Catholics, the minimum wage, and labor unions

[pnwmom]

http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/catholics-and-minimum-wage

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The movement for a minimum wage in the United States caught fire in the 1920s and 1930s. But for Catholics, it really started in 1891. That was the year that Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that offered a trenchant critique of capitalism, and called for all workers to earn not just a minimum wage, but a “living wage,” defined as income sufficient to support a spouse and children in the necessities of life.

That document was enormously influential in motivating American Catholics to work for minimum wage legislation which was finally enacted at the national level in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, recalled the Catholic “labor schools” in parishes and schools in the 1930s and 1940s. In the early days, these schools (as well as Jewish lyceums) taught workers about their rights, and about how to form unions.

As chance would have it, I attended a labor school in the late 1950s at De Sales High School in Lockport, N.Y. It was essentially an after-school course over about six weeks, where I learned Catholic social teaching and labor history. I didn’t study how to form a union; local representatives from the AFL-CIO reviewed both Catholic social teaching and the major labor legislation of the 1930s and 1940s.

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