The CIO's Left-Led Unions.

Let us beat about no bushes. Monsignor Higgins has given us a book that is the best thing ever written on the subject and should be required reading in every Catholic seminary in the U.S.A., as well as a mandatory text in every Catholic college course in social ethics or moral theology.

Of making many books on Catholic social teaching there is no end. Few of them reveal a sense of what really happens in the factory or the office, on the street or the picket line. This book is different. It is Catholic social teaching plus personal memoir of a man who for fifty years has been at the center of the church's concern for labor and labor's concern for justice plus labor history plus profiles of major labor leaders plus a no-holds-barred account of the major strikes and disputes in which the church and Father Higgins have been involved, sometimes with him on the workers' side against the heads of Catholic schools and hospitals.

In a chapter titled "Practicing What We Preach," Higgins documents some outrageous campaigns by Catholic schools, universities, and hospitals to prevent the organization of their employees into bona fide unions, in carefree disregard of a hundred years of the church's support of the right to organize. Most of the hospitals, the worst offenders, are run by orders of religious women independent of the bishops in whose jurisdiction they are located. Higgins climaxes this section by quoting a talk he sometimes gives to groups of sisters: "You're asking for leadership in the church. Well, you've got the leadership in the hospital field, and you're not doing much with it. Here's a chance to really step forward and show us how to do something better."

One can't applaud the split infinitive, but any friend of justice and a larger role for women in the church must applaud this two-pronged appeal to put our own house in order before we get too self-righteous about the sins of others.

Higgins pays tribute to Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, who not only ordered the Catholic hospitals in that city to break away from the anti-union hospital association and sign a separate agreement with the union, but was outspoken in public testimony in favor of legislation to outlaw the permanent replacement of strikers. This is a hot issue right now on the labor front in the halls of Congress.

Higgins writes, "I would argue that the cardinal is the best friend organized labor has had in the American Catholic hierarchy in recent years."

The book makes a powerful case for a major overhaul of U.S. labor laws that are contributing to a partly successful effort by U.S. employers to destroy the labor movement. Other than South Africa, the U.S. is the only industrial country whose employers, in the main, have not abandoned the dream of operating in a totally nonunion environment. They complain about the adversarial attitude of the unions, but the unions' adversarial attitude, if any, is love-and-kisses compared with their own.

There was a time--in the thirties and forties, mainly--when many Catholics, lay and clerical, found the labor movement an exciting place to demonstrate their Christian commitment to justice. Those were the glory days, when the workers--many of them our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters--were fighting for their most basic rights. Times have changed. Today, Andrew Greeley notes, Catholics are the most affluent gentile group in the U.S. But look again. Many of our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters are once again fighting for their most basic rights. The rich grow richer, the poor and middle class poorer. Higgins notes that the average CEO income in 1988 was $2,023,285, some ninety-two times the average factory worker's earnings. Millions are earning nothing, unemployed.

Blacks, Hispanics, Asians are even worse off than the whites. It is time once again that Christians looked to the labor movement for a place to prove that their love of justice is not a sometime thing. Higgins has done a noble service in telling us why.

The CIO's Left-Led Unions also has much to say about organized labor, the Catholic church, and various labor leaders. But what it has to say is very different from the Higgins book. On the first page, the editor, Steve Rosswurm, who writes several of the essays, characterizes Philip Murray, head of the CIO, as "obscenely wrongheaded." "Obscene" is defined as "deeply offensive to morality or decency," and that characterization of Murray struck this reviewer as deeply offensive to both morality and decency.

Anyone who was actually in the CIO in the thirties and forties and knew anything about Murray and was not under the baleful influence of the Stalinists, will tell you that Philip Murray was one of the most decent, moral, and effective labor leaders that ever lived. As George Higgins testifies.

As for "wrongheaded," Rosswurm wants us to believe that the expulsion of the Communist-Led unions from the CIO in 1949 was a terrible mistake that is responsible for all the bad things that have happened to the labor movement since then. Not only that, but he thinks the Catholic church in general and the ACTU (Association of Catholic Trade Unionists) in particular should be ashamed of themselves because they not only opposed Communists in the CIO, but, after 1945, abandoned whatever progressive policies they had had and made anticommunism their "sole focus."

First of all, this latter charge, still made in some academic circles, is a total lie, falsehood, or misstatement, depending on the knowledge or intent of the person who repeats it. Higgins's work with the U.S. bishops and the AFL-CIO, the farm workers, and a hundred other beleaguered unions should be enough to refute it as far as the church is concerned. As to the ACTU, this reviewer can testify that it is also a total falsehood since he spent eighteen years of full- and part-time work for ACTU, from its founding in 1937 to about 1955. Even after 1945, anticommunism remained a minor part of ACTU's overall focus, which was still consistently prounion and pro-Catholic.

From Stalinists we expect this kind of abuse, but Rosswurm is no Stalinist. A young historian, he started his academic career and learned his biases when anticommunism was politically incorrect. Then, about 1988, anticommunism became politically correct. There was just too much hard evidence about the failures of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So Rosswurm tries to have it both ways. He is honest enough to admit that the Communists in the CIO displayed "a slavish loyalty to the Soviet Union" and that the Soviet Union and its satellites were "brutally authoritarian." And as a Catholic himself he is also honest enough to concede that the Stalinists' "hostility toward religion...antagonized Catholic working people, who had good reason to be anti-Communist."

Since the ACTU was composed of Catholic working people, it follows logically that they had good reason to be anti-Communist and in no mood to be controlled by leaders with "a slavish loyalty" to a "brutally authoritarian Soviet Union."

For Rosswurm, Marxism is still politically correct and he does not see the connection between Marxism and the fact that the Soviet Union was such a "brutally authoritarian" failure. But setting him straight on that is an exercise too long for this review.

Rosswurm is only one of eight contributors to this book, and their essays are mostly factual accounts of the activity of Communist-Led longshoremen, electrical workers, leather, and agricultural workers. Some of these Communists were admirable people. Too bad that (a) they were fatally mistaken, and (b) more of those who were and are right did not, and do not, emulate their zeal and their dedication.