Renewing Labor

Conservatives have placed a new spotlight on the policy and politics of work. In his VP acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Senator JD Vance announced he and President Trump would “commit to the working man.” As confirmation, Trump invited Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak at the RNC.

Living up to that commitment will not be easy. As O’Brien declared, “something is wrong in this country” with how we treat workers. That commitment also invites the perennial political challenge: harmonizing the interests of business owners, who have been the backbone of the conservative movement, with the interests of the sprawling working class, who could be the movement’s muscle. Must conservatives sacrifice the concerns of one for the other? 

There is no easy answer. But there is a way forward. As Fr. John Ryan (later known as “the Right Reverend New Dealer”) put it in 1920, “the most effective means of diminishing the antagonistic elements in the relations between capital and labor is religion.” What Fr. Ryan envisioned was not a “come to Jesus” moment between corporate executives and union bosses, but a mode of labor relations that drew upon the rich reservoir of biblical wisdom about work—its purposes, problems, and prerogatives. That wisdom can elevate our policy debates and address our practical politics now and in the future.

Our current policy debates tend to focus on what, in biblical terms, we might call work’s “fruit” (Ps. 128:2) and “thorns and thistles” (Gen. 3:17–19). We debate wages and working conditions, treatment and terms of employment. These are worthwhile issues that any just labor policy should address. But Scripture calls us to start elsewhere. 

In the beginning, God created man and woman in his image and blessed them with a twofold commandment, to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen. 1:26–28). Human beings were thus universally called to a singular vocation: to work. Our unique human dignity is bound up in this vocation. “Man is the image of God,” Pope Saint John Paul II writes in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens (“Through Work”), “partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth.” Just as God created the earth from a world “without form, and void” (Gen. 1:2), his image-bearers draw out the logos, God’s order, latent in creation to perfect it, and to glorify God as co-creators. 

Scripture underscores this co-creative dimension of work linguistically. In Genesis, the Hebrew word avodah, typically translated “work,” is capacious enough to mean both work as labor and work as worship. The English word that most fully captures avodah’s breadth is “serve.” Work is meant to help us grow in service, both inwardly and in the material fruits with which we support family and community. 

The overarching goal of a just policy about work should be to reinforce the nature of work as service. It must, of course, help work be remunerative, as compensation is the most tangible signal of work’s potential for service—most tangible, but not most important. But above all, it must reinforce the notion that human beings are co-creators who through their work can grow in the virtues needed to serve God and neighbor more fully.

Any policy committed to workers must focus first on the human person rather than the systems in which work is performed. The human being performing work is not only the proper subject and concern of policy, but is also profoundly shaped by work in ways that employers may not naturally appreciate. In work, as John Paul observes, “man not only transforms nature . . . but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense becomes ‘more a human being.’” Done well, work cultivates virtues and thereby perfects the soul. But done poorly, it can corrupt souls and rob workers of their humanity.  

Labor and employment policy should help employers see their workers as humans, as co-creative subjects first, and not as objects. This is a challenge when workers are often treated as an input like any other, part of a production process whose costs are to be minimized to keep margins fat. But the objectification of workers cannot be dismissed as another “thorn and thistle” to endure. As co-creators, human beings are not to be worked on, but worked with.

There is much that policy reform could achieve here. For example, businesses should more easily be able to form employee stock ownership plans, in which workers can have an ownership stake in the business and shape its management. Laws should permit German-style “works councils” in which workers or their elected representatives discuss workplace issues on level terrain and outside the collective-bargaining context. A more ambitious reform would empower workers at a public company to elect a board representative and ensure that actions taken on behalf of shareholders consider labor as more than a cost to be managed. 

Such policies should help owners and managers see the humanity of those they employ. No hierarchy or chain of command should overcome the fundamental equality of all people in an enterprise. Foregrounding the shared human dignity of employers and managers can likewise more readily make them the objects of admiration and service, rather than fear or disdain. Policy may not reconcile natural differences, but it can soften an otherwise adversarial relationship.

The biblical account of work does not end with work. “And on the seventh day, God ended his work . . . and he rested” (Gen. 2:2–3). Rest completes work, for human beings as it does for God. It preserves workers’ dignity as co-creators. As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church explains, Sabbath rest “constitute[s] a barrier against becoming slaves to work whether voluntary or by force” and thus gives us a “fuller freedom.” 

In an era of teleworking, smartphones, and 24/7 accessibility, it is more imperative than ever to reclaim time for rest. Restoring God’s rhythm of rest and work would make both more meaningful. Unfortunately, the Sabbath norm, painstakingly built up by the Christianization of cultures over two millennia, has largely disappeared from society. Culture alone is unlikely to restore this norm, given the economic and political alignments that undergird the status quo. It is low-wage, low-skilled workers who, in the absence of the norm, are likeliest to be induced to Sabbath work. Their lack of human capital leaves them few means, either economically or politically, to resist the draw; meanwhile, those wealthy enough to afford leisure generate outsized demand for Sabbath work, especially in e-commerce and hospitality. (Much the same played out in the lockdowns, where white-collared professionals “stayed safe” by means of low-paid delivery workers’ “unsafe” labor.)

It is possible that society could spontaneously address this need for communal rest without state intervention, like it’s possible that we could have traffic safety without mandates to drive on the right side of the road. Possible, but not plausible. The revival of “blue laws” and other measures to guard Sabbath rest is thus one more example of a prudent policy intervention to protect the subjectivity, the personhood, of workers. 

Before John Paul II could finish Laborem Exercens, he was shot at the behest of a Soviet regime founded on materialist lies about work. His miraculous survival and recovery allowed him to complete and publish a beautiful meditation on the truth about work. Returning to its source in biblical wisdom can rescue us from a not-altogether-different materialism that objectifies workers and obscures work’s true purpose. Though it may not prescribe a governing agenda, this wisdom nonetheless supplies a framework for elevating work as dignified service—by treating workers as co-creative subjects and by joining the Creator’s rhythm of work and rest. Our future leaders would be wise to heed it. 

Jonathan Berry is the managing partner at Boyden Gray PLLC, a boutique law and public policy firm in Washington, D.C. He previously served as the acting Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Labor.

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