Earlier this
week, Catholic World Report, a webzine, ran an article, “Nonessential
Workers” and the Essential Dignity of Work.” Reading through the article, there seemed to
be some confusion about different types of work, and even work as work, as well
as the concept of dignity. It seemed to
paint the situation as a single issue in black and white, while in reality it
is a number of issues that get into some very gray areas.
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| "I'll screw up your economy the right way!" |
First off, one of
the confusions regarding the dignity of labor these days is that it has become
inextricably entwined with purely economic work, and often people aren’t too
sure whether “labor” is a dehumanizing term for human workers, or a humanizing
term for work. Add to that is that one
of the basic principles of Keynesian economics is that only a “job” entitles
someone to income. It doesn’t have to be
productive work, as long as it’s a job for which someone is paid.
In fact, under
certain circumstances (according to Keynes), it is better that the job consist
of doing something completely unproductive, just to generate income (“effective
demand”) to clear existing production.
As his lordship said,
When involuntary unemployment
exists, the marginal disutility of labour is necessarily less than the utility
of the marginal product. Indeed it may be much less. For a man who has been
long unemployed some measure of labour, instead of involving disutility, may
have a positive utility. If this is accepted, the above reasoning shows how
“wasteful” loan expenditure may nevertheless enrich the community on balance.
Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the
education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands
in the way of anything better. . . .
If the Treasury were to fill old
bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which
are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private
enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire
to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of
course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be
no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income
of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good
deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build
houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in
the way of this, the above would be better than nothing. (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), III.10.vi.)
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| Work has no dignity. Workers do. |
In other words,
Who cares what you’re doing as long as you get paid? By that standard, a heart surgeon and an abortionist
are of equal dignity, for they are both doing “jobs.” Even someone who is paid to do nothing is
contributing to society in the Keynesian Universe, because he is “stimulating
demand.”
Obviously, there
is some confusion here due to the fact that work qua work has no
dignity. It’s just work. That’s all.
It’s only when the work is 1) worth doing, and 2) done by human labor
that “the dignity of labor” (not “dignity of work”) enters into the equation.
And that leads to
another little confusion: What do you mean by “dignity of labor”? Do you mean that labor qua labor has
inherent dignity? Or that human labor
has dignity due to its inherent link to the human person?
You see where
this is going. The “dignity of labor” (as
opposed to the dignity of work) implicitly assumes that 1) some work is better
than other work, and 2) it has dignity only because of labor’s inherent link to
the human person.
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| The logical end of Keynesian economics; |
That being the
case, we necessarily conclude that, 3) a job performed only for the income it
generates or that results in a harmful good or service actually violates human
dignity. You would otherwise be forced
to draw the ridiculous conclusion that a well-paid, fed, housed, and clothed
guard at Auschwitz had his human dignity respected, while a member of the Polish
underground working without pay, starving, dressed in rags, and living in a
hole in the ground had no dignity.
The problem is
that if you restrict most people to wage system jobs as their primary or sole
source of income, you are fostering the belief that human beings are only
valued for their labor. If people can’t “work,”
then they are worthless, “useless eaters” for not producing.
In modern academic
(and thus political) logic, this translates into the presumed need for “job
creation” solely for the purpose of obtaining sufficient income. “Job creation,” however, does not enhance
human dignity; nothing, in fact, is more degrading to human dignity than to be
forced to do a “job” that is unnecessary merely to obtain income. Doing so ties someone down to meaningless
labor and prevents him or her from the real work of acquiring and developing
virtue and becoming more fully human.
This is what
Aristotle called “leisure work,” or the work of civilization and personal
growth. “Job creation,” on the other
hand, smacks of the sorts of tasks invented to keep slaves busy to justify
feeding them until they’re really needed.
So, if work per
se has no dignity, and labor only has a sort of dignity as a result of its
inherent connection to the human person, does the dignity of the human person
really require a “job” to give life meaning and for someone to realize his or
her innate human dignity?
Or is there
another way? That is what we will look
at in the next posting on this subject.
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