American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions

6. Harassed by Strikes or Threats of Strikes

127 “It seems that Oakland would not be Oakland were we not harassed by strikes or threats of strikes,” wrote the chronicler of Providence Hospital in Oakland , California, in 1979.1 Although Catholics were increasingly influential in social justice policies, workplace issues were more problematic. Secular principles dealing with labor applied to service institutions such as Catholic hospitals with religious missions, and over the last quarter of twentieth century , Catholic hospitals became targets for their anti-union stance. Criticism came from within and outside the Catholic Church as strikes occurred in California, Washington, and Alaska. Nurses, other workers, clergy, and sisters as owners and administrators of hospitals were pitted against each other. A number of Catholic hospitals faced up to the labor problem constructively, but unionization in some turned acrimonious. Many Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals resisted unionization of their workers, mainly due to concerns over the financial viability of their institutions and their objection to having a third party injected into the chain of command. Strong unions significantly influenced hospitals’ budgets, which limited management’s ability to streamline resources and decrease staffing.2 When Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1979, a writer for the Washington Post asked: “Will he wonder aloud why Catholic hospitals have reputations for being anti-labor and anti-union?”3 By the 1990s, debates about workplace justice triggered a reevaluation of the Catholic hospital. It has been only since the 1960s and 1970s that unions have paid serious attention to not-for-profit institutions such as hospitals.4 Unions concentrated Harassed by Strikes or Threats of Strikes Chapter 6 128 American Catholic Hospitals in the industrial Northeast, Michigan, and California, with some activity in Washington and Oregon. It is impossible to say how Catholic sister administrators as a whole felt about unions, because many were in states with restrictive labor laws and never had to deal with them. In other hospitals such as Seton in Austin, run by the Daughters of Charity, unions were unsuccessful in 1975.5 However, unions had a significant presence in the Sisters of Providence hospitals in the West and Northwest. What made Catholic hospital labor disputes different from others was that papal encyclicals traditionally supported labor unions. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when U.S. Catholics were in the bricks-and-mortar period of building hospitals, churches, and schools, the labor movement was organizing industrial workers. The Catholic Church’s pro-labor attitude resulted from management’s reluctance to recognize the basic rights of workers, many of whom were immigrant Catholics, until workers formed their own associations. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) recognized unionization as a social right, emphasizing the duties of both workers and employers: workers were to respect property and avoid violence, and employers were to provide a just wage, safe working conditions , and reasonable working hours. In 1931 Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (After Forty Years) developed Pope Leo’s teachings further. Issued in the middle of the Great Depression during the rise of communism, it condemned both socialism and communism for their materialism and totalitarianism and also attacked the unfettered competition of capitalism that burdened the working class.6 Pope John XXIII in 1961 issued Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) about Christianity and social progress, which supported a just wage but implored workers to use collective bargaining rather than strikes. The 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) taught the value of human labor and maintained that workers had the right to join unions. Then in 1981 Pope John Paul II issued Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), which stated that workers had a right “to form associations for the purpose of defending the vital interests of those employed in the various professions.”7 In 1991, on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Norarum, he issued Centesimus Annus (Hundredth Year), which proclaimed the cultural importance of unions.8 “The Privilege of Service”: 1930s–1950s In the early and mid-twentieth century, both public and religiously based hospitals spent an enormous amount of time consolidating their power over Strikes or Threats of Strikes 129 their employees.9 They took advantage of their nursing students, who usually lived in hospital housing and were exploited as a labor force. Most hospitals, including Catholic institutions, did not hire the nurses they graduated until around 1940. Rather, graduate...