The importance of work

In his 1981 encyclical, Laborem exercens, Pope Paul II develops two helpful insights about work and capital that are worth recalling in the face of disputes at Qantas and the street protests around the world with their focus on Wall Street and the controlling power of big money.

First, work is important for self-formation and human life. Pope Paul says that part of what it means to be made in the image of God is to co-operate in the tending of the earth. This work is communal.

Sadly the Christian tradition was influenced by the view that what defined humanity was reason and rationality, and the way this tradition assigned workers and women to a subordinate place. This is still reflected in the way we value different kinds of work, and undervalue manual labour. What is particularly important is the Pope’s comment that because of the importance of work for human well-being, it is also work that makes people vulnerable to harm and distortion of their proper life. It implicitly highlights the destructiveness of unemployment and underemployment as both economic and personal issues.

It may seem like a slightly old-fashioned idea, but the second of the Pope’s insights is as important as the first: the central cause of dehumanization, oppression, alienation and war is the continuing conflict between labour (meaning people in all the broad forms of work) and capital (which is the result of the heritage of human labour), and that labour should have priority over capital. That is, the issue is not – as in Marx – who owns the capital, but whether it is used to serve labour, and whether those who labour are treated simply as units of production or human beings.

If we begin with the Pope’s insights then we approach a conflict like that at Qantas with a reading that takes seriously the claims of workers about the impact on their life, and the way Qantas serves their needs and not just those of the shareholders. It may allow us to understand that the point of strikes, which Qantas complaint about so loudly, is to force companies to negotiate.

Australia is not beset by strikes. Qantas was on the front page because it was unusual, and because it impacted on so many other parts of society – like tourism. It is not strikes that are hampering productivity improvements but under-investment in education, training and infrastructure, and an obsession with maximizing outputs rather than finding productivity improvements.

Christians need to enter the debate about workplace issues.