Some Irked by Bishops Meeting at Non-Union Hotel

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The nation’s Roman Catholic Bishops will hold annual assemblies at a non-union hotel in Baltimore for the next five years, a break from the church’s historical support for labor. Moving the assemblies from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore will save money and draw attention to Baltimore’s recently renovated basilica, said […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The nation’s Roman Catholic Bishops will hold annual assemblies at a non-union hotel in Baltimore for the next five years, a break from the church’s historical support for labor.

Moving the assemblies from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore will save money and draw attention to Baltimore’s recently renovated basilica, said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.


Organizers looked for a union hotel in Baltimore but could not find one that could accommodate the bishops conference, Walsh said. The bishops conference will be held Nov. 13-16.

The bishops conference is facing tough financial times. Under a plan the bishops are expected to approve next week, diocesan contributions to the conference’s yearly budget will be cut by $1.9 million and more than 25 percent of the organization’s workforce will be eliminated.

But a century-long trail of papal pronouncements and Catholic social teachings says people should be put before profits, according to the Rev. Edward Boyle, director of the Archdiocese of Boston’s Institute of Industrial Relations.

“Economics have never been the bottom line in the church,” Boyle said.

The bishops’ decision to meet at a non-union hotel follows two high-profile labor disputes pitting managers of Catholic-owned businesses against workers.

Resurrection Health Care, the largest Catholic health care network in Illinois, battled union organizers for three years before reaching a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board in October. Resurrection is owned by two Catholic religious orders, the Sisters of the Resurrection and the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

And employees at Catholic News Service, which is owned by the bishops conference, have been without a contract since January. The CNS workers, who are members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, have been battling the bishops over their pension plan.

Moving the bishops’ fall conferences to Baltimore will save the conference money in hotel rates, said Walsh, though she could not provide an estimate of the savings.


(The bishops meet semi-annually, in the spring and fall. Their last fall meeting was at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, which is unionized.)

Alyson Harkins, who organizes Baltimore’s hotel workers for the union group Unite Here, said there is only one unionized hotel in Baltimore: the Wyndham Hotel in the Inner Harbor. That hotel has more than 700 guest rooms, 25 meeting and event rooms and about 30,000 square feet of space for conventions, according to Renee Uhlman, Wyndham’s sales director. It hold conferences every week, Uhlman said.

Boyle, 75, said Catholic support for labor unions stretches back to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “On the Condition of Workers.”

“It’s been a consistent policy that moral thinking rather than the marketplace must be the principal value or criterion on which decisions must be made,” Boyle said.

In a 1981 encyclical “On Human Work,” the late Pope John Paul II wrote: “History teaches us that (unions) are an indispensable element in social life, especially in industrialized societies.

“The purpose of unions is not simply to defend the existing wages and prerogatives of the fraction of workers who belong to them, but also enable workers to make positive and creative contributions to the firm, the community and the larger society.”


RB END BURKE

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