February 6, 2014
Every so often something hits you with such force that you have to say something about it. I recently became aware of an employment situation that’s taking place right here in Grand Rapids. Other than that I’m going to falsify the facts about the person involved so as not to bring attention to them, let it be said that person worked until recently in a service industry and has worked as a valued part of a work community that prides itself on doing social justice. The person I’m talking about worked a long time in a job that was enjoyed and always with good reports about the completion of tasks.
The person is past the age of not being able to find a job easily – somewhere over 55. Recently, the person resigned the job because it was resign or be fired, after a new supervisor found her not the best fit for “the team.” That means no unemployment benefits. An accident of the system? A good individual worker, but not a team player? One might say that. Or we could also say the person involved is a victim of injustice.
Since Pope Leo XIII, the Church has constantly fought for the rights of workers. All the popes and perhaps most especially Pope John Paul II spoke out for workers. John Paul II pointed out in the encyclical “Laborem Exercens,” that capitalism treated the worker “on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of one’s work, that is to say, where the worker is not treated as a subject and maker…”
Treating workers poorly or unjustly is not the way Catholic Christians should be operating.
“It is right to struggle against an unjust economic system that does not uphold the priority of the human being over capital and land,” the pope said. When you have contributed a large amount of your life to a company, then it is morally right for that company to treat you with the dignity you deserve. A company does not have the right to just set you aside because you are aging, or because of a single bad job review. One ought to be given the chance to see if improvement is possible, and if other avenues of work can be found that might not involve the team in question.
Pope John Paul goes on to say, “Work is, in the first place, ‘for the worker’ and not the worker ‘for work.’ Work itself can have greater or lesser objective value, but all work should be judged by the measure of dignity given to the person who carries it out.”
Anyone should be able to continue working, even when they are ‘graying’ because of their God given human dignity. It is not the work that makes the worker, it’s the other way around. And we often find that maxim difficult to carry out. The man who is reported in the news to have given his workers a raise before $10.10 becomes the effective minimum wage is adhering to the principles of social justice – he sees the importance of giving his work force a sense of dignity and so he pays his workers a decent living wage they can live on.