Labor Movements at Loyola: Examining a Catholic University’s Corporate Doublespeak

After months of working without a contract, Loyola campus dining hall employees have finally secured better wages, better health care and a 40-hour work week, according to the campus group Students for Worker Justice. But Loyola’s labor troubles are far from over.

As dining hall workers concluded this phase of their struggle with Loyola contractor Aramark, Loyola’s 11 English Language Learning Program faculty members voted to unionize on April 4. That followed the unionization in January of non-tenure-track professors in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). Out of 326 professors eligible to vote, the outcome was 142-82 in favor of joining the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73.

Loyola’s administration was not pleased by the union votes.

“I believe it’s better to work together directly, not through an outside third party,” Interim President John Pelissero said in a pre-vote video address to CAS faculty, emphasizing “not” with an admonishing head shake.

In March, Loyola appealed the CAS vote to the National Labor Relations Board, claiming religious institution exemption from NLRB jurisdiction. The appeal reflects widespread concerns among Catholic universities that recently expansive NLRB discretionary power opens the door to overreach. DePaul University President the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider described schools such as Loyola and DePaul opposing adjunct faculty union drives as an incidental part of a larger defense against government intrusion into their institutions’’ Catholic educational culture.

Such concerns are valid, but this narrow focus on institutional autonomy fails to acknowledge that compromising critical Catholic social principles is precisely what got Catholic universities into this mess in the first place. Catholic institutions embracing anti-Catholic employment practices forfeit the moral high ground from which to oppose intervention, specifically interventions that seek to mitigate the damage done by those practices.

Loyola’s labor hypocrisy concerns me personally, not only because I pay tuition or care about our professors and dining hall workers, but because my own labor organizing experience paved my path to Loyola.

In September 2012, six coworkers and I delivered a petition to our then-employer, the billion-dollar, West-Coast-based company Peet’s Coffee & Tea. We requested modest adjustments to our work conditions: most important, a living wage and a dependable number of weekly work hours for every employee. Our worker-run union fought a losing but richly informative battle with all levels of management before finally dissolving in 2014.

“The corporatization of higher education”

Transitioning from food service to the ivory tower of academia, I was surprised to learn that precarious employment conditions had spread beyond the typical low-wage sectors to infect the higher education system. As The Atlantic and other publications have recently reported, even while tuition skyrockets, U.S. universities are converting more and more of their teaching positions into semester-long mini-contracts, paid in shockingly low stipends with no benefits.

One-third of U.S. university professors now inhabit this “contingent faculty” category, with Loyola worse than average: In 2014, 45 percent of faculty were part-time, according to an investigation by The PHOENIX. Loyola pays adjuncts better than many area universities, but part-time employment (a two class per semester limit) forces professors to find second and third jobs at those same universities, adding chaotic schedules and wasted commute time to low pay, non-existent benefits and no job security.

Like my coworkers and I, frustrated Loyola professors finally approached their employer last April with a petition for improved work conditions. Like us, they were ignored.

Loyola began taking the situation seriously when SEIU entered the scene, proposing to unionize non-tenure-track CAS faculty. Scrambling to sway full-time professors against unionization, the administration emphasized just how different their employment conditions are from their part-time colleagues, who at two classes per semester make at most $20,000 a year. By contrast, full-time, non-tenured professors earn around $63,000 a year with benefits and can negotiate long-term contracts.

Why the severe disparity between professors who, from a student’s vantage point, are indistinguishable? As adjunct Loyola professor Paige Warren wrote in January for Crain’s Chicago Business, the situation reflects the “corporatization of higher education.”

“Our values and beliefs”

Dignity of work, a fundamental concept in Catholic social teaching, is irrelevant to corporate America. Brandishing euphemisms such as “fair market wages” and “flexible scheduling,” employers such as Aramark and Peet’s Coffee exploit an overpopulated labor market by over-hiring at the lowest possible wage and keeping employees in competition among each other for scarce work hours.

As a recent escapee of this system, I’m familiar with the fatuous web of “trickle-down” and “rising-tide” rationalizations it relies on, and I’m gravely disappointed to see its ideological claws sunk so deeply into our Jesuit institution’s administration. In The PHOENIX’s 2014 investigation into the working conditions of part-time faculty, then-provost Dr. Pelissero was quoted, stating that the university decides part-time faculty stipends “on the basis of the marketplace, and not on the basis of this being a living wage.”

Or in other words, “Everyone else is doing it.”

But everyone else did not invent the principle of a living wage. Catholics did. Since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, encyclical after encyclical flowing from Rome has insisted employers do everything in their power to pay employees a living wage. A living wage is not an option, a second thought or a luxury spillover during good times. It’s a central tenet in the Catholic blueprint for a just society.

There is room for debate about what precisely constitutes a living wage, but Pelissero’s casual disregard of the core principle itself reflects the usurpation of Loyola’s Catholic values by corporate ideology. Pope Francis has spent his papal career reminding us how this creeping capitalist ideology, which feigns helplessness in the face of the market-is-God status quo, invites a “new tyranny” which “relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”

Rather than recognizing the call to examine what laws and rules it is obeying, Loyola seems determined to compartmentalize its Catholic rights and Catholic responsibilities.

“[W]hat is at stake here,” wrote Senior Vice President for Administrative Services Thomas Kelly in a letter to faculty last December, “is … our right to define our own mission and to govern our institution in accordance with our values and beliefs, free from government entanglement.”

Rather than exemplifying just leadership to the secular world, Loyola is demanding protection from the secular world’s attempt to hold it accountable to its Catholic values — ostensibly in order to be free to live out its Catholic values.

“An economic bottom line”

In addition to this corporate doublespeak, Loyola has, perhaps unconsciously, adopted the classic “not a real job” living wage evasion. In the 2014 PHOENIX investigation, the then-Dean of the CAS, Dr. Reinhard Andress, was quoted. Andress pointed out that some professors don’t want to work full-time; they just teach for supplemental income.

Such professors exist, but this rhetoric is misleading and demonstrably dangerous. Whole industries adopt it to justify not paying employees a living wage. At Peet’s Coffee & Tea, our work weeks were capped at 25 hours because part-time employment offerings allow companies to characterize employees as high school students or bored housewives who don’t need to “live” on what they make. Yet almost all my coworkers were in their 20s and 30s, paid their own living expenses and juggled two or three jobs.

When employers create positions they admit don’t pay a living wage, then conjure convenient stereotypes of who will fill that position, all inside a bureaucracy too large to know its employees individually, they create a framework for abuse. Once this framework is entrenched and budgets rearranged around it, employers inevitably speak as though they themselves are helpless victims, unable to curb their own exploitation of the permanent underclass they systematically created.

Such corporate abdication of responsibility appears in Andress’ frank admission that “there’s a certain percentage of part-timers who I don’t think we’re ever going to make happy because we’re an enterprise that has an economic bottom line.”

Based on the CAS union vote, this “certain percentage” is larger than Andress suspected. Furthermore, the phrase “bottom line” wields rhetorical clout with its apparent quantitative certainty, but it’s only corporate jargon. Budgets do not create; they are created. They involve money, and they involve priorities. When mom-and-pop shops struggle to pay a living wage, I sympathize. When sizeable Catholic institutions choose to build their “enterprise” around unsustainable part-time labor, this is strategically and ethically irresponsible.

Loyola has no stockholder-driven growth imperative. Its first commitments are to its students, its workers and its Catholic values. It lacks the luxury of comparing itself to “competitors” rather than to the ideal. It has no excuse for adopting the fast food industry business model, and its administration has no reason to be surprised that 142 professors voted against this model. Treating humans like interchangeable machine parts is, effectually, begging them to unionize.

“Clear common ground”

But isn’t there some way to solve this without third-party mediation, like Pelissero urged?

Back in 2012, my coworkers and I made the unlikely decision not to join SEIU’s Fight for 15, choosing to negotiate with our employer directly. Among other reasons, we did not appreciate SEIU’s aggressive recruitment tactics and found it hypocritical that they did not, at that time, pay their own organizers $15 an hour. (In other words, I don’t write out of any love for today’s labor unions, although I respect their hard-working organizers.)

Importantly, our choice not to sign union cards was one born of relative privilege. Our five worker-organizers were young, fluent in English, well-educated, able-bodied and childless. We had social support networks in case the company fired us. Compared to other low-wage workers, including overworked university professors, we could more afford to carry out an uphill, idealistic experiment — and it was still exhausting.

My choice in 2014 to attend Loyola was a concrete recognition of this privilege and its accompanying responsibility. Organizing taught me that I owed it to the less fortunate to put to real use my inherited access keys to the halls of power and devote my unearned social capital to radically reshaping our broken society.

Today I expect nothing less of every person who holds those keys, including Loyola’s Jesuit leadership. Although I am not Catholic, my time organizing brought me into contact with many devout Catholics who proved to be among the fiercest and humblest of leaders in various intersectional struggles for justice.

Because of them, I was attracted to the idea of attending an institution mandated to uphold the highest standards of human dignity. If that institution failed to reach our mutually high standards, I felt I would have clear common ground on which to challenge it.

I write now from that ground. I deeply appreciate Loyola for providing me with amazing professors — some of them grossly undervalued — who have supported the development of my critical thinking and writing skills and encouraged my deepening dedication to speaking truth to power. I wish to give Loyola’s administration the benefit of the doubt that it is fundamentally committed to social justice, and its employment practices have simply succumbed to the corporate status quo.

This particular blind spot is far easier to see from the bottom than it is from the top, which is why the recent resurgence of protest and direct action at Loyola is a timely wake-up call. If Holtschneider is right that Catholic institutions of higher education face a serious threat of government meddling in their educational culture, that is all the more urgent reason for Loyola leadership to recognize the toxic ideology already distorting its culture, humbly reassess its institutional priorities and commit in no uncertain terms to providing just, sustainable employment for every person who works on our campus.

Joanna Rudenborg is a senior political science major.