BY GERALD F. COLVIN

URING THE first, difficult days of the anthrax crisis of October 2001, National Public Radio host Scott Simon voiced amazement over the initial lack of protective treatment for postal workers while hundreds of White House staffers immediately received antibiotics. According to Simon, such blatant disregard for the already exposed postal employees underscored once again the essential need for labor unions as a counterbalance to elitist proclivities. In fact, he declared that a democracy is precisely the right place for labor unions.

Under the circumstances, I found it hard to disagree with his logic, even though my Adventist heritage kept telling me otherwise.

Like most Seventh-day Adventist prebaby boomers, I was warned against labor unions by my Bible teachers and home church pastors. As they described the situation, labor unions incited violence, fostered ill-advised partnerships, encouraged indolence, and forced members to walk picket lines-even on the Sabbath. Those charged with my education weren't seeking to indoctrinate me with "new light" or an overtly political philosophy: antiunionism had doubtless been the standard by which their teachers taught them a generation earlier.

What We Were Told
While select Bible passages clearly condemn violence, unwise alliances, slothfulness, and rebelliousness, my mentors drew their criticisms of labor unions wholly from the counsel of Ellen White, written five or more decades before. The following statements from her pen accurately reflect the burden of both her concern and theirs:

A Wider View by Bill Knott Many thoughtful Adventists who have examined the historical record of the church's attitude toward labor unions have felt uneasy with the apparently promanagement tilt of its overall weight. Some have unfairly attributed this imbalance to Ellen White herself, assuming that her strong warnings about union membership expressed an underlying political philosophy as well. A thorough survey of all her discussions of labor unions, however, reveals that Ellen White clearly understood the social inequities and injustices which they at least initially sought to redress. Side by side with her critiques of the violence, greed, and oppression wrought by labor unions are equally strident denunciations of the "captains of industry" whose unjust and avaricious behavior frequently pushed workers to the very edge of survival. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, she denounced the ungodly excesses of both groups, a fact not usually appreciated by the many lay Adventists who have unfairly been made aware of only her criticisms of the labor movement. Her Christian compassion for the oppressed classes of her society led her to reject the morally ambiguous goals of the labor unions, many of which employed unworthy means to otherwise worthy ends. Ellen White was not, in the final analysis, a partisan for either labor or management. She instead called all parties to a social compact based on Christ's ethic of justice and peace. _________________________ Bill Knott is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.

1. "Those who claim to be the children of God are in no case to bind up with the labor unions that are formed or that shall be formed. This the Lord forbids. Cannot those who study the prophecies see and understand what is before us?"¹

2. "A few men will combine to grasp all the means to be obtained in certain lines of business. Trades unions will be formed, and those who refuse to join these unions will be marked men."²

3. "Because of these unions and confederacies, it will soon be very difficult for our institutions to carry on their work in the cities. My warning is: Keep out of the cities. Build no sanitariums in the cities."³

4. "These unions are one of the signs of the last days. Men are binding up in bundles ready to be burned. They may be church members, but while they belong to these unions, they cannot possibly keep the commandments of God; for to belong to these unions means to disregard the entire Decalogue."⁴

5. "Unionism has revealed what it is by the spirit that it has manifested. It is controlled by the cruel power of Satan. Those who refuse to join the unions formed are made to feel this power. The principles governing the forming of these unions seem innocent, but men have to pledge themselves to serve the interests of these unions, or else they may have to pay the penalty of refusal with their lives."⁵

Dozens of similarly critical references to labor unions can be found in the variously packaged books, articles, addresses, letters, and testimonies of Ellen White, now also available in part or the whole via the Internet. Almost all of these statements strongly condemn labor unions as incompatible with Seventh-day Adventist beliefs, though important contextual information and surrounding material is frequently not made available. (See the sidebar "A Wider View," which follows this article). In some of these statements Ellen White adds that she had received this counsel specifically from heaven. We dare not dismiss counsel buttressed by such claims.

Although the church's legal representatives have informed the courts that the Seventh-day Adventist Church "teaches that it is morally wrong to be a member of or pay dues to a labor organization,"⁶ membership in a labor union has never constituted an official test of fellowship. Though no statistical evidence is known to exist, anecdotal evidence makes clear that a noticeable minority of North American Adventists do belong to unions. Union membership appears to be more frequent among members of minority racial groups, among hourly workers, and among those who usually vote Democratic in local or national elections. Those holding to an antiunion position are predominantly Caucasian, tend to work in nonunionized occupations, and frequently vote Republican. While the church's teaching about union membership was assumed to be widely understood a generation ago, articles in Adventist publications cautioning against union membership have sharply declined in the past 15 years, with the result that many members are no longer aware of the church's historic position.⁷

An Example of Union Effectiveness
In 1900 nearly 2 million American children labored in mills, mines, fields, factories, stores, and city streets.⁸ In fact, the 1900 U.S. census for workers aged 10-15 revealed that 18.2 percent of the nation's children in that age bracket were working, many of them for as long as 12 hours a day. This census report did much to spark a national movement to terminate child labor in the United States. Taking organizational form in 1904 with the founding of the National Child Labor Committee, the movement drew on moral outrage about the rampant use of child laborers, new interpretations of the value of childhood, and warnings about racial and national decay to mobilize support for strict regulation of child labor. Labor unions were in the vanguard of such efforts to reduce or eliminate child labor, primarily because of concerns about abuse, but secondarily to remove a competing low-paid and nonunionized population from the workforce.

In spite of the widespread sentiment in favor of federal laws against child labor, it was not until 1938 that the U.S. Congress provided protection for children with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Because the act prohibited interstate commerce in the products of child labor, its opponents challenged it before the Supreme Court. In February 1941 the Court reversed its opinion concerning the unconstitutionality of a 1918 child labor bill and upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act. The reversal was widely viewed as a victory for organized labor and its increasing influence in American life.

What's Happening Today?
As America's manufacturing economy gives way to one built on service and information industries, classic images of labor unions as tied to the nation's smokestack industries are also disappearing. While union presence in heavy industry has slowed or even reversed, aggressive efforts have been put forth to unionize large new professional populations, including health-care workers, educators, and government employees. Many Adventist applicants for jobs in these sectors discover that union membership is mandatory for employment, with little consideration given for an individual's religious scruples.

Labor unions are also today turning to churches, synagogues, and mosques to help them organize low-paid service workers, many of whom are not "making it" in a recessionary economy. And they are finding receptive allies among socially active religious leaders who feel that helping the working poor to attain a living wage through labor union pressure is a moral and ethical responsibility.⁹

Unions "are showing us how to bring our faith into action," says Rabbi Michael Feinberg, executive director of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition. He and Rev. Edward F. Boyle, director of the Institute of Industrial Relations/Labor Guild of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, were the main speakers at a recent seminar in New Haven, Connecticut. They pointed to a deep reservoir of Jewish and Christian religious principles-from biblical pronouncements to papal encyclicals
-that uphold the fundamental rights of workers, including the right to organize. The seminar capped the summer work of 25 interns, some of them seminarians who were recruited by the Chicago-based National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice to help unions organize and seek out the support of local congregations. The entire program was underwritten by the AFL-CIO.

After a week-long orientation, the newly trained "disciples" fanned out across the country, working in membership drives in populations as diverse as poultry factory workers in Arkansas and Maryland to hospital workers in Los Angeles and New Haven. "It's been so successful we are talking with the AFL-CIO about doubling the program next year," volunteered Regina Botterill, coordinator of the interfaith committee's summer program. The New Haven interns included a senior at Yale who intends to become a rabbi and a Yale Divinity School graduate who will work for an ecumenical social service agency upon graduation.

Emblematic of the new respectability of union organizing among persons of faith, the Divinity School graduate, also a 1994 Harvard graduate, admitted that a few years ago if anyone had mentioned the words "labor union" to him, his only thought would have been of the movie Hoffa. But that changed when he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in 1995 and spent a year in the inner city of Hartford. There he came to realize, he said, that unions are "the best and most effective way to get people to stand up for themselves."

Looking at the Numbers
Even with the growth of union in new sectors of a changing economy, union membership as a percentage of total employees continues to decline in almost all Western nations.¹⁰ Except for public-sector employees, many areas now appear virtually union-free. In the year 2000 the percentage of the U.S. work force belonging to a union declined to 13.5 percent, the lowest since the government began collecting information in 1983. The unions' share of private-sector workers fell to a record low of 9 percent in 2000 (from 9.5 percent in 1999), while the union share of government workers inched up to 37.5 percent from 37.3 percent. In all, the total number of union members in the United States has slipped more than 200,000 since 1999.

In Europe the Financial Times, of March 9, 2001, found many analysts wondering if trade unions were heading for extinction.¹¹ This fear comes from no less than the European Trade Union Confederation, which recently published a 713-page report on the matter. The investigators concluded that labor unions in most Western European countries, historically some of the region's most powerful social and political organizations, are failing to modernize and restructure themselves sufficiently to survive in a changing economy.

In Germany, union representatives exist in only 6 percent of workplaces, and a third of the country's trade union members have either retired or lost their jobs. In France, labor unions are in the throes of a deeper crisis than ever before, which seems moral and is affecting the very core reasons for their existence. In Spain, unions are being increasingly submerged in a new social order that also tends to overwhelm other liberal elements, including ecologists, feminists, pacifists, and antiracists. Only in the Nordic countries is the position of unions less desperate. Most of the workers in this region are already union members, because the unions have negotiated a continuing partnership in the development of social market models.

Where to From Here?
If union membership as a force in Western societies is in decline, and fewer Adventists as a percentage of the church membership are consequently being confronted with the requirement to join a union in order to secure employment, shall we conclude that Ellen White's now century-old counsels are no longer relevant or applicable? While this conclusion may appear timely and convenient for middle-class and Caucasian Adventists, who may thus maintain their historic antiunion perspective, the problem of integrating inspired counsel with real-life employment will then fall most heavily on Adventist African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, many of whom still find entry-level employment in service industries that have become increasingly unionized. The church dares not accept a two-track approach in which one racial group is largely allowed a "pass" while others have to wrestle with a difficult personal or professional choice.

Thoughtful, faithful Adventists should always be clear analysts of their times, alert to the ways in which inspired counsel relates to changing world situations. With world crises evolving at an ever more rapid pace, believers will look to the future to
witness whether Ellen White's oft-repeated warnings against labor unions were primarily intended for her own age or should continue to be a subject of deep concern for modern Adventists. As with many of God's warnings given through His prophetic messengers through the centuries, it is at least possible that Ellen White's labor union forecast was conditional prophecy, and that changing times and social attitudes could make it less applicable to our era.

We must also hear the profoundly moral concern that caused her to give the counsel she did. The violence often associated with labor struggles deeply disturbed her, even as she criticized the tycoons who created the markets that brought it forth from oppressed workers. She regularly portrayed the unions of her day as both controlled by Satan and crucial in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. She believed union conflict would play a key role in establishing the prophesied mark of the beast that would prevent Sabbathkeeping Adventists from being able to "buy and sell" in the last days.¹²

These are by no means unlikely scenarios in the world that has emerged since September 11, 2001. Adventists who understand both prophecy and the times they live in will also know that the themes that gave rise to the rampant unionism of Ellen White's era will likely come to the fore before Christ's second coming: class and ethnic conflict, misappropriation of the laborers' wages, a vulgar increase in the extremely rich, callous disregard for the needs of the oppressed, and harsh discrimination as to who may or may not work. What seemed unlikely, even impossible, in the world of yesterday may progress with lightning speed today, sweeping all justice and equity before it in the name of national emergency or social good.

¹ Ellen G. White, Country Living (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1946), p. 12.
² White, Last Day Events (Boise, Idaho: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1992), p. 117.
³ Ibid.
⁴ White, Selected Messages (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1958), book 2, p. 143.
⁵ White, Manuscript Releases (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1990), vol. 4, p. 75.
⁶ Nottleson v. Smith, 643 F.3d 1461 (9th Cir. 1996).
⁷ Ronald Lawson, "Seventh-day Adventists and the U.S. Courts: Road Signs Along the Route of a Denominationalizing Sect," Journal of Church and State, Summer 1998, p. 2.
⁸ Jim Zwick, "The Campaign to End Child Labor: Introduction," www.boondocksnet.com/labor/cl_intro.html, in Jim Zwick, ed., The Campaign to End Child Labor, Feb. 12, 2003.
⁹ Gerald Renner, "Labor, Religion Work to Deepen Old Ties" (New Haven, Conn.: Religious News Service; www.beliefnet.com/story/39/story_3955.html).
¹⁰ "The Decline of Labor Unions," ZENIT, Weekly News Analysis, Mar. 31, 2001; www.zenit.org/english/archive/0103/WA010331.html.
¹¹ "Fragile Unions in an Age of Anxiety," Financial Times, Mar. 9, 2001; www.etuc.org/ETUI/Publications/Books/Challeges/ChallFinTi.cfm.
¹² Robert C. Kistler, Adventists and Labor Unions in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1984), pp. 39-44.

_________________________
Gerald F. Colvin, Ph.D., is a professor of Education and Psychology at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee.