Catholic University Claims Religious Exemption From Labor Laws

(I think I’m going to basically start using this blog as a place to drop news articles relevant to my thesis. If you’re just here for the travel updates, sorry in advance!)

Normally, when a group wants a religious exemption to a law, it’s about hot-button social issues like abortion or gay rights. So this case at Duquesne University, a Catholic school in Pennsylvania, is pretty bizarre. They’re claiming that they should have a religious exemption to recognizing an adjunct professor’s union.

The article linked above summarizes the case quite nicely; you can see the court documents here if you’re interested. The gist of it is that a 1979 decision exempted religious schools from some oversight by the National Labor Relations Board, apparently on the grounds that investigations by the NLRB might undermine the clerical authority of administrators. Precisely what kinds of employees fall under this exemption is the point of contention in this case – it might apply only to employees directly involved in religious instruction, which most adjuncts at this university aren’t.

What’s interesting to me is that the school is claiming a religious exemption in order to do something that obviously goes against Catholic doctrine; the US Conference of Catholic Bishops supports unions, and has for a long time. Of course, that’s in a general sense – it’s not like priests are unionized – but it seems like adjunct professors teaching secular topics would fall under USCCB’s embrace of unions.

Religious exemptions obviously can’t be rooted in official church doctrine from a legal standpoint, because not all religious beliefs are structured the same way so there aren’t always nice neat doctrines that you can point to. But in this case, when the church in question is really hierarchical and officially unified in its views, I feel like the judge considering their request should look skeptically on it precisely because it seems to run contrary to their religious beliefs. The point of religious exemptions is to protect the integrity of religious practices and beliefs, but here it looks like they’re being used as a loophole to get around paying a fair wage.

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