Labor stands for more than just work, Franciscan Father Brian Jordan told a congregation of workers, most of them in the skilled and building trades, during the annual Labor Day Mass on Aug. 28 at St. Camillus Church in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Father Jordan broke it down letter by letter.
“L: Love what you’re doing,” he told his assembly. “A: action.” The letter “B” stands for benefit, as the work they do provides “a benefit to society,” Father Jordan said. “O” is for organizing, a right vital to the growth of unions and, according to the priest, guaranteed by Catholic social teaching. And “R”? Religion, noted Father Jordan, citing both Old Testament and New Testament passages that honored workers.
God is aware of the toil of labor, Father Jordan said in his homily. “He made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he rested,” he noted. Later in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 61, can be found “the beginning of social teaching,” he said, noting the prophet’s testimony: “I have come to bring good news to the poor.”
“People have a right to make a living – meaningful work for a fair wage … the right to own property,” Father Jordan said.
The priest observed that Aug. 28 marked the 61st anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. “That speech is just as important now as it was then,” he said.
The priest reminded his listeners that Rev. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was slain in 1968, to help striking city sanitation workers form a union.
Speaking after Communion was St. Camillus parishioner Tom Perez, better known as the U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Obama Administration. Perez is now a senior adviser to President Joe Biden.
Perez said that U.S. immigrants given temporary protected status – citizens of a country experiencing ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or any temporary or extraordinary conditions that would prevent the foreign national from returning safely – are assimilating into U.S. society.
“Twenty-five percent of all people with TPS status work in the construction industry,” Perez said, and they are often subjected to dangerous worksite conditions and wage theft.
Perez told a story about Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt, the first woman to serve in the cabinet and whom Perez considers “the gold standard” of labor secretaries.
In 1936, according to Perez, Perkins was talking about the health dangers of silica dust, “but it wasn’t until 2014 that we did anything about it.” Effecting change, he added, is “tough.”
The thermometer on Aug. 28 hit a record-breaking 101 degrees in Washington, but it appeared to not deter those in attendance.
Greg Davis, a business agent for Steamfitters Local 602, pointed to the church roof and told the Catholic Standard – while standing under a shade canopy – “Doing HVAC work, we’d be up on the roof.” “A tin roof,” chimed in Tom Gifford, another Local 602 business agent.
Michael Goins, an apprentice with Local 5 of the Plumbers and Gasfitters Union, observed, “Some of us came here from work.”
It’s a two-way street, though. St. Camillus parishioner Paul Fitzgerald, a retired plumber with the Prince George’s County Public Schools, said working in the cold is no bargain, either. “We’d flip (a coin) to see who would go into the hole,” he recalled. “It was warmer there. And you didn’t have the wind blowing on you. … I only won a couple of times.”
Tom Killeen, a 45-year member of Sheet Metal Workers Local 100, speaking in the air-conditioned comfort of the church, noted he was retiring effective at the end of August, although he said he would likely stay on for a spell at local headquarters as leaders decided how to assign the work he was doing among existing (and potentially incoming) staff.
To beat the heat, Killeen – who was baptized at St. Camillus and who got his union card once he graduated from high school – had one simple piece of advice: “More water.”
It was Killeen’s last Labor Day Mass as an active union member. But hope remains that it won’t be the last Labor Day Mass at St. Camillus. Father Jordan, a noted labor advocate among the clergy, was recently transferred by his Franciscan provincial to serve as the pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Manhattan. He said he would ask his successor as the pastor at St. Camillus, Franciscan Father Jorge Hernandez, to continue the tradition.
