Newt Gingrich Fights Pope, Al Franken, Public on Union Rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/newt-gingrich-fights-pope_b_228260.html

Art Levine Contributing editor of The Washington Monthly

Recent Catholic convert Newt Gingrich is challenging Pope Pope Benedict XVI and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over workers' rights to organize. In an encyclical released this week (hat tip to the AFL-CIO Now blog), the Pope embraced the right to form unions as essential to economic justice.

The Pope declared:

Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labor unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome...their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

While stopping short of explicitly endorsing the Employee Free Choice Act that Gingrich and Big Business groups have demonized, the Pope's encylical adds to the growing array of Catholic scholars and organizations that are endorsing union rights -- and, in some cases, the proposed bill -- as a moral imperative.

FULL story at link.