When Catholic Charities fired me, I was glad to get unemployment. Those days may soon be over.

When I read that the U.S. Supreme Court appears to favor the Catholic Charities’ case to opt out of paying unemployment tax, I’m grateful the Madison agency fired me when it did.

I worked in various IT and data analyst capacities for Catholic Charities of Madison for a decade. But when the new senior management decided to outsource all of its IT in 2022, they showed me the door. Based on my seniority, I got a 10-week severance package.

As it turned out, 10 weeks wasn’t enough time to find a new job. But in 2022, I had the right to file for unemployment, based on the taxes Catholic Charities was paying — I almost said religiously — to the state of Wisconsin. And it was a good thing, too: I needed the money to live on, and COBRA health insurance payments also came out of my unemployment benefits.

Fortunately, by the end of the year, I was hired as IT director at Freedom From Religion Foundation, and I’ve been happy as a well-compensated clam ever since. But suppose the U.S. Supreme Court rules the way everybody thinks it will in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission. In that case, things could turn out very differently for other people who lose their jobs with Catholic Charities or any other religious organization that provides social services. Instead of a landing net, they could be hitting the pavement hard.

The case, which was heard on Monday by the Supreme Court, involves a Catholic Charities bureau run by the Diocese of Superior, Wis., which is trying to get several of its subsidiary nonprofits exempted from paying unemployment taxes. The agency claims that the services they provide, although not explicitly religious, are “religiously motivated.” The case has an enormous potential impact, as FFRF’s friend-of-the-court brief documents, and not just for Catholic Charities employees: More than three-quarters of a million employees who work for huge Catholic-operated health care organizations could also lose their benefits.

And it’s not as if the social services provided by these organizations are funded by Catholics and provided by Catholics for the benefit of Catholics — although many Catholics assume this is the case. These services include drug addiction therapy, in-home help for the disabled, the operation of homeless shelters, and day centers for the elderly. While each diocesan Catholic Charities runs differently, many accept millions of dollars of county social service money. To receive that money, they may not discriminate on the basis of religion — either in the clients they serve or the employees they hire. I know; it was part of my job to document our nondiscrimination.

As a result, not only are the people served by these charities religiously diverse, including many atheists and agnostics, but their employees have the same spiritual diversity. Moreover, the staff may not proselytize in the performance of their jobs.

Many of these service jobs are extremely low paid, and in Wisconsin, the method for administering Medicaid funds virtually ensures that they must be low paid. Some of the people who take these jobs may be religiously motivated, but far more are people who can’t get work elsewhere — recent immigrants, for instance. The shifting nature of public social service funding means that entire programs can be halved or wholly terminated, throwing employees into the arms of unemployment with little warning.

Except now those arms may not be there.

I have no idea whether my former employer will attempt to opt out of Wisconsin unemployment, or what, if anything, would replace it if it did. Any replacement program would necessarily be small and private, possibly at the mercy of diocesan finances. As a non-Catholic, I would have been terrified to have to rely on something like that.

As nonprofits, the various Catholic Charities organizations are already exempt from most taxes. Refusing to pay for unemployment isn’t a question of preventing some kind of government control of religion — it’s about evading responsibility to their employees, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. I fear for my old colleagues now.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.