Three Seventh-day Adventist organizations have joined a legal challenge against a National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) ruling that a religious college in Montana must allow its faculty to organize a labor union.
Three Seventh-day Adventist organizations have joined a legal challenge against a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that a religious college in Montana must allow its faculty to organize a labor union.
Loma Linda University and Medical Center, La Sierra University, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council, along with a group of religious colleges, are arguing that the NRLB ruling deprives religious organizations and individuals of their religious freedom rights.
The dispute centers on labor relations at the University of Great Falls, a Roman Catholic-owned college in Montana. In its August 2000 ruling, the NLRB held that the Catholic university did not have a “substantially religious character” and thus could not claim a religious exemption from federal labor laws. The NRLB directed the university to allow its faculty to organize a union.
The decision threatens to place countless religious educational institutions in the “untenable position of being routinely required to bargain with a union over matters that go to the heart of what these organizations see as their religious mission,” say opponents of the NRLB’s ruling in their brief, filed August 7.
“Loma Linda University and Medical Center exist to continue the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus Christ,” says Kent Hansen, general counsel for Loma Linda University Adventist Health Sciences Center. “We do not believe that the unique method of pursuing this sacred mission should be subject to elections, strikes, or collective bargaining.”
“This is another in an increasingly long line of cases where the government assumes the right to decide whether religious ministries are sufficiently religious to enjoy religious freedom protections,” says Alan Reinach, public affairs and religious liberty director for the Adventist Church in the U.S. Pacific region.
He cites a number of recent cases where religious freedom protection has been denied, including an Adventist radio station in Solano County, California, which was declared a business, not a ministry; and a recent NRLB ruling that Ukiah Adventist Hospital’s religious freedom is outweighed by the right of nurses to organize a labor union.
Oral argument in the University of Great Falls appeal is set for December 4 in Washington, D.C.
