By Dick Meister
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.
Those seeking to guarantee workers the unfettered right to unionize have a compelling new example of how it can be done: An agreement reached in June by representatives of organized labor and the Catholic health care system.
It wasn’t easily reached. It took more than a decade of dialogue and sometimes hostile confrontations as union organizers tried to win collective bargaining rights for the 600,000 workers in the Catholic Church’s 600 hospitals and 1,200 other health care facilities across the nation.