Sweeney's drive for labor rights rooted in Catholic social teaching

[rug]

John Sweeney, former AFL-CIO president, gestures during an interview at his Washington office. (CNS/Bob Roller)

Aug-15-2014
By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Awards are not what retired labor leader John J. Sweeney is about.

Securing fair wages, preserving benefits and assuring safe working conditions remain a much higher priority even though he retired after 14 years as president of the AFL-CIO in 2009.

Still driven by the desire to improve working conditions and expand organized labor's reach, Sweeney, 80, recently was honored by the AFL-CIO with the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Lifetime Achievement Award for Global Workers' Rights.

Telling Catholic News Service recently that he was surprised by the honor, Sweeney readily pointed to the people and the experiences that guided his career as a forceful advocate for workers, from the Irish Christian Brothers at his alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx borough of New York, to Gerry Shea, a longtime assistant at the AFL-CIO.

"I grew up learning much about the labor movement and it was much of the reason that motivated me and drew me to the issues of workers," Sweeney said.

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1403440.htm

I was taught by the Irish Christian Brothers in high school as well, in Power Memorial in Manhattan.

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. You won't often catch me reccing an article from Catholic News Service but this is worth reading.

Sweeney's from the homeland (Bronx) ... thus hard to ignore. Also people here ( on DU) tend to simplify and stereotype RC doctrine and tradition as a monolith... and a conservative monolith at that.

It isn't.

That said.... it would have been nice to hear from Mr. Sweeney during his AFL-CIO tenure re. appalling treatment of LGBTs by the church and its obdurate and oblivious-to-history marginalization of the female of the species.

I don't believe we ever did.

[rug]

2. The homeland.

Damn right. Since I moved to Pennsylvania I find myself thinking of NYC as the old country, just like the lady from Czechoslvakia on the third floor used to say when I was growing up.

[Smarmie Doofus]

3. My dad's family... Irish immigrants came from Ireland in the 1860s.

Stopped in BKLYN and then settled in the Scranton , PA area where they begot. And begot. And begot.

I was told they worked for "the railroad" but I imagine they mainly worked in the coal mines. ( RR work was more highly esteemed, I'm thinking.)

Someone came back to Manhattan in time for my dad to be born in 1913 on W155th street.

Here I am in the Bx. 101 years later. Go figure.

Gotta think that Sweeney's story is not much different.

There are still Doofuses in Pa. but I'm out of touch with them.... petty much completely.

It's called assimilation, I guess.

Anyway..... homeland is where the heartland is.

[rug]

4. Heh, my mother's grandparents came from Cork to Manhattan in the 1890s

Her father died in the TB sanitarium on Blackwell's Island, later called Welfare Island, now called Roosevelt Island,

And I ended up 50 miles away from Scranton, in Milford, PA.