The Right That Comes Before the Board

On Monday, the resident assistants at Stanford University withdrew their petition asking the National Labor Relations Board to recognize their union. They said they would go on organizing without it. Their case had become an argument over whether a federal statute counts student RAs as employees. The Church asks an older question first: where does the right to form a union come from, and what is the state for?

The Principle

In Rerum Novarum (1891), the first of the great social encyclicals, Leo XIII gave workers’ associations pride of place. “The most important of all are workingmen’s unions,” he wrote, “for these virtually include all the rest,” and he promised to show “that they exist of their own right.” His argument starts with man’s weakness: “The consciousness of his own weakness urges man to call in aid from without.” The impulse that builds civil society also builds smaller bodies inside it, associations that are “lesser and not independent societies, but, nevertheless, real societies.”1

The argument over the right of labor to organize hinges on a single principle articulated by Leo. Private associations, he writes, cannot “be absolutely, and as such, prohibited by public authority. For, to enter into a ‘society’ of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them; and, if it forbid its citizens to form associations, it contradicts the very principle of its own existence.”2 His argument makes two claims. The right comes from human nature, which is older than any government. Additionally, the state’s reason for existence is protection: to protect these fundamental rights. A state that forbids its people to associate saws at the branch it sits on, since the state and the union both exist for one reason, “the natural tendency of man to dwell in society.”

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says it in plainer words. “The rights of workers, like all other rights, are based on the nature of the human person and on his transcendent dignity.” Among these rights, it lists “the right to assemble and form associations.” It adds, soberly, that these rights “are often infringed.” Four paragraphs later it calls unions “an indispensable element of social life.”3

John Paul II explained in 1981 why the right exists at all. After setting out the rights that belong to workers, he wrote in Laborem Exercens that “all these rights, together with the need for the workers themselves to secure them, give rise to yet another right: the right of association.” The right to organize and form associations is how the other rights get defended. Unions are “a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice,” but that struggle is “a normal endeavour ‘for’ the just good,” and he would not let it be recast as class war.4

The same teaching limits the state in both directions. It may forbid associations formed “for purposes which are evidently bad, unlawful, or dangerous to the State,” yet even then “every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit.” Good associations the state “should watch over,” Leo adds, “but it should not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their organization, for things move and live by the spirit inspiring them, and may be killed by the rough grasp of a hand from without.”5

In May, Leo XIV picked up the thread in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence. He credits the unions that grew out of Rerum Novarum with better labor law, then says they “are no longer sufficient by themselves” in an economy reshaped by AI. Leo XIV asks something new: “Labor unions, which the Church has consistently supported, are called upon to be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them.”6 That’s a development worth spending some time with. Leo XIII defended the right; Leo XIV asks that its protection reach workers the old categories were never drawn for. He recognizes that while the economy has changed, this right to form associations has not ceased to exist.

It is important at this point to be clear about the weight of each claim. That workers have a natural right to form associations, and that the state must protect it, is ordinary magisterium, taught without a break from 1891 to the present day. How a country protects these rights is another matter. Leo XIII declined to prescribe forms of organization, which he said “must depend on national character, on practice and experience” and the circumstances of each trade.7 Which statute, which board, and which workers it covers are prudential judgments, and faithful Catholics disagree about them in good faith.

More on this principle: Work and the Worker. All twelve principles.