Catholic Social Teaching and Labor Unions
According to EnergyPublisher.com:
Many politicians, I need hardly remind you, are very unsympathetic toward labor unions. You may think this simply means that they are siding with harsh employers who want to pay their workers as little as possible for interminable hours of toil. It is not as simple as that. Anti-unionism has a long, and sometimes surprising, history. We can trace it back to the eighteenth century, the age of American independence and the French Revolution. Strangely enough, it has often been favored by people who are generally considered “enlightened”.
In England, Parliament passed a law in 1800 “against unlawful combinations of workmen”, which aimed to outlaw unions of laborers, as well as craftsmen’s guilds and all such associations. The main sponsor of this legislation was William Wilberforce, famous for his campaign against slavery. In France, shortly after the Revolution, a similar law was enacted in 1791 by the National Assembly. The man behind this was Isaac Le Chapelier, a radical lawyer renowned for his fiery speeches denouncing the pre-revolutionary privileges of the aristocracy and clergy.
So it is clear that anti-unionism is not merely a matter of pandering to greedy capitalist employers. It is also connected with the pursuit of some forms of liberty. The radicals and revolutionaries at the end of the eighteenth century were idealists who dreamt of maximum individual freedom. That meant, among other things, that any individual should be free to enter into a contract, on any agreed terms, with any other individual; and this included contracts of employment...click to continue.
