Economics: Labour: Vision needed for the spread of Christian unions in North America and China

If you are a member of a labor union, most likely you are a member of the overall global labor federation called the"World Trade Union Confederation."  Some of the WTUC members are unions of Christian inspiration and principle, like the national Christian Labor federation in the Netherlands (CNV) and the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) -- but not (yet) the Christian Labor Association in the USA (CLA-USA).

The present WTUC has evolved from previously separate global labor centers of different principles: the secularist and hence atheist labor central embracing the main capitalist and socialist unions and the more Christian-hospitable union then called the World Confederation of Labour.  Both bodies worked assiduously with the UN-affiliated International Labour Organization.  The WCL of which the CNV (Netherlands) and CLAC (Canada) have long been members was the bastion of Catholic-inspired global unionism, with a few Protestant-inspired unions also principially in this day of ecumenism actively affiliated.  One of the causes, the Catholic and formerly Catholic unions championed, a cause which the CLAC atypically concerned itself with, was the independent trade unions of Cuba where the unions were severely restricted and their leaders, including leaders of Christian labor there, were jailed -- with the keys to their cells virtually tossed into the ocean.  Instead, in old Soviet-style the Cuban govt established its affiliated Communist-inspired unions with a monopoly of representation / repression of workers.

Catholic unionism, now within the WTUC, still exists, but because of changes in the interpretations of the Catholic social encyclicals since Vatican II, the nature/grace conceptualization underlying these unions has become seriously attentuated, not least in regard to passing of the old concepts thru Vatican II's new dogma of the "preferential option for the poor" and the broader rubric "solidarity" (made famous by Lech Walesa's leadership of the Solidarity organization in Poland).  The transition from the grace side of the schematic to the nature side is a global phenomenon among formerly forthr+tly Catholic unions, once outfitted with priestly chaplains who kept the affiliates and the locals at large industrial facilities on the strait and narrow. But solidarity-thinking and an option preferential to the poor helped move Catholic industrial organization of workers to a more secular way of existence and functioning.  I think of Hendrik Hart's rubric, "biblical secularity" in my own attempt to fathom the necessity of Christ-principled labour unions distinct from institutional churches (denominations), genuinely free organizations for representing workers in the h+ly differentiated-zone of industrial labor that marks our Western societies, and which is exploding enormously in China in its quick-paced capitalist transformation under a Communist govt (with again soviet-style govt labour organizations to control workers).
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