Georgetown Models Catholic Social Teaching During Food Service Workers’ Union Campaign

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=4105

Posted at: Sunday, April 10, 2011 03:20:57 PM
Author: Clayton Sinyai

The other day food service workers at the nation’s oldest Catholic University announced that after a lengthy campaign their union, UNITEHERE, had been recognized by their employer. The whole story has been retold elsewhere – but for those familiar with union organizing, the relative civility of the campaign was notable. In large measure, this was because Georgetown took seriously its obligation to implement Catholic Social Teaching.

Georgetown, like most major universities and many other large institutions, contracts out its food service work. The dining hall workers were not employed directly by Georgetown but by their vendor, the multinational corporation Aramark. While many firms and organizations use contracting to escape social responsibility, Georgetown used its position to model fidelity to Catholic social principles.

Millions of food service workers in restaurants and cafeterias around the nation work for poverty-level wages. (A full-time worker earning the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour will draws an annual salary of only $15,080, well below the $18,530 poverty threshold for a wage-earner with two dependents.) However, since Church teaching forbids paying “wages …insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner,” the university maintains a Just Employment Policy requiring contractors to pay a “living wage” to their employees. Georgetown’s Living Wage required a $14/hr compensation package in FY2008, with annual adjustments tracking the rate of inflation.

This living wage protects all workers serving the Georgetown community, whether or not they belong to a union. But it meant Aramark did not have to fear that in the wake of unionization a competitor paying minimum wages could easily undercut their prices and take away their contract. The food service workers’ union campaign was an economic challenge for management but not a catastrophe to be resisted at any price.

FULL story at link.