Religion in the Workplace: Faith, Action, and the Religious Foundations of American Employment Law

Religion in the workplace tends to make us uneasy-an intruder in a world of Weberian rationality. Nevertheless, while relatively few of us realize it, our labor and employment law has a strongly religious foundation, without which we would have little of the legal structure with which we are familiar. In this address, I will expose this foundation, and suggest that we only fully can understand the dynamics of the law in this area in light of the religious influences that gave our law its form. Secondly, I will suggest that the crisis that employment law finds itself in—and not just in the United States—only can be addressed through a willingness to consider anew the insights religion has to offer us on the nature and dignity of work and of the humans who perform it. Lastly, I will suggest that as much as we may wish to avoid the topic, religion will force us to confront it, in the workplace, in law, and in politics. It is integral to human personality and we can ignore it only by ignoring ourselves

The Notion of Solidarity and the Secret History of American Labor Law

“Solidarity,” a term not overly familiar to Americans, sometimes seems to have as many meanings as it has users. The concept became incorporated into American thought during the 19th and 20th century waves of Catholic and Jewish immigration. It provides a European vision of communitarian social order that competes with the “unencumbered self”—America’s unique brand of individualism. Among philosophers, politicians, religious thinkers, and social activists, solidarity theory sought to redefine the then-prevailing views of social bonds. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the American labor movement, which espouses as its core values the principles of unity and the collective good. Yet there is something undeniably strange about the National Labor Relations Act—the apogee of the movement’s efforts—which forces workers to subordinate their individual voices in order to gain a collective voice in managerial decision making. The NLRA is unique not only among the labor relation schemes of other nations, but its terms do not fit well within American legal patterns either. It is the only place in our famously individual-oriented legal system where the law seeks to protect the status of the person through the regulation of freely-formed associations. Perhaps this anomaly is rooted in the predominant role the Catholic Church has exercised in shaping America’s labor movement. The author suggests that two factors might explain the Catholic character of American labor law. Perhaps the manner in which Catholics understand community and the Church’s traditional teachings on social justice account for the consistent support the Church has given to organized labor and collective bargaining. By providing a short history of solidarity, and using the Corpus Christi celebration as an example of Catholic community values, the author assesses a uniquely Catholic contribution to American labor law

Comparative Law in a Time of Globalization: Some Reflections

This piece discusses the tension between internationalization of legal ordering and the growing pressure against local and national ordering. Using Aristotle, Tocqueville, the Reception of Roman Law as forebears of the problem, I discuss three major European Court of Justice decisions (Laval, Viking and Schmidberger) as examples of the displacement of local ordering. I conclude that the task of comparative law is to focus on the importance of local ordering, keeping the human at the center and not vague principles generated by international bodies with no or little local ties