Here in Boston the students have descended upon us from the four corners of the earth, the mornings are crisp, and the earliest of leaves have started to change colors, but nothing announces the arrival of fall like the return of football.  With the Sox not even in contention this year, a month before their traditional October collapse, all eyes are on the Pats.  Like football fans everywhere, New Englanders are screaming their collective head off over the horrendous officiating that has plagued the league.

While I am a sports fan, I am under no illusions about the importance of what they are doing.  Football is just a game, after all, and while I may have been guilty of breaking the second commandment a couple of times during last weekend’s debacle in Baltimore, in the big scheme of things I recognize it’s no big deal.

What the replacement refs did simply putting on the stripes is a big deal, however.  We have been subjected to a bunch of small college zebras on the game’s biggest stage ever since the league locked out the regular, union officials while they negotiate a new contract.  The replacement refs are therefore not only terrible, they are also, in a word, scabs.

Catholic social teaching has long recognized the rights of workers to form trade unions, dating back to Pope Leo XIII’ Rerum Novarum in 1891.  More recently, Pope John Paul the Great wrote in Centesimus Annus that

Furthermore, society and the State must ensure wage levels adequate for the maintenance of the worker and his family, including a certain amount for savings. This requires a continuous effort to improve workers’ training and capability so that their work will be more skilled and productive, as well as careful controls and adequate legislative measures to block shameful forms of exploitation, especially to the disadvantage of the most vulnerable workers, of immigrants and of those on the margins of society. The role of trade unions in negotiating minimum salaries and working conditions is decisive in this area.

This is not to say that simply because unions are just, needed, and do good works, that all unions are right all of the time.  To pull an example from another recent major labor dispute, I am far more sympathetic to the demands of the mayor of Chicago than I am to that city’s teachers.  As one who holds an educator’s license and has a passion for public education, I have only the highest respect for teachers.  I recognize, however, that their union rightfully exists to look out for the interests of its members, not for what is best for students.

I will certainly grant you that union referees’ earnings have far exceeded “adequate” wage levels, when, for only a few hours of work, they earn a salary that is several times larger than what the guy in the seats makes in a year.  However, anyone who has watched any of these games (and a tip of the hat to Mirror of Justice for a great post on the “simultaneous possession” fiasco) recognizes that there is something to be said for maintaining a certain level of capability and productivity.  Those concerns are even more pronounced when we are speaking of a tradesman, or nurse, or unskilled worker who labors each day in unsafe conditions.

I am fortunate enough to work in an extraordinary university where every day I interact with the brightest minds of today and tomorrow.  While they may be the most visible people with whom I work, they are not the only ones.  I also work with the most vulnerable workers, the immigrants, and those on the margins of society.

The Fields Medal winners, the scion students of old Brahmin families, and the football referees don’t need the protections a union provides.  It is Francisco, the man who empties my garbage each night, and his friends and colleagues, and many of my friends and family, who need and deserve the protections as union can provide.

It is for them that I support labor unions.  “Certainly not because of ideological prejudices or in order to surrender to a class mentality,” as the Holy Father said, but because as the union poster in my office proclaims, “We can’t eat prestige.”