The Rev. Wayne Hartmire picked his way down a sun-baked sidewalk in this Los Angeles suburb, moving from picket to picket, dispensing advice.Six volunteers were holding placards during the noon shift, trying to catch the attention of lunchtime traffic, and to Mr. Hartmire’s practiced eye, they were doing it all wrong.
Turn the signs at an angle, he explained, so drivers can easily see the slogan. Make eye contact. Smile, wave, give a thumbs up. Just don’t bother calling out any chants. Anyone inside a passing car will just think you’re yelling.
Mr. Hartmire, now 74, had learned the techniques 35 years earlier as a Presbyterian minister marching alongside César Chávez and the United Farm Workers.
On this day in late July, he was turning the weapons not against landowners or growers, the enemies of decades past, but against an order of nuns who had been his allies back then.
Just two blocks away and around the corner stood the Mother House of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.
During the farm workers’ campaigns, Mr. Hartmire recalled, the order had housed union activists. Some St. Joseph sisters went to jail in 1973 in solidarity with Chávez.
Now it was different. The Sisters of St. Joseph, as the formal sponsor of a health-care system covering 14 hospitals and 20,000 workers in three states, were the target of an organizing effort by the Service Employees International Union.
After five years of escalation, the union had brought its campaign literally to the doorstep of the sisterhood, holding rallies and worship services.
In practical terms, the stakes are about 9,000 employees of eight of the nine St. Joseph hospitals in California, essentially all the workers except doctors, nurses and operating engineers.
The impasse between the union and the hospital system involves the rules for holding an election on whether, and by whom, those employees want to be represented in collective bargaining.
Such a thumbnail description, however, cannot possibly convey the visceral heat of the conflict.
This showdown between former comrades goes well beyond the usual labor-management confrontation with its ritualized drama of each antagonist playing tough before sensibly settling.
On both sides of the wrought-iron fence at the Mother House, the mutual senses of betrayal and hypocrisy run deep and personal.
Beyond those emotions is an intense debate about whether a community of nuns is violating the Catholic Church’s teaching on social justice.
Pressing home that point, the union has lined up public support from many priests and appealed directly to California bishops, a tactic that has particularly inflamed the sisters.
Some of the workers most involved in the drive, like Gilbert Zamora, used to take their families to Mass in the Mother House on Christmas and Easter.
Carmelo Gutierrez, a Catholic and a 14-year employee at a St. Joseph’s hospital, said simply of the nuns, “We thought they were just.”
On the same afternoon when Mr. Hartmire and Mr. Gutierrez offered their opinions, the clerical and secular leaders of the St. Joseph Health System expressed theirs. Not surprisingly, the dueling versions were irreconcilable.
“I want to stand, physically, with my body, keeping back people from disparaging what hundreds of sisters have done,” said Sister Katherine Gray, the general superior of the order and chairwoman of the St. Joseph Health Ministry.
Referring not only to the order’s hospitals but also to its education and job-training programs, Sister Katherine continued, “I call on people — literally, I call on people — to say, ‘You may disagree with me and us about this issue, and can’t you see that we are still doing something good?’ ”
Kevin Murphy, the health system’s vice president for theology and ethics, characterized the resistance to the union-recognition effort as consistent with Roman Catholic teachings. The papal encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” issued in 1891, lent the Vatican’s moral force to the labor movement, and has been followed over the decades by similar pronouncements.
Mr. Murphy, however, emphasized the concept of individual choice, including the choice to spurn a union. (Unions do, though, represent workers in some St. Joseph’s hospitals.)
“The foundation of the tradition is the human dignity of the individual,” Mr. Murphy said. “First book of Genesis, man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God and invited to co-create with God. There is human dignity. That’s the strand within this tradition of how important human dignity of the individual is.”
The headwaters of the present struggle go back to 2003, when employees in a St. Joseph system hospital in Santa Rosa, Calif., approached the service employees union about representing them.
The union had recently won the right to represent workers of Catholic Healthcare West, another hospital system.
Over the next few years in Santa Rosa, the essential battle lines emerged. The St. Joseph system, while insisting that its conditions were so generous that no union was needed, was nonetheless bound by federal law to have a recognition election.
The service employees union, which maintains that federal regulations give management too much leeway for antiunion advocacy, proposed other electoral conditions, like no negative campaigning.
Catholic Healthcare West had accepted those terms, but St. Joseph’s did not.
By 2007, the union and workers at several St. Joseph’s hospitals in Southern California began an organizing effort.
Talks between the union and the hospital management collapsed.
The union took on an increasingly public posture, which culminated in last month’s rallies and worship services.
“The sisters have a calling, and the workers who are trying to have a voice have a calling, too,” said Glenn Goldstein, the union’s director of organizing.
“The workers respect what the sisters have done, their history of supporting the farm workers, helping the poor. There’s just this great disconnect between who they are and how they’re acting.”
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