| On July 26, 1974, President Richard Nixon signed Pubic Law 93-360. This legislation, in part, restored federal labor law coverage to the not-for-profit hospital sector; coverage from which the sector had remained exempt since 1947. The enactment of PL 93-360 quickly catalyzed an increase in hospital labor organization initiatives.;This new regulatory environment effectively stoked an already smoldering intra-Church dispute concerning the moral legitimacy of administrative resistance to the association of a Catholic hospital's own employees for purposes of collective bargaining. Contributors affiliated with the American Church's longstanding legacy of promoting industrial workers' rights have tended to identify with hospital employees and to interpret the corpus of applicable Catholic social teaching as a mandate for their free association. Those affiliated with the realm of the Church's healing ministry in the U.S. have tended to identify with the hospital, to note the limitations of official teachings, and to view third-party labor entities as threats both to a sacred Christian mission and to the hospital community which works to fulfill it.;Within this broader debate, a less overt consideration has received little critical attention within the topical literature: the moral significance of occupational structure in the American hospital industry. After establishing historical-contextual foundations and reviewing the pertinent literature, the dissertation employs credible sociological scholarship to explore the moral relevance of the broader hospital industry's largely standardized workplace environment for the Catholic hospital labor controversy at hand.;The study argues that critical social assessment: first, indicates the need for applicable decision-makers to base moral deliberations and judgments concerning resistance not only on the traditional "community-of-service" identity of the Catholic hospital-as-workplace, but on its socially problematic "business-analogous" attributes as well; and second, offers helpful historical-contextual insights into the controversy's opposing Catholic viewpoints. |
