Bring the Catholic Worker Back To The Picket Line

In 1936, following the encouragement of the Archbishop of Detroit, Dorothy Day traveled to Flint, Michigan to cover the famous sit-down strikes at the General Motors factories for the Catholic Worker newspaper. It was a time of historic, militant worker rebellion in the United States; many of the massive strikes of the mid 30s took on a revolutionary character resulting in mass violence and shuttered cities. The workers in Detroit had physically occupied the factories to halt production so Day had to climb into one of the buildings through a barricaded window to interview them. Explaining why she was allowed in, Day writes, “The Catholic Worker is generally recognized as a labor paper, as well as a religious one. Many of the men were familiar with the paper, so it was easy to get permission to go into the plant.” Day went on to write passionately about the strikers plight:

“It was the speedup [of the assembly line] which bothered the men most. The workers packed tightly around the cars, with not a second off to get a drink or go to the toilet. It was only recently that they got five minutes off, morning and afternoon...Inasmuch as the sit-down strike has been used as a non-violent tactic to prevent scabs from taking the jobs of the workers, and to prevent the employer from removing the machinery and thus depriving the worker of his right to work and earn a living, we of The Catholic Worker have upheld it.” 

Dorothy Day’s strident support of unions and the labor movement animated the early decades of the Catholic Worker movement in significant ways. Arguably, in addition to providing direct services for poor and homeless people, supporting workers in their struggles was the early Catholic Worker’s primary focus.

Eventually the focus of the Catholic Worker would change. With the dawn of World War II, Day and Peter Maurin’s increasingly intense focus on utopian farming communes, and the rise of the New Left and its influence on the movement, the Catholic Worker’s unionism took a back seat to more prefigurative, clandestine, and smaller scale forms of highly symbolic activism.

My decade of experience in the Catholic Worker, and the experiences of many of my peers in the movement, has been influenced in an outsized way by these later projects. Significant amounts of time have been spent organizing one-off direct actions primarily focused on garnering media attention. These actions were directed at social injustices like systemic racism, environmental degradation, climate change, and unending war. Unlike the early generation of Catholic Workers, I seldom walked a picket line or supported a strike as a Catholic Worker and was never encouraged to do so by my Catholic Worker mentors.

While I am proud of much of the activism that my generation of Catholic Workers has pulled off, and believe our work has played an important role in the Catholic Worker Movement and broader movements for social justice, I have come to lament the modern Catholic Worker’s respective disengagement from the labor movement. (There are obviously important exceptions, notably the ongoing work that the SS Francis and Therese CW community is doing to support a monumental nurses strike in Worcester, MA).

While I continue to believe that activism focused on broadly changing public opinion, garnering media attention, and cultivating utopian internal group dynamics can play a role in our movement, I believe that the Catholic Worker is somewhat anemic in its support for long-term, relational organizing projects among the multi-racial working class that confronts power in a more direct way. (A better articulation of the differences between the “activism” and the “organizing” I am talking about can be found here and in a previous post on my blog here).

For this reason I believe that we contemporary Catholic Workers should return to our roots and once again engage in the labor movement. And, as mentioned above, our roots in the labor movement are deep.

The Catholic Worker began on May Day, a holiday celebrating international working class struggles, the first issue was sold at a communist labor rally in Union Square in Manhattan, and the first few issues of the paper were primarily concerned with labor struggles across the country. These examples point to the primacy of the labor movement in the Catholic Worker’s consciousness during the 30s and 40s. Of the newspaper, labor historian David Gregory writes, “...the first edition addressed the exploitation of African-American labor in the South. The second issue focused on farmer strikes in the Midwest and the poor working conditions of restaurant workers in urban areas. The third issue dealt with textile strikes, and child labor in the textile industry. The fourth issue dealt with strikes in the coal and milk industries.”

Soon this support expanded beyond the pages of the Catholic Worker newspaper, and the early Catholic Workers embodied the solidarity they wrote about. In 1934 the Catholic Workers joined the striking Orbach Department Store workers in Manhattan on the picket line, holding signs with quotes from the great social encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.

In one of their most famous and notable acts of solidarity with the labor movement, the New York Catholic Worker relocated its headquarters in 1936 to assist the National Maritime Workers Union in a strike and union formation drive. Day writes, “For the duration of the strike we rented a store on Tenth Avenue and used it as a reading room and a soup kitchen where no soup was served, but coffee and peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches. The men came in from picket lines and helped themselves to what they needed.”

While much of the Catholic Workers’ labor activism was concentrated in the 30s and 40s, Dorothy Day and many Catholic Workers were deeply invested in the United Farm Workers’ strike and grape boycott, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in the late 60s and early 70s. Day, who was arrested many times throughout her life for participation in civil disobedience, was arrested for the last time on a UFW picket line in 1973. Her arrest was documented in the iconic photo of her seated on the picket line, chatting with the police, their weapons foregrounded in front of her calm and steely demeanor.

Part of what grounded the early Catholic Worker in the labor movement was their conviction, typical of most leftists in those decades, that the organization of workers was an absolute requisite of any revolutionary strategy. They believed that in order for capitalism to end (which has always been a primary aim of the Catholic Worker) those who produce capital/wealth for capitalists (the ones actually holding the helm of the economy) must organize together to end their exploitation and take control of the means of production. No other group outside of the working class is poised to do this.

For Day and the early Catholic Workers, worker control of the means of production was the only way labor could be dignified in the manner God meant it to be. For this reason they saw organizing workers as an indispensable facet of the Catholic Worker’s mission. In her book Houses of Hospitality, Day writes about the Catholic Workers solidarity with the labor movement; “Month by month, in every struggle, in every strike, on every picket line, we shall do our best to join with the worker in his struggle for recognition as a man and not as a chattel. We reiterate the slogan of the old I.W.W.’s: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’...We are all members, one of another, in the Mystical Body of Christ, so let us work together for Christian solidarity.”

In a 1949 article in the Catholic Worker newspaper Day writes about the revolution she was striving toward; “We believe in the constructive activity of the people, ‘the masses’...We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production. We believe in an economy based on human needs rather than on the profit motive.” And for Day and the early Catholic Workers, the labor movement was the primary means for making an economy “based on human need” a reality.

In addition to the Catholic Worker’s deep roots in the labor movement, and the role the labor movement must play in bringing about the revolutionary changes that many Catholic Workers seek, I also believe that involvement in the labor movement will bring contemporary Catholic Workers into deeper solidarity with poor and working class people.

Before I co-founded a Catholic Worker community in my early 20s with a group of friends, we took a road trip across the country and visited around 16 different Catholic Workers and Christian intentional communities. Our hope was to learn as much as we could from these communities, to glean as much wisdom as possible before we started a community of our own in Minneapolis. The trip was invaluable. There were lessons learned that I have continually revisited over my decade in the movement.

However, there was one particular piece of advice we heard from many (typically longer-term) Catholic Workers that today I increasingly feel resistant to. It was around the issue of Catholic Workers engaging in paid, “outside” work. Many Catholic Workers were critical of people in the movement taking on wage work, believing instead, as Dorothy Day did, that Catholic Workers should “beg” for what they need and live in “voluntary poverty”. After our trip, we were under the impression that one of our community’s primary goals should be to engage in fundraising to enable us to quit our jobs so we could “do the Catholic Worker” full-time and be ready to get arrested at one-off direct actions and spend time in jail. (For many in our community this ended up being impossible because of the tremendous amount of debt they were saddled with).

What is jarring about this particular formation of Catholic Worker identity is that in an attempt to be in solidarity with the poor and oppressed by living in “voluntary poverty”, we have created a way of life (living off donations in hospitality houses) that is pretty unique and unrelatable. While the degree of simplicity and anti-consumerism that many Catholic Workers engage in is certainly admirable and can produce deep spiritual fulfillment, living in donated houses that we have significant degrees of control over, and voluntarily going without certain basic comforts is surely not the experience of most poor, homeless, or working class people, most of whom spend a majority of their waking lives engaging with the economy through wage labor.

For this reason, I suggest that a valuable and under-represented way to “do the Catholic Worker” is to join the labor movement! And perhaps more specifically, Catholic Workers might consider getting jobs in strategic, unorganized, and exploitative industries and organizing direct confrontations with capital alongside their co-workers. I’m convinced that this form of activism would be an important addendum to the work already going on in the movement. It would provide crucial perspective and a much needed material solidarity with poor and working people, a solidarity that, in my experience, is at times lacking within the context of Catholic Worker-style hospitality houses.

For these reasons I suggest that Catholic Workers consider returning to our roots and joining the labor movement, in addition to the important work we are already doing. Any transition out of the death spiral of racial capitalism, and the ecological crises and endless wars it fosters, will require a strong labor movement. Dorothy understood this; she understood the power of an organized working-class and the necessity of unions in bringing about a world where it is easier to be good. We should once again heed her insight, join with the masses of workers, and bring the Catholic Worker back to the picket line.