Worthy of His Hire

Appropriate for the Feast of St Joseph the Worker/International Labour Day, here is a chapter from The Church and Labor (sic).

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Fr John A. Ryan (R+I+P), STD

For the wage-earner of today, access to the resources of nature can be had only through wages. This means that the industrial community in which he lives, and for which he labors, shall provide him with the requisites of a decent livelihood in the form of living wages.

When we consider man’s position in relation to the bounty of nature, we are led to accept three fundamental principles. The first may be thus stated: Since the earth was intended by God for the support of all persons, all have essentially equal claims upon it, and essentially equal rights of access to its benefits. On the one hand, God has not declared that any of His children have superior or exceptional claims to the earth. On the other hand, all persons are made in the image and likeness of God, composed of the same kind of body and soul, affected by the same needs, and destined for the same end. Therefore they are all equally important in His sight. They are all equally persons, endowed with intrinsic worth and dignity, ends in themselves, not instruments to the welfare of others. Hence they stand upon an essentially equal footing with regard to the animal, plant, and mineral bounty of the earth. This bounty is a common gift, possession, heritage. The moral claims upon it held by these equal human persons are essentially equal. No man can vindicate for himself a superior claim on the basis of anything that he finds in himself, in nature or in the designs of nature’s God.

Nevertheless, this equal right of access to the earth is not absolute. It is conditioned upon labor, upon the expenditure of useful and fruitful energy. As a rule, the good things of the earth are obtained in adequate form and quantity only at the cost of considerable exertion. And this exertion is for the most part irksome, of such a nature that men will not perform it except under the compulsion of some less agreeable alternative. The labor to which the earth yields up her treasures is not put forth spontaneously and automatically. Therefore, the equal and inherent right of men to possess the earth and utilize its benefits becomes actually valid only when they are willing to expend productive energy and labor. This is the second fundamental principle.

Obviously we are speaking here of the original rights of men to the earth, not of those rights which they have acquired through the possession of private property. The rights in question are those which inhere in all men, whether or not they are private owners.

From the two principles of equal right of access to the earth, and universal obligation to perform a reasonable amount of useful labor, follows a third fundamental principle. It is that men who at any time or in any way control the resources of the earth are morally bound to permit others to have access thereto on reasonable terms. Men who are willing to work must be enabled to make real and actual their original and equal right of access to the common bounty of nature. For the right to subsist from the earth implies the right actually to participate in its benefits on reasonable conditions and through reasonable arrangements. Otherwise the former right is a delusion. To refuse any man reasonable facilities to exercise his basic right of living from the common bounty by his labor is to treat this right as non-existent. Such conduct by the men who are in possession implies a belief that their rights to the gifts of God are inherently superior to the right of the person whom they exclude. This position is utterly untenable. It is on exactly the same basis as would be the claim of a strong man to deprive a weak one of liberty. The right to freedom of movement is not more certain nor more indestructible than the right of access on reasonable terms to the bounty of the earth. Were a community to imprison an innocent man it would not violate his rights more vitally than does the proprietor or the corporation that deprives him of reasonable access to the resources of nature. In both cases the good that he seeks is a common gift of God.

This, then, is the moral basis underlying the laborer’s right to a living wage. Like all other men, he has an indestructible right of access to the goods of the earth on reasonable terms. Obviously, the conditional clause, “on reasonable terms,” is of very great importance. Neither the laborer nor anyone else has a right of direct and unconditional access to those portions of the earth that have rightly become the property of others. Such a claim would be the height of unreason. The laborer’s right to participate in the common heritage must be actualized in such a way as not to interfere with the equally valid rights of others. The laborer’s right must be satisfied with due regard to existing acquired rights and the existing form of industrial organization.

From this principle to the principle that the laborer has a right to a living wage, the transition is logical and certain. Pope Leo XIII declared that the laborer’s right to a living wage arises from the fact that his wage is his only means of livelihood. Owing to the manner in which the goods of the earth have been divided and appropriated in the present organization of industrial society, the wage-earner has no way of exercising his original and equal right of access to the earth except through the sale of his labor in return for wages. An occasional worker might get a livelihood by cultivating a piece of land, but the cost is so great that only those can defray it who are already receiving more than living wages. If such an opportunity and alternative were general, the living wage would not be a practical question. Men would not hire themselves out for less than that amount when they could obtain a decent livelihood by employing themselves on a piece of land. To assure a laborer that if he does not like to work for less than living wages, he can fall back upon his right of access to the earth by taking up a piece of land, is but to mock him. Such access as he has is evidently not access on reasonable terms.

For the wage-earner of today, therefore, access to the resources of nature can be had only through wages. The men who have appropriated the goods and opportunities of the earth have shut him out from any other way of entering upon his natural heritage. Therefore they are morally bound to use and administer these goods in such a way that his right shall not be violated and his access to the resources of nature not rendered unreasonably difficult. This means that the industrial community in which he lives, and for which he labors, shall provide him with the requisites of a decent livelihood in the form of living wages. On the one hand, the worker has performed a reasonable amount of labor; on the other hand, the industrial community is the beneficiary of his services. In the product which he has created the community has the wherewith to pay him living wages. To refuse him this amount of remuneration is surely to deprive him of access to the earth and to a livelihood on reasonable terms.

It is assumed here that the laborer’s product is sufficiently large to provide this much remuneration, and that the employer would rather pay it than go without the laborer’s services. The case in which the product falls short of this sufficiency will be considered presently. If the employer does not think the laborer worth a living wage, he has a right to discharge him. Otherwise the employer would be treated unreasonably. But when the employer regards the employee as worth a living wage, but refuses to pay it merely because the laborer is economically constrained to work for less, he is surely treating the latter unreasonably. He is depriving the laborer of access to the goods of the earth on reasonable terms. In the striking words of Pope Leo XIII, he is making the laborer “the victim of force and injustice.”

_________

This essay is a chapter  from “A Living Wage,” in The Church and Labor. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

The featured image is “Arbeiterkammer” (1925), by Wilhelm Thöny, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.