Our Jesuit education has made us who we are. For one thing, we met as students at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, so we owe our marriage to the institution. One of us was a lapsed cradle Catholic majoring in film production, the other a recent convert majoring in theological studies.
Both of us found our faith strengthened by a Jesuit culture that encouraged us to be men and women with and for others.
One goal of a Jesuit education is to foster a deep commitment to justice, especially for the poor and vulnerable. As students who first met on a campus ministry trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, we took this seriously. The Jesuit commitment to “forming the whole person” has remained with us almost a decade after graduating.
One of us, Antonio, now works for the United Farm Workers (UFW), America’s oldest and largest labor union for agricultural workers. The UFW predominantly serves immigrant agricultural workers who now find themselves threatened by mass deportation.
The other, Melissa, works to advance consumer protection and affordability in the health care system. She organizes against federal budget cuts that will leave some of America’s most vulnerable without health care. In addition, she is a proud member of her workplace union.
A Betrayal of Jesuit Values
That is why we are bewildered by Loyola Marymount’s recent announcement that it is seeking a religious freedom exemption from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to avoid negotiating union contracts with the university’s newly unionized workforce. In a recent email to alumni, Paul Viviano, Chair of LMU’s Board of Trustees, explained that this decision means “LMU will no longer recognize labor unions representing its employees for purposes of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and will not participate in collective bargaining under that statute.”
This is union-busting, plain and simple. It is an effort to strip LMU workers of their labor rights and throw out the democratic result of a majority decision by those LMU workers to unionize.
In effect, the decision means the LMU Board of Trustees is aligning our Jesuit alma mater with the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in seeking to roll back the most basic New Deal reforms. Adding insult to injury, our Jesuit alma mater is doing all these things in the name of “religious freedom,” cynically invoking the beautiful, two-thousand-year-old Catholic faith to avoid meeting its basic responsibilities under labor law to the very workers who make LMU possible.
In addition to being unfair to the majority of LMU workers who chose to unionize, LMU’s grim decision to union-bust is also a sharp break from Catholic teaching and tradition.
According to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops testified before Congress in support of the NLRA, the very law that LMU’s trustees now wish to claim a religious exemption from. In their testimony, the bishops stated, “The working man’s right to organize must not be interfered with,” while citing earlier Catholic teaching which recognized the right to a union going back to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical in 1891.
It is no coincidence that our current Pope Leo XIV took this same name to remind us of the importance of his predecessors’ teachings, not just on social issues but also on economic ones.
It is these church leaders, not craven school administrators trying to weasel out of their legal obligations as employers, who understand the true meaning of our faith. A Jesuit institution union-bustinging in the name of the Catholic faith is blasphemous. It reduces the Catholic faith to little more than a legal loophole, using the language of religious rights to evade our own religious responsibilities.
As the late, great Jesuit Pope Francis put it: “There are no free workers without a union.” The LMU Board of Trustees surely failed to appreciate this when they sleazily described the union at LMU as a “third-party intermediary who may not share the university’s mission.”
An Attack on Immigrants
The LMU Board of Trustees’ decision to union-bust is also an attack on Los Angeles, particularly its immigrant communities. It is no coincidence that the union seeking a collective bargaining agreement with LMU is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been on the frontline of defending Los Angeles’ predominantly Catholic immigrant community.
It was SEIU California President David Huerta, a U.S. citizen, who was arrested by federal immigration agents amidst a raid targeting immigrant garment workers in downtown Los Angeles, just a few miles (but a whole world away) from the comfortable luxury of LMU’s pristine campus. Yet while union leaders join Catholic bishops and priests in putting their bodies on the line for our immigrant neighbors, the LMU Board of Trustees apparently values paying low wages to LMU staff more than they value the Jesuit mission.
To be clear, both of us love our alma mater. The friendships we forged there are invaluable. Loyola Marymount’s mission, its community, and the Jesuit values it hopes to instill in future generations remain central to who we are.
That’s why we stand in solidarity with the workers who make that LMU education possible, from the cafeteria workers and groundskeepers to the adjunct professors and teaching assistants. All play a crucial role in making LMU’s community and educational experience possible.
Given that the unionization effort under attack at LMU is that of non-tenured professors, we also note that it was the non-tenured professors who were often our best teachers, staying with their students well after class. Many of the best professors we had during our time at LMU eventually left for other schools due to the very working conditions and lack of career stability that the unionization effort now seeks to address.
Reembracing Jesuit Values
A values-based Jesuit education has never been more critical than it is now. While many other elite institutions, such as the secular public universities or the private Ivy Leagues, simply seek to offer their students access to elite circles, a Jesuit education does not just create elites. It tasks them with being good elites, focused on the common good and not just their own self-actualization.
Yet how can Jesuit education accomplish its mission—to train men and women for others—when its own leaders put money over values? How can a Jesuit institution claim the same tradition as Pope Francis and Pope Leo while it union-busts its own employees? How can a Catholic claim religious freedom to violate the actual teachings of our religion?
We both benefited greatly from financial aid during our time at LMU. So we do not take lightly the potential rise in tuition ominously referenced in the trustees’ email as the financial—rather than religious—reason for seeking to avoid the university’s legal obligations under the NLRA. Yet pitting student needs against faculty and staff wages, without even making a counteroffer to the union’s proposed contract, is not the way forward.
While we can sympathize with the board of trustees’ desire to keep an LMU education accessible by managing rising operating costs, the university’s glitzy and costly expansion into the more-Musk-than-Francis “Silicon Beach” campus tells another story. Those efforts cannot come at the expense of LMU’s workers, American labor laws or the core teachings of the Catholic faith.
It would be better to have no university at all than one that so thoroughly betrays the values it claims to uphold. If what you want is an expensive private education divorced from Catholic principles, then the University of Southern California already exists—and at least it has a football team.
We urge the board of trustees of our alma mater to repent, reconsider, and return to bargaining in good faith with LMU’s workers and their democratically-chosen collective bargaining representative. We struggle to recognize an alma mater that has so dramatically betrayed the values it taught us, though we will happily return to campus for a picket line.
Every worker at LMU, like every worker across the world, deserves dignity and respect, including the right to unionize. Indeed, this is what our Catholic faith and Jesuit values teach us. Loyola Marymount needs to relearn the lesson.
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Melissa Cedillo is an organizer for Health Access California. She sits on the board of the Catholic Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas.
Antonio De Loera-Brust is the Communications Director for the United Farm Workers Union.
Cedillo and De Loera-Brust are graduates of Loyola Marymount University.
