Issues Page

Unemployment rose last month in the twelve most hotly contested battleground states in the presidential election, including Michigan, Florida and Ohio. Michigan's jobless rate rose to 8.9 percent, the highest in the nation, with the loss of more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs in August, the Labor Department reported yesterday. Unemployment in Florida has surged 2.3 percentage points to 6.5 percent over the last 12 months. News about swelling unemployment rolls capped a tumultuous week when the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression dominated the presidential campaign. With Republican President George W. Bush in the White House, Democratic nominee Barack Obama gained support as economic concerns monopolized political debate.

The U.S. bishops' annual Labor Day message calls the faithful to use Catholic social teaching to guide them as they cast their votes this November. "An American Catholic Tradition" marks Labor Day, celebrated Monday, Sept. 1, and calls for "renewed vigor as we seek to build together a society that cares for its own, reaches out to the poor and vulnerable, and offers true hope to all." Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, New York, chairman of the U.S. episcopal conference's Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, issued the statement. It highlights the needs of workers, economic inequalities and the responsibilities of all citizens to help improve working conditions.
Given the coming national elections, the Labor Day statement reminds Catholics to use Church social and moral teaching to assess issues of economic justice, human life and dignity.

Several of the country's most prominent labor groups are seeking an investigation into whether Wal-Mart Stores Inc. violated federal election laws by holding meetings with employees in which managers discussed the impact of electing Democrats on legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize companies, including Wal-Mart. The labor groups are asking the Federal Election Commission to determine whether the company "made prohibited corporate expenditures" by organizing meetings across the country to warn employees that a Democratic president would back legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which the company opposes. The groups say such statements amount to advocating the defeat of Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the November election.

It’s rare, in the parched landscape of the immigration debate, to come across policies that are simple, realistic and humane. But here is one: The Los Angeles City Council is expected to vote on Wednesday on an ordinance requiring big-box home-improvement stores to protect order and safety when day laborers gather in their parking lots looking for work. The ordinance is primarily aimed at Home Depot, which has 11 stores in Los Angeles and would like to open at least a dozen more. It would require new or renovating stores to have a plan for what to do when the day laborers show up, as they almost always do when Home Depot moves in.

The Sisters of St. Joseph, as the formal sponsor of a health-care system covering 14 hospitals and 20,000 workers in three states, were the target of an organizing effort by the Service Employees International Union. After five years of escalation, the union had brought its campaign literally to the doorstep of the sisterhood, holding rallies and worship services. In practical terms, the stakes are about 9,000 employees of eight of the nine St. Joseph hospitals in California, essentially all the workers except doctors, nurses and operating engineers. The impasse between the union and the hospital system involves the rules for holding an election on whether, and by whom, those employees want to be represented in collective bargaining.

Planned layoffs at U.S. companies jumped 26 percent in July from June, depicting further deterioration in the labor market, a report showed on Monday. Planned layoffs at U.S. companies totaled 103,312 in July, compared with June's 81,755, employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc said. Announced job cuts at U.S. companies last month were the second highest total so far in 2008, more than double the 42,897 a year earlier, the report said. From January to July, planned layoffs totaled 579,260, up 33 percent from the same period a year ago. Financial companies, in particular mortgage lenders, have been slashing their payrolls, prompted by billions of losses and write-downs tied to soured investments on housing and mortgages.

The nation's employers eliminated 51,000 jobs in July, the seventh consecutive contraction in the labor market, as the unemployment rate reached a four-year high, signs that the pressure on business owners and consumers was likely to continue. Still, Friday's report from the Labor Department showed that the declines have softened since spring. The number of layoffs was less than the 75,000 that economists had expected, and the government said that businesses cut fewer jobs in June and May than first thought.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies -- including Wal-Mart. In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized. The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million - the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago. The loss of pay has become a primary source of pain for millions of American families, reinforcing the downturn gripping the economy. Paychecks are shrinking just as home prices plunge and gas prices soar, furthering the austerity across the nation.

When the July employment report comes out Friday, U.S. payrolls are likely to shrink by an additional 68,000, according to economists. But a substantial number of those who lose their jobs won't get unemployment benefits -- even though Congress recently took steps to bolster the program. Only 37% of the country's unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001, according to the Labor Department. The others have exhausted their benefits, haven't applied or don't qualify. Those who don't qualify include many part-time workers, people who quit or were fired, and workers who didn't earn enough money in a one-year "base period" that often excludes the most recent three to six months.

Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two decades, employers across the country are fighting back in state legislatures, the federal courts and city halls. Business groups have resisted measures that would revoke the licenses of employers of illegal immigrants. They are proposing alternatives that would revise federal rules for verifying the identity documents of new hires and would expand programs to bring legal immigrant laborers.

U.S. employers cut workers from their payrolls for a sixth straight month in June for the longest losing streak for the labor market since 2002, and a jump in first-time claims for jobless benefits points to more weakness ahead. The Labor Department said on Friday that 62,000 nonfarm jobs were lost last month, bringing jobs shed for the year so far to 438,000 as housing market woes chilled growth. The unemployment rate, which shot up sharply in May, held steady at 5.5 percent. A separate report showed new applications for jobless benefits hurdling to 404,000 last week, a level associated with recession in the past that suggests further weakness ahead for employment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are staging dramatic raids across the country that routinely seize hundreds of undocumented workers at their jobs — and leave their employers free to work another day. The appearance of separate justice that arose during federal authorities' surprise morning raid at Action Rags USA on Houston's east side fits a nationwide pattern. Many of the 166 workers taken into custody on suspected immigration charges in Houston last week were paraded toward vans to be transported into detention. But immigration authorities spared company officials both immediate arrest and the embarrassing "perp walk" that exposed those arrested to news photographers.

The Iraq war funding bill that Congress is sending to the White House will extend weekly benefits for jobless Americans hurt by the tough economy and rising unemployment. The legislation, upon President Bush's signature, will give an extra 13 weeks of unemployment benefits to jobless workers who have exhausted their regular 26 weeks of benefits. Extending the benefits follows five straight months of falling payrolls and an unemployment rate that jumped half a percentage point to 5.5 percent in May, the biggest one-month increase since 1986.

A group of Washington-area religious and political leaders focused their attention June 19 on a Smithfield Meats pork processing plant in Tar Heel -- the world's largest such facility -- to urge a boycott of Smithfield meat products until the company stops what they said is unfair treatment of its workers. There should be "one sense of fairness, one goal of fairness, one standard of fairness" at Smithfield, said the Rev. Donald Robinson, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Washington. "There shouldn't be two standards of fairness."

While Christians continue to be drawn in public and media circles as preoccupied with the politics of abortion and gay “marriage,” Christians have also proven passionate on causes that include concern for the environment, and most recently, fair trade. Many companies, recognizing the potential business in catering to faith-based, fair trade minded churches, have moved in to fill the void and meet market demand. Equal Exchange, a Massachusetts-based organic coffee company, is just one of the many companies that has capitalized on the growing concerns of Christians to support fair trade causes.

Frustrated by a steady flow of illegal Mexican immigrants into Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has decided to take matters into his own hands. Arpaio dispatches teams of sheriff's deputies into Hispanic communities where they stop people and arrest anyone who cannot prove he or she is a legal U.S. resident. Now he faces an onslaught of criticism from Hispanic activists, local lawmakers and the Phoenix mayor, who call his crackdown on immigrants a clear case of racial profiling in which only people who look Hispanic are targeted.

What ever happened to welfare reform? Our nation’s financial assistance to low-income (and usually single-parent) families was a hot-button issue in the 1990s, but since then it seems to have vanished from our collective radar. In the debates among presidential candidates of both parties, welfare reform has been obscured by other issues. Until the recent economic downturn, post-9/11 concerns about security, terrorism, immigration, Iraq, and now Iran made it hard to pay adequate attention to domestic policy in general, and social-welfare policy in particular. Yet for the millions of Americans-most of them children-whose lives are directly affected by even the slightest change in federal welfare regulations, the future of the welfare system is an important matter. While the positions staked out on this issue by candidates and their parties may appear as mere afterthoughts in this campaign season, it is a mistake for voters to think of welfare as a minor issue-or to imagine that welfare reform is finished business. Grinding poverty persists in our country, even if many of us fail to notice it.

At the height of the Great Depression, industry convinced President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress to enact a law allowing companies to collude to drive up prices. To balance out this giveaway to big business, the law gave workers something that they had long been fighting for: the first federal minimum wage. This week marks the 75th anniversary of the National Industrial Recovery Act — which Roosevelt signed June 16, 1933, at the end of his famous first 100 days — and of the federal minimum wage. It was a grudging, almost accidental win, and the road since then has been rocky. Advocates for low-income workers have had a hard time keeping the minimum wage at a reasonable level and passing other laws necessary to fulfill the original goal: ensuring that people who work hard can achieve a reasonable standard of living.