Why the dignity of work is at the heart of civic and spiritual renewal
From a talk arranged by Together for the Common Good
As part of the part of the Lincoln Cathedral Common Good Project, MP Jon Cruddas, author of The Dignity of Labour and Honorary Professor at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, gave a talk on, "Just Working? Why the Dignity of Work is at the Heart of Civic and Spiritual Renewal". Here are some extracts:
This series asks us to reflect on "How can common good theology help us play our part in civic and spiritual renewal?" That is such a significant question. It is asking us to think deeply about the challenges we face as a nation – we can all agree these challenges are immense e.g. climate change, how we live together, fake news and the denial of truth, the rise of authoritarianism and political strong men across the globe, inequality, how we age and the future provision of health and social care, intergenerational challenges around housing, debt and work.
These are all big ticket items. That is why this series of talks is so important - because of the questions it asks - questions that politicians dodge. We literally hide from them, we stay in the weeds, focus on trivia and political point scoring. In part because of the fear of social media and the press, in part because of the limited time horizons of politics, in part because this stuff is really difficult.
I want to try to focus on questions of human labour to address some of the wider issues I have just mentioned.
The obvious question is why should we bother? Well, if we accept that political instability threatens the foundations of liberal democracy then we cannot assume democracy will survive. And if we acknowledge this - then for it to survive requires us to return to some fundamental philosophical questions such as; "How do we wish to live?", "What provides meaning in our lives?", "Where and to what do we belong?".
I think these questions of purpose have to be revisited. Because, I would suggest, behind the forces that are driving modern political turbulence, lies a fundamental point that is often obscured. It seems to me there is a growing escalating tension between the lives we live or we wish to live, and the lives we are forced to live. This division finds expression in the rage and anger that we can detect in constituencies like mine.
Questions of purpose and meaning fuel a populist reaction - this angry backlash against modern politicians and liberal democracy, which is failing to deliver the goods, that is driven by frustration about a lack of purpose and meaning in our lives. The disappearance of hope bends toward despair.
I am interested in questions of human labour because historically work and the struggle over human labour has offered meaning and purpose in our lives, a source of human dignity and hope. So work is a good issue to begin to address some of these larger questions. Despair is not inevitable.
Jon then goes on to cover five aspects:
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Why work is back at the centre of our public conversation.
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What Catholic Social Teaching might offer in this area.
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Using Catholic Social Teaching to discuss human dignity.
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Exploring issues regarding technological change and automation.
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Some policy ideas.
In this short article, it would be difficult to cover these thoroughly. Please read/listen to the full talk. However here are some very brief points from the first three aspects:
1. Why work is back at the centre of our public conversation.
The pandemic forced a reset. Government was forced to regulate who works, where and under what conditions. The status and significance of human labour moved centre stage. The value attached to the work of others - especially the vocations – of public service workers increased significantly. They had renewed value because they helped keep us alive. We recognised the dignity of their labour. We confronted our own mortality and what we value in our own lives and the contribution of others.
We have a productivity crisis. Productivity continues to underperform compared to other countries. The UK ranks 31st out of 35 OECD countries in growth of output per hour from 2008 to 2017. We literally don’t know what to do about it. The Bank of England describes our productivity problem as a ‘puzzle’.
We have recently experienced an extraordinary inflationary surge triggered by global events - which has further dramatically contracted living standards - and people have sought to challenge this as being unjust.
Then there is the question of automation. A renewed interest in work futures reflecting a widespread view that ‘the robots are coming’, often described as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’; one which will redraw how we live, in ways that we can't even imagine today.
Recognising the challenge posed to liberal democracy, the politics of work is now centre stage, following decades where questions of human labour were decoupled from politics.
2. What Catholic Social Teaching might offer in this area.
On 15 May 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum – in Latin, “of revolutionary change” – on the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”. In it the Pope sought to preserve the essential dignity of workers at a time of rapid social change and the unbridled growth of the power of capital. It asserts the moral imperative to regulate capitalism and it planted “a preferential option for the poor” into the evolution of Catholic social thought. This creed advocated unions, collective bargaining, a living wage - to maintain and preserve the dignity of the person in the workplace. It urged the capitalist - and I quote - “not to look upon their work-people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled of Christian character”. Its focus was morality and not just questions of utility.
Ninety years after Rerum Novarum, in his encyclical Laborum Exercens, “On Human Work”, Pope John Paul II offered his restatement of this tradition. It begins by elaborating why work is not simply a commodity or random action but is essential to human nature, “a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth”. Being made in the “image of God”, the person is a subject capable of acting in a planned and rational way, and so “man is therefore the subject of work” and by acting on nature through work he finds fulfilment and becomes “more of a human being”. Laborum Exercens reasserts, and I quote, “a principle that has always been taught by the Church: the principle of the priority of labour over capital”.
It follows that protections must be in place to halt violations of dignity, including unemployment, wage inequalities, job insecurities – and technological change. This last element can “supplant” the person, and I quote, “taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave”.
Work is a spiritual activity, following literally in the footsteps of a carpenter, through which the worker collaborates with the Creator “for the redemption of humanity”. Today Pope Francis follows, and is a radical advocate of, this intellectual inheritance. “We do not get dignity from power or money or culture. We get dignity from work,” he said in 2013. “Work is fundamental to the dignity of the person. Work, to use an image, ‘anoints’ with dignity, fills us with dignity, makes us similar to God who has worked and still works, who always acts.”
3. Human dignity.
Until recently, if we discussed human “dignity” we were likely to be contemplating how we are to die rather than how we are to live. The pandemic changed this. In confronting death, we once again recognised the worth of others and realised the dignity of their contributions.
What do we mean by dignity? The word retains a moral purchase but it remains controversial. Dignity is not just about status or standing; the worth of a worker cannot simply be measured by his or her salary or position in an office hierarchy. The word suggests something more significant, something that can be ambiguous and elusive but which can readily be recognised when it is lost. It suggests ethical duties in how we order society. For instance, in tolerating slavery, abuse and exploitation, or allowing some forms of imprisonment, we compromise both our personal and our collective dignity.
The idea of the negation of human dignity implies a process of reduction, degradation, dehumanisation. It captures some intrinsic human worth, with minimal acceptable moral standards, that we can recognise, whether we come from a religious or a secular humanist standpoint. I think the loss of personal dignity actually underscores the rage and anger that drives populism and underscores modern politics. The distinction between the lives we want to live and the lives we are& increasingly forced to live - and that growing gap, that canyon between those two, creates a sense of anomie that drives the rage that we witness all around us.
Understood in these terms, “dignity” has real political significance and purchase that can be detected across a variety of spiritual, ethical and human rights traditions. In secular traditions, human dignity relates to notions of agency or autonomy, and the ability of humans to choose their own actions. In both traditions, dignity can embrace a shared state of being that involves obligations - not just in religious traditions but also secularised traditions. This implies the ethical duty to remedy things or processes that violate that dignity – genocide, torture, tyranny or exploitation.
Our dignity – both in a personal as well as a collective sense – is shaped by what we tolerate and what we do not. And it is an organising method for how we build a conception of justice, a view of how society should be organised. That seems to me to have real power.
Access the full talk (Lecture 6 Rescheduled) here.
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From a talk arranged by Together for the Common Go, 20/12/2023