With God on Our Side: The Struggle for Workers´ Rights in a Catholic Hospital
Adam D. Reich
When unions undertake labor organizing campaigns, they often do so from strong moral positions, contrasting workers' rights to decent pay or better working conditions with the more venal financial motives of management. But how does labor confront management when management itself has moral legitimacy? In With God on Our Side, Adam D. Reich tells the story of a five-year campaign to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, a Catholic hospital in California. Based on his own work as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Reich explores how both union leaders and hospital leaders sought to show they were upholding the Catholic "mission" of the hospital against a market represented by the other. Ultimately, workers and union leaders were able to reinterpret Catholic values in ways that supported their efforts to organize.
More generally, Reich argues that unions must weave together economic and cultural power in order to ensure their continued relevancy in the postindustrial world. In addition to advocating for workers' economic interests, unions must engage with workers' emotional investments in their work, must contend with the kind of moral authority that Santa Rosa Hospital leaders exerted to dissuade workers from organizing, and must connect labor's project to broader conceptions of the public good.
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About Adam D. Reich
Reviews for With God on Our Side: The Struggle for Workers´ Rights in a Catholic Hospital
Choice
Reich uses his experience as a volunteer organizer with the Service Employees International Union to explain how a Catholic hospital administration at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital reacted to unionizers employing a Catholic strategy. The book suggests some of the new opportunities and challenges presented by unionizers confronting an employer with a strong moral and cultural identity.
Conscience
Reich's central thesis is that unions and workers will increase their workplace voice and power if they add a strong ideological and emotional component to their time-honored strategies of exerting economic and political leverage and of forging strong community alliances. This is a timely and compelling affirmation. It gives Reich’s work a pathfinding quality which makes the book an invaluable resource for workers, labor leaders and activists, labor students and scholars, and anyone attempting to improve labor-management relationships.
American Catholic Studies
This is an engaging book written by a former doctoral student and one-time volunteer organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).... With God on Our Side makes a significant contribution to labour history and labour studies by reminding us of the cultural dimensions of labour struggles.
Labour/Le Travail