finance the new hiring, but makes company owners ultimately pay the bill.
“This is very different from asking one company to increase employment alone. Under this policy, all large companies will know that all other large companies are hiring. Hence, they’ll know that there will be a bigger demand for the additional goods and services their new employees will produce.
“In 2008, German workers and employers voluntarily adopted national job-saving measures, and the German economy is now the envy of the world.”
http://www.democracyjournal.org/22/the-church-of-labor.php?page=4
I would note three things about this suggestion:
(1) It seems very much in keeping with Catholic social teaching – in fact, an embodiment of solidarity. This is one of Lew Daly’s points.
(2) It sounds odd to Americans, because we have no tradition of doing this sort of thing. This is another of Lew Daly’s points.
(3) Although this isn’t a point Daly made, I would venture that unions would also oppose the suggestion I’ve pasted here – to take a 7.5% pay cut out of solidarity for those out of work. Solidarity with those outside the union (except on occasion with those in other unions) is not a feature of unions in the US. Unions are run as self-interest organizations.
Another relatively simple thing that could be done is shorten the work week. There would have to be more hiring. This might be done in conjunction with other actions such as Daly suggests. (Though I”m not sure his theory is practical. What might the unforeseen consequences be?)