A Catholic University With a Radical History Faces a Union Drive of Its Own
Catholic radical Louis J. Twomey’s labor institute at Loyola University New Orleans trained a generation of workers for class struggle. A new union drive among the university’s food service workers draws on that legacy of the best of Catholic trade unionism.
Loyola University in New Orleans. (Arnoldius / Wikimedia Commons)
“[It is an] immoral principle that human labor is a commodity.”
-Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, Address before the Industrial Relations Committee of the Louisiana State Senate, 1954
The American Catholic Church was once an incubator of working-class activism. As Catholic institutions face unionization drives of their own, will they forsake this legacy or embrace it?
Food service workers at Loyola University New Orleans, a Jesuit university, have recently gone public with their intent to unionize. While the workers are technically employed by a third-party contractor, the university can greatly influence the result of the drive. It has yet to be determined how the university will respond.
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