Where are the Wisconsin bishops now?

The U.S. bishops' pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, reads:

"The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions. This is a specific application of the more general right to associate…. Unions may also legitimately resort to strikes where this is the only available means to the justice owed to workers. No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself. Therefore, we firmly oppose efforts, such as those now seen in this country, to break existing unions and prevent worker from organizing." (Economic Justice for All, 1993)

In opining to these documents and others such as Gaudium et Spes and Centessimus Annus, Catholic social teaching supports not only the right to organize but the exercise of that right.

In their book The Church and Social Justice, Fathers Jean Yves Calvez, S.J. and Jacques Perrn, S.J. write:

There is need only to draw out the implications of the reasoning of the popes on the necessity of unionism and on the correlative obligation to join a union. The most easily seen argument rests on the fact that, by means of collective bargaining, all those who are employed in an enterprise, even the non-unionists, benefit from the action which the union undertakes in defense of their rights. The individual work contract made by the worker is established with reference to the collective bargain, so he has some sort of tacit engagement and ought to admit to some obligation toward the union.