Believe it or not, I'm stunningly neutral regarding unions. I grew up with a plumber father who felt they had grown too powerful and refused to join them until forced to do so to keep his job. He griped about the money they took form his paycheck but the numbers did grow bigger thanks to union-set wages.

I work for a non-union paper with an extremely bitter union-busting past, so much so that, 30 years after the fact, there are ardent unionists who believe any employee here is a scab, even though precious few on the payroll crossed a picket line to get their job.

I personally feel unions have gotten too potent too often, thwarting efforts at efficiency and progress in many places - Philadelphia is a great example, where metro columnist Tom Ferrick recently unearthed evidence that, while the trade unions insist they are protecting the poor city workers, most of them live in richer suburbs. I also believe unions have proven utterly invaluable in their passionate and often costly push over the decades for better working conditions and a fairer share of the profit pie.

A union is priceless when it does the essential work of truly protecting employees and jobs. It becomes prohibitively expensive when it protects bad workers or obstructs reforms needed to keep those jobs where they are. A good company with a smart attitude toward worker relations doesn't need a union, and a good union with a smart attitude toward management relations shouldn't need to throw its weight around.

That long preface out of the way, the Diocese of Scranton's decision Thursday to reject requests to unionize teachers deserves a loud round of harsh criticism. Not because of what they did, but because of how it was done. For well over a year the Scranton Diocese Association of Catholic Teachers has sought recognition as bargaining agent for teachers under the new school system, which abolished numerous smaller school boards in favor of four regional ones. The answer the union kept getting was, "give us a little time, we've got to get all our ducks in order."

The bishop said the decision to allow a union must fall to the newly formed boards. The newly formed boards said they had to take care of more pressing problems but promised to consider the request. Then the diocese (not the boards) announces in its newspaper The Catholic Light  (rather than contacting the union directly first) that a new employee relations program is being uniformly adopted by the three regions where the union had sought recognition, and that the boards of those regions had rejected the union's request.

The veneer here is thin enough to pierce with a tossed paper clip. It becomes profoundly difficult, considering the way the process was drawn out and the way the decision was announced, to believe this came from the regional boards. It has, as Union President Michael Milz said, all the markings of a top-down rule, an edict the bishop required the boards adopt, then sugar coated for public consumption. If they wanted us to believe this was truly a decision each board reached independently, they could have at least had the boards separately contact the union with the news. And, by the way, form letters that said exactly the same thing from each board wouldn't have done the job. That tactic was used when the board's individually responded to the union's initial request for recognition after they were formed in October.

The problem here is not that the bishop or his hierarchy are almost certainly making the real decisions. They not only have that right (legally and canonically), they have that responsibility under the Catholic Church's structure.

The problem is that they gave the impression they would seriously consider unionization, at one point even noting in The Catholic Light that diocesan legal counsel had suggested the proper way to settle the matter would be to let employees vote on unionization by secret ballot overseen by a neutral third party.

Even if everything is exactly the way the diocese spun it, if the bishop really left it all up to the regional boards, if those boards really did carefully consider unionization and separately conclude it was the wrong way to go, they've still left the flock with the foul taste of promises broken. They've given more reason to believe we are repeatedly asked to put our faith in a facade.

I've said many times that I believe Bishop Joseph Martino is a smart man doing the incredibly hard job of physically restructuring a diocese that has changed radically demographically without making necessary adjustments. I still hope that's true.

 But with each move like this, where the impression is given that people will be heard but the end decision seems indifferent to their words, he makes it harder to believe.

About the Author

A West Hazleton native, I worked as a service technician repairing electronic mailing and shipping systems, a bike shop owner and an Emergency Medical Technician (among other jobs) before landing a reporter job at the Times Leader Hazleton Bureau in 1995. I started by covering primarily politics in Hazleton City and outlying municipalities, eventually became "social issues" team leader in the Wilkes-Barre office with the accent on education, and headed the Hazleton Bureau for a spell before returning to full-time reporting, my preferred position. I'm an avid cyclist and rode across the country in 1990, a trip of more than 5,000 miles from New Jersey to Seattle and down the coast to San Francisco. Years in the Boy Scouts made me a life long backpacker and camper, and I've yet to find a better way to enjoy the quiet lure of winter snow than cross country skiing.

Mark also writes a regular blog for timesleader.com.

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