Fair wages from Catholic institutions?

[stwannabe]

The Church talks about how people deserve a just wage. i taught in a Catholic school for several years. i loved the job, thankfully! However, the pay was low and often I, and the other teachers, would be called upon to do extra activities for which we received no pay at all. Needless to say we were already putting in a lot of time on our own to make our lessons fun/informative, again for which there was no compensation, just a desire to do a good job. My husband taught in a public school and received a more “Christian” salary! It seems the powers that be, when speaking of just wages, are only speaking of those who don’t work for Catholic institutions! How do they reconcile this apparent hypocrisy?

 

[Fr.Charles_Grondin]

Generally speaking, each individual school or Catholic agency is independent from the others in terms of finances. There’s simply not one large pot of money that is dolled out to everyone in turn. Rather, each organization is an independent entity with its own “profits and loss.”

The only money a Catholic school has to pay its staff with are the tuition payments and donations received. Running any institution is an expensive proposition. There’s salaries and benefits of employees, insurance, electricity, heat, changing fire codes, landscaping, snow removal (in certain areas), trash removal, safety codes, etc. And then there’s all the regular maintenance and repairs that go with a physical building.

I really haven’t heard of too many Catholic schools that “make money.” Most basically scrape by and barely break even between income and expenses. If schools increase tuition too much, then fewer students attend so its not always easy to raise funds.

If a school was banking an unreasonable amount into savings every year and never passing any of that along to its employees then that would indeed be a moral issue. However that is not the case in the overwhelming majority of Catholic schools that I am aware of; for most, it is not a case of refusing to pay higher wages but rather the inability to do so.