U.S. politicians love to talk about the dignity of work. And for good reason: Work is a major part of how Americans understand themselves. But politicians do not agree about what the dignity of work entails. The way Republicans and Democrats talk about this idea and the policies they justify through it differ widely.
So it is remarkable to see Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s recent essay on the dignity of work in the journal First Things. In it, Mr. Rubio, a Republican, uses the concept of work’s dignity in ways more commonly heard from Democratic senators like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Mr. Rubio writes of “the essential role of labor unions” and how the growing power of financial capital “has sapped our productive capacity and damaged our ability to provide dignified work.”
It is also remarkable that Mr. Rubio draws these ideas from Catholic social teaching. “The dignity of work, the Church instructs us through documents like [Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical] Rerum Novarum, is not just the concern of individuals,” he writes. “It is the concern of communities and nations to provide productive labor to their people.”
The partisan divide over the dignity of work comes down to one question: Where does dignity come from? Do jobs give people dignity, or do people give jobs their dignity?
The labor-friendly ideals of Catholic social teaching are more often echoed by Democrats’ statements on the dignity of work than by Republicans. With this essay, Mr. Rubio is breaking intellectual ranks. If other Republicans follow him, he may show that Catholic social teaching points the way toward a pro-worker political consensus.
The partisan divide over the dignity of work comes down to one question: Where does dignity come from? Do jobs give people dignity, or do people give jobs their dignity?
Republicans typically say dignity is inherent in work itself. When you work, you earn not just wages but also the right to take pride in contributing to society. By this reasoning, minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, as well as collective bargaining by labor unions, get in the way of people’s access to the dignity that work brings. As the former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker said last year, in a statement justifying new work requirements for food stamps, “We want to help those in need move from government dependence to true independence through the dignity of work.” Without work, on this view, you lack dignity.
Democrats, by contrast, talk about dignity as contingent on the quality of the job; work is only as dignified as the wages, protections and benefits workers get from it. That means dignity is not equally inherent in all work. “Dignity of work means hard work should pay off for everyone, no matter who you are or what kind of work you do,” reads the website for Mr. Brown’s 2019 Dignity of Work Tour. “When work has dignity, everyone can afford health care and housing…. When work has dignity, our country has a strong middle class.” Dignity, then, is something to preserve, to organize around or, as Mr. Brown has said, to “fight for.”
Mr. Brown’s view, like the one Mr. Rubio espouses in his essay, aligns with much of what the popes say in the social encyclicals. Catholic social teaching emphasizes that the person has dignity before they ever work a day in their life—or if they never do. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1981 encyclical, “Laborem Exercens,” “the basis for determining the value of human work is…the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” Work is only dignified because human beings, made in the image of God, already are.
The social encyclicals were written, in part, to combat socialism. Pope Leo spends much of “Rerum Novarum” defending the right to private property and calls Marxists “crafty agitators.” But his vision of labor is also radical by the standards of the United States in the 21st century. Leo sounds further left than Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, when the pope deplores the inequality created by Industrial Age capitalism: “A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”
As for policy, Leo argues for a living wage—income high enough to support a frugal family—and for maximum hours based on the kind of work being done and “the health and strength of the worker.” He mentions miners as deserving “shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health.” Throughout the encyclical, the pope appeals to natural law. Humane labor conditions are not just perks for the highly skilled; they are universal requirements of justice.
It will take more than one Republican senator’s essay to realize Catholic social teaching’s vision of the dignity of work. But workers’ natural rights become a little more secure with each legislator who begins to see dignity in Pope Leo’s terms.
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