Dear Pope Francis:

Your Holiness, on behalf of contingent and tenure-track faculty, and on behalf of the students they teach, and on behalf of all non-academic college and university staff, we ask for your attention, and for your sympathy. We ask you to make clear your stance—a stance made clear by faith and by teachings of the Church—regarding the dignity of all laborers of all colleges and universities, Catholic and otherwise, and their right to decide for themselves whether or not to form unions. We ask this because we hope that your approval—your blessing—will make it easier for staff and faculty at Catholic institutions of higher education, as well as otherwise religiously-affiliated institutions, to publicly address and redress their concerns without fear of retribution, retaliation, or removal.

For decades, American institutions with religious affiliations have prevented unionization of faculty by claiming religious exemption under labor law, but there are signs that the situation is changing. Faculty at more and more religiously-affiliated schools have successfully appealed to the National Labor Relations Board to declare the exemption void. Contingent faculty have recently won the right to decide for themselves whether or not to unionize at Pacific Lutheran University, Duquesne University, and St. Michael’s University. Georgetown University, in a rare case, cites its Catholic and Jesuit heritage as the reason why they support union organization on their campus. Not all of these faculty agree that a union is the answer on their campus, and the NLRB’s decision is only the first obstacle to overcome, but the right of association, and the right to determine the nature of that association, has been made clear in a number of papal encyclicals, such as Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (no. 36) and John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (no. 20). The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (no. 68) lists the right to unionize without fear of reprisal among the “basic rights of the human person.”

According to United States Department of Education data from 2013, more than 70% of all faculty across the nation are hired contingently: 52.07% are hired on a part-time semester-to-semester basis, and 18.25% are hired full-time on a year-to-year basis. The percentages at institutions with a Catholic affiliation are similar: 51.25% part-time, and 14.96% full-time contingent. This means that more than two-thirds of faculty are “contingent.” In a January 2014 report on contingent labor published by the Democratic Staff of the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “a large number of respondents reported making between $15,000 and $20,000 per year, at or mostly below the federal poverty line for a family of three ($19,530) or well below the poverty line for a family of four ($23,550).” On top of the indignity of low pay and no benefits, contingent faculty frequently labor without any recourse if their teaching loads are reduced at the last minute, or their class-sizes increased.

Your Holiness, we believe with you that “to claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practice a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute.” We believe in the social justice of which you so often speak, a justice echoed in the missions of the universities where many of us teach or have taught, some of them with Catholic affiliation. We—staff and faculty, their friends and family—believe those missions have been compromised by bottom-line thinking, by a “throwaway culture” in thrall to an “economy of exclusion.” These shared beliefs are the basis for this petition. With great humility, and high hopes, we eagerly await your kind and meaningful response, in peace and love.