Lew Daly on "The Church of Labor"

I really appreciated Lew Daly's God's Economy, and so I'm not surprised that I very much enjoyed, learned from, and was provoked by this essay of his, "The Church of Labor."  I'm not able to agree with Lew entirely -- I think he, and other Catholic advocates for the labor movement, need to distinguish more than they do between (a) the dignity of workers and their right to associate in order to advance their common interests and the common good, on the one hand, and (b) the practices and demands of today's labor movment, especially of public-employee unions.  But, for now, I want to put that aside.  Lew's essay nicely reminds readers of the (secular) journal, Democracy, that most of what today's "progressives" value (or say they value) about the labor movement is not easily separable from Catholic, communitarian thinking about associations, mediating institutions, and the common good.  A bit:

I believe that widespread indifference and even hostility toward religion among progressives and Democrats in recent years has helped to reinforce certain trends in our political and legal culture that are equally hostile to the goals of organized labor and, indeed, to the very idea of organized labor. This is the little-told part of the story of labor’s decline—how the very same liberalism that has separated church and state and strengthened individual rights on social issues such as gay marriage has helped to undermine collective rights in the economy.