THE DIGNITY OF HUMAN WORK
LABOR DAY CELEBRATION
September 03, 2017
Saint Cecilia Catholic Community, Palm Springs CA
Rev. David Justin Lynch
Sirach 38:27-32A Wisdom 10:15-19, 20b-21
1 Corinthians 3:10-14 Matthew 6:19-24
+ In the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
When I meet someone new, one of the first questions I ask
is, “what sort of work do you do?” I ask that because more than anything else,
our work, or lack of it, at least partially, describes who we are. The response to that question gives me an
insight into someone’s soul. What work
one does is part of one’s identity.
The work we do is bound up with our dignity as human persons.
Human dignity is the cornerstone of Catholicism. Psalm eight sings our praises.
We were created “a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and
honor,” and given dominion over all creation. Catholicism gets its focus on human dignity
from Jesus Himself. Recall the story of the crippled woman healed on the
Sabbath, to which the prevailing religious authorities objected. Jesus
responded by saying, “don’t you untie your donkeys and lead them to water on
the Sabbath, yet I shouldn’t heal this woman? What Jesus taught here was caring
for people because they are people! Jesus teaches us mercy. Jesus taught us to
do mercy. It is in doing mercy that we affirm and respect human dignity.
The Book of Genesis tells us that all humanity, no matter
who or what we are, were created in God’s image. Being the image of God the
human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something,
but someone. The human person is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession
and of freely giving himself or herself, and entering into communion with other
persons. And the human person is called by grace to a covenant with God the
Creator, to offer God a response of faith and love that no other creature can
give in our place. God’s life and love
is inherently imprinted on all of us.
Human persons were made for work. God enlisted humanity to
assist in creation by designing us to develop our gifts and potentialities.
Human work is part of God’s design for the universe. Our work is our continuing participation in
God’s creation. All things, even those created in earthly factories, were
created by God, who continually participates in all we do. The human person is
the source and goal of all economic life. As Pope Paul the Sixth so aptly put
it in his encyclical, Octogesima Adveniens, “the beginning, the subject and the
goal of all social institutions is and must be the human person.” That
would include work.
Today, we celebrate work, as such. What is work? Work means productive human
activity, other than what we do to survive, like eating. The activity of the
animal kingdom undertaken for survival, such as finding food or building a nest,
is not work as we know it, because it is fulfillment of an instinct, not a
voluntary act. Thus, work is unique to human beings in contrast to other
creatures.
Not all work of value is paid work. As a priest, I am paid nothing. Many people
work as volunteers for churches and other organizations doing valuable tasks
without payment. Parents who stay home to take care of young children are another
obvious example, but over the last two weeks, we have seen people in Texas
working hundreds of hours as volunteers to rescue the victims of Hurricane
Harvey and help them recover from devastating floods.
Although work, whether paid or not, defines what it means to
be human, it’s a fact of life that most people who are working are doing so to
earn money to pay their survival. Most people have no choice but to work to
support themselves, lest they descend into homelessness, hunger, and all that besets
those who are without money. Much of the population in the United States lives
paycheck to paycheck, with no savings. According to a recent study by the
Federal Reserve Board of Governors, for about half the population, an
unexpected expense of four hundred dollars, say for example, a car repair,
would mean either borrowing money or selling items of value. For a wealthy person, however, a four hundred
dollar car repair is an expected cost of doing business, but for many, it is a
major life trauma. Nowhere has this been more true than for the victims of
Hurricane Harvey, many of whom were comfortably middle-class but now face the
hardship of uninsured losses from an unexpected natural disaster.
A lack of even a small amount of accumulated wealth also
limits their freedom to leave a job in an abusive working environment. A stark
choice faces them: either tolerate abuse or descend into poverty. Most workers have
no choice but to submit to a weaker position in a power relationship where the
stronger party is not only in control, but makes decisions that serve their own
interests rather than the interests of the weaker party.
The power differential in the workplace became particularly
acute in the course of the industrial revolution. Goods that had previously
been the pride of craftspeople such as those described in our first reading
became mass-produced by machines. Instead of the person who made the goods
receiving direct payment from the person who purchased them, the money went to
the company owner who owned the machines that made them and paid the worker to
run the machines. The company owners had no economic incentive to provide safe
machines to the workers coupled with a strong incentive to pay those workers as
little as possible. Companies used human
beings as mere instruments for money-making. Labor was a commodity to be
purchased at the lowest possible price, forcing workers to lower their economic
expectations to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. The more
labor, the more competition for available jobs, and the lower the wages paid,
and the lower their standard of living.
Because the workers lacked the money and political power to
change their situation, the company owners took advantage of them. Workers faced long hours, unsafe and unhealthy
worksites, and job instability. During economic recessions, many workers lost
their jobs or faced sharp pay cuts. If workers were hurt on the job,
there was no such thing as workers’ compensation to pay for medical care and
lost earnings. The general public became concerned with industrial accidents
only when scores of workers were killed in a single widely reported incident,
such as the many coal-mine explosions and factory fires. From these conditions
arose labor unions, who took collective action by way of strikes to force
higher pay and better working conditions, and laws mandating a minimum wage, a
maximum work week, compensation for injured workers, as well as regulations to
address health and safety concerns. All of this furthered the dignity of
workers and their work.
To paraphrase Pope John Paul the Second in his encyclical Laborem
Exercens, work is a good thing for the human person, a good thing for humanity,
because through work, we not only transform nature, adapting it
to our needs, but we also achieve fulfillment as human being, and indeed,
in a sense, we become "more
a human being.” But when work is reduced to an activity for mere
survival, it no longer has any dignity in and of itself. As Pope Leo the thirteenth correctly noted in
his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, “working for gain is creditable, not shameful,
to a man, since it enables him to earn an honorable livelihood; but to misuse
men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely
for their physical powers - that is truly shameful and inhuman.”
When employers exploit workers, people no longer work
because it gives them a purpose and identity. They work because they must to do
so, not because they want to do so. I
myself was an employer. I first owned an insurance adjusting company for seven years,
then a law firm in Orange County for six years, and another law firm in Palm
Springs for fourteen years. I paid my people as well as I could, paid their
health insurance in full, and did all I could to give their lives some degree
of human dignity. I thought of my employees as family, not just workers. The
result was I did not become as wealthy as I could have been had I looked out
only for myself. Unfortunately, most other business owners think differently
than I do. For me, paraphrasing today’s second reading, the mercy taught by Jesus
was the foundation on which I built my economic life.
Applied to Labor Day, to be merciful is
not just a virtue, but a command. Although company owners may have higher
standing in human society, in God’s sight, they are no more significant than
the workers they employ. One’s abundance of money or possessions does not make
one person more worthy than another in God’s eyes. Yet we live in a society
where the amount of money one has determines one’s ability to live with dignity
or not. That is a well anticipated
result when survival becomes a matter of competing with other people for money
or resources. The stronger will prevail. That may be reality, but it is a
reality that should not be.
We, acting as individual Christians, are
not going to change that anytime soon, and not without collateral damage.
However, workers do have an inherent right to organize for change, whether that
be through labor unions, the Courts, or the political system. Our goal is an economy that serves people, not
people serving the economy. We must do this. The human and moral costs of an economy
without mercy that puts money before people are substantial. Unemployment leads
not only to material poverty, but spiritual poverty as well, when workers
neglect their spiritual lives to concentrate on mere survival. An
ever-increasing gap in both income and wealth between the richest and poorest
people produces social unrest that often leads to violent crime and property
destruction, often directed at immigrants, sexual minorities, and other
vulnerable groups. Young women and men fresh out of college with mountains of
debt are unable to successfully start their lives so that they can contribute
their best talents to the economy to benefit not only themselves but the rest
of us as well. Older people are unable to achieve a dignified retirement. All of this occurs because the wealthiest
among focus on money first, not mercy. We are seeing the results every day of
serving money first and God as an afterthought, if at all. To serve mercy, is
to serve God.
The causes of most unemployment are
globalization and automation, not immigration. The economy is no longer local
to a community, state, or nation, but is the entire world. Goods are
manufactured and services provided wherever the cost is least. A good example is customer service to the
United States from India, the Philippines, and elsewhere, made possible by both
cheap labor and fiber-optic cables. Not
only are we part of a global economy, but the work itself is more and more
automated by robots and artificial intelligence. You call somewhere for service
and talk to a voice-recognition system. The result has been devastating to
American workers, particularly those in rustbelt industries, who grew so
desperate that last fall they relied on the empty promises of an unqualified
demagogue to elect a President who would exploit their worst instincts by
exploiting their fears of immigrants, who come to the United States just to
make a better life for themselves. The
notion that immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans is nonsense. Yes,
immigrants do jobs white American won’t touch, but particularly troubling is
the notion that Americans are somehow more valuable than foreigners. The truth
is, Americans are no better or worse in God’s sight as anyone else. The people of India, the Philippines, China,
and all the other places who provide goods and services to us, are just as much
God’s children as Americans are.
Trump, however, is just a bump in the long
road ahead. Politics notwithstanding, globalization, robotics, and artificial
intelligence are not going to stop, and are going to continue to cause
disruptions in human life by breaking familiar economic and social patterns. No amount of ideology of whatever stripe is
going to stop it.
We will not be able to maintain the
dignity of human persons by doing things the way they’ve always been done. The twin realities of both the global economy
and advances in technology require a new social contract, built on different
philosophical assumptions. The maintenance of human dignity, and in fact the
survival of the world, depends on recognition that we are, in fact, one world,
and that placing the responsibility for each person’s survival on the back of
each individual person, plus continued competition among people for survival of
the fittest, is no longer a tenable set of propositions.
As much as it may conceptually offend proponents
of free markets and individualism, the time has come to consider not only the universal
single payer health care of every advanced country but the United States, but
universal basic income as well. Technological advances will require fewer
people to do the work necessary for human survival. A universal basic income
will restore the dignity of work for the human person, because more and more
people will do work they want to do and love to do, rather than work at
something they would rather not do, just to survive, for example, music, art,
literature, and yes, ministry. People
will put their heart and soul, not just their bodies, into what their
work. Then, we will truly be able to
cooperate and engage with God in the ongoing creation of the Universe. But most
important, we need to see a re-ordering of power relationships, where those
providing labor and those providing capital share fairly the fruits of
production, acting as partners. Absent the unequal power relationship of the
traditional employer-employee, master and servant relationship, work can and
will reacquire its inherent dignity. To paraphrase Pope Francis, we must say no
to an economy of exclusion, no to an idolatry of money, no to a financial
system that rules rather than serves, and no to inequality that spawns
violence. That can only happen, however, when we see our fellow humans not as
competitors or threats to who we are, but as a reflection of the same love with
which God created us. AMEN.
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