How's your job treating you?

People who know me would find it hard to believe that I once belonged to the Teamster's Union. But it's true. While working in a number of gas stations during my college days, it was mandatory for pump jockeys to belong to the Teamsters. If they didn't, the tank-wagon drivers would not deliver our all-important supplies.

On the other hand, my father, forced to leave school at age 15 to take a job on a delivery truck, really was a Teamster. Although in my job I greased cars and changed oil, in retrospect, I hardly considered myself one who worked with his hands. Possibly, I guess, because I knew, that this was not to be my career.

My father, eventually, spent most of his long career pushing papers, as did his son, and as do most American workers in this end-of-the-century year. That's not to imply that there's anything wrong with paper-pushing. What matters is what kind of papers are being pushed, for what purpose, and under what kind of working conditions.

Much has been said and written about the renewed efforts of unions to organize workers. Only 10 to 15 percent of all American workers now belong to unions, a far cry from the once high percentage that historically prevailed. So, wisely, union organizers are concentrating on laborers at the bottom of the economic ladder - the unskilled, for example, who work in the kitchens and corridors of restaurants and hotels. These are people who work with their hands, but, at least without union support, with how much dignity?

I was most fortunate to work during the salad days of labor unions in the United States. Not only was union membership growing exponentially, but key leaders were people who truly gave a damn about their members - men like Philip Murray, John L. Lewis, and especially Walter Reuther.

Those same salubrious times for union-organized working people were also times when the inspired social teachings of the church were taken with the utmost seriousness. Students in Catholic schools and colleges were unlikely to graduate without having learned about the rights and dignity of working people, as taught by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as by great American teachers like Monsignor John A. Ryan. (Even premeds learned this, so the story went.)

These were also the heady days of the labor priests, one of whom was even:characterized, in barely fictionalized form, in Elia Kazan's classic film "On the Waterfront.- It was a time when the dignity of people who worked with their hands was held up for praise as

One can't help wondering how often students in Catholic schools and colleges hear this Good News in their classrooms today. Or, for that matter, how many students in secular institutions learn about Samuel Gompers, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, or about labor "goons."

Most workers today have to find on their own a rationale for their work other than their wages and benefits. There is no labor union for computer programmers, receptionists, or advertising copywriters, and while some get a little help from their bosses, for most it's a matter of flying solo when the dignity of a job is sought.

Needless to say, that search is helped immensely when the "business" of one's employer is intrinsically common good. But the majority of workers today labor in the vineyards of the free market, making products or buying or selling. Nothing bad about that. It's just that it takes more effort for the workers to say not only that "this is what I do" but "this is what I am."

I remember fondly a man I knew, not highly educated, charged with maintaining, without help, a small office building. Some of his tasks required modest manual skills, but most were sweat jobs. Yet to those who knew him, the building was his building. Until the day he became physically unable to carry on, he did his job with quiet pride and dignity.

Granted that it's not easy for the average Jane or Joe, waiting on a frigid morning for a bus or commuter train to arrive, to exclaim, "Golly, gee, I can hardly wait to get to my dignified job!" It might help, perhaps, if each of them could say to themselves, "At least no one else could do my job the way I do it."

It can sometimes be life-threatening to the person who speaks of the sacredness of work, but if we don't accept that work is sacred, then the game is either over or we've lost it. Maybe a prayer to St. Joseph the Worker is called for.