I’ve dealt with this issue more at CatholicVote (e.g., here and here), but wanted to mention something about the morality of just wages and labor in general in Catholic Social Teaching here at T&C, spurred on somewhat by Matt’s reflections on the uncertainties of the current job market.
I’ll start with a summary of my own understanding of Church teaching: workers, because of their inherent human dignity, have a right to employment and a wage that supports them and their dependents. They have a right to a job that is not too dangerous, too dirty, and that will not ask them to do immoral things.
There is certainly nothing objectionable here as a standard of economic behavior on the part of employers. But employers have to deal with more than standards of behaviors; bottom lines count too. While I am not advocating the abandonment of moral standards in order to achieve profitability, as I argue in the CV links I think the concept of a “living wage” as a hard-and-fast moral principle is problematic. And, as Matt has noticed and as Ed Leamer (as interviewed by Russ Roberts) explains, bottom lines haven’t been doing too well in the past few recessions.
Armand Kohl48.jpg at wikimedia commons
Leamer notes that the most recent three recessions show very different recovery patterns from earlier ones. In a nutshell, during earlier times we bounced back much quicker in terms of output and employment; since 1990, though, output and employment have been much slower to return to normal (if they ever do). While people like to place blame (or pin their hopes) on government policy, Leamer basically suggests that the economy is undergoing a kind of paradigm shift: since the explosion of computer and internet technology since the 1990s, robotics and microprocessors are able to do many of the repetitive tasks that laborers did. In earlier recessions, workers got laid off but once we bottomed out the companies realized they needed those workers again and hired them back. In recent recessions, companies realized that their (relatively expensive) workers could be replaced by (relatively cheaper) machines or programs, machines and programs that weren’t available pre-1990.
The moral implications are pretty significant: if the modern economy has little use for manual labor (even including what I do as a professor which, let’s face it, could be replicated pretty easily by a student perusing youtube clips of good professors talking about the same topics), then where stands the moral obligation to pay a “living wage?” If a business on the verge of bankruptcy can avoid this fate by either paying workers less or replacing them with machines, what does the moral theologian suggest? If it is financially impossible for the business to remain open by paying a “living wage” to all its employees, what is the alternative? Do we stick to the living wage rule and consign businesses to financial ruin? If they stay afloat by lowering wages, will there be a broad-based bashing of business by moralists? I guess I’m simply asking whether moral arguments about living wages ever need to consider financial realities.
To be optimistic, I think the Leamer story can lead to employees being more highly valued as full persons. Let’s face it; if you worked in a factory fifty years ago, your boss probably didn’t care a whit what you thought about things. It wasn’t relevant to the job. But workers in the future are going to need more than muscles to be employable; which is a great thing because persons are more than just muscles. Workers will need to be creative, to be problem-solvers, and to be responsive to needs; which is a great thing because these are all divine attributes that we should cultivate in people. If some romanticists criticize certain industrial work as being dehumanizing, well then isn’t it a good thing when we stop having humans do those jobs? So why do these same romanticists bewail the loss of manufacturing jobs?
If the economy is going to undergo a paradigm shift in what workers are expected to do on the job, then perhaps moral teaching on the economy can undergo a similar paradigm shift that rejects both the antiquated and combative ”capitalists vs. workers” view of labor markets, and the romantic notion that the only good job is one where you work by the sweat of your brow. Robots don’t sweat, and there is important gray matter behind your brow that we need a lot more.