How Faith-Based Labor Movements Plan to Stop Corporate America's Billion-Dollar Theft

By Nancy Maclean, Boston Review. Posted June 13, 2009.

Such a shift is not so far-fetched in the current climate of resurgent populism, especially if Bobo succeeds in mobilizing the faithful to end wage theft. After all, pro-labor religious activists helped usher in and protect the New Deal. John A. Ryan, a Catholic activist intellectual who was a powerful force in the Roosevelt presidency observed at that time: "Never before in our history have Government policies been so deliberately and consciously based on the conception of moral right and social justice." (For more on Ryan, see Lew Daly’s The Catholic Roots of American Liberalism, in the May/June 2007 issue of Boston Review.) Perkins quoted this remark approvingly. Bobo points out that Catholic parishes and orders operated almost 200 labor schools to teach workers how to organize and run unions in the two decades after the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act, which protected employees’ right to organize.


The civil rights movement similarly depended on the religious, justice-seeking tradition among whites. For all the brilliant grassroots activism of African Americans and the determined lobbying of the NAACP, the Civil Rights Act would never have passed had white Christians and Jews not lobbied otherwise unyielding Midwestern Republican Senators, as historian James Findlay shows in Church People in the Struggle.


Their devoted activism emerged from deep wells of commitment to social justice in the Catholic and Jewish traditions and the Protestant social gospel that drove so much Progressive Era and New Deal reform. Might those wells bubble up again as the economy melts down? "We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," FDR noted in 1937, "we now know that it is bad economics." We have relearned the truth that it is bad economics, but we still await the moral awakening.

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Nancy MacLean is Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent publications are Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace and, with Donald Critchlow, Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1945 to the Present.

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