In praying for working conditions this May, Pope Francis made clear his belief that work was a complex set of relationships that needed to ensure the wellbeing of all – workers, families and society.
There are two conflicting views of work. One says that work is about enabling people to make money for the companies and is only secondarily about the workers themselves. In this view the goal is to increase profit. Conditions in the workplace are controlled by efficiency, and workers are seen as costs rather than as persons.
The opposing view is to see work more broadly as about persons and their development, and so about the complex set of relationships between workers and between workers, bosses and shareholders and their world through humane conditions, shared responsibility, the development of skills, contributing to a profitable, cooperative and responsible enterprise of which all involved and society at large can be proud.
FRIENDS AND ALLIES
Pope Francis saw work as a set of relationships that benefit all involved in it. It is not between competitors or enemies but between friends and allies cooperating in taking responsibility for the success of the work and in its effectiveness. All those involved can find fulfilment and pride in their work. Fulfilment implies that through their work together people will grow in self-confidence and in skills. They will have some agency in the shaping the policies and the conditions of their enterprise, and will seek to build good relationships with others at all levels in it.
Pope Francis also situated work within a world larger than the workplace. Those involved have responsibilities wider than the business. They extend also to the families of workers. For that reason, employers must pay wages that can support families. The responsibility to families, of course, does not fall exclusively in the companies involved but also falls on the State in its own support of families and in the regulations that govern the health, remuneration and review of workplaces. Such changes in workplaces as the move to work from home concern more than the profitability of the company. They also involve the dignity of workers and their family. To sustain people’s dignity means respecting their unique importance as human beings and establishing the conditions necessary for it.
HEALTH OF SOCIETY
When Pope Francis prayed that society might be humanised through right relationships at work, he again insisted that the health of society depends on the relationships between human beings at all levels of society: through family, schools, churches, political unions, and so on. Where these relations are exploitative, hostile or seen as mutually exclusive, society and all those in it suffer. In all our relationships we have a responsibility to society as well as to the other people involved. Corporations, businesses and employers have the same responsibility. A generous and happy society cannot be created by government law. Law can only mark boundaries. It must reflect the quality of relationships already visible in society.
To be recognised as persons is the opposite of being treated as interchangeable cogs in a machine, slaves, as a cost in doing business, or as dispensable. It is to form a community of human beings united in their commitment to their work and to one another.
Pope Benedict XVI described this quality as love, a commitment of the heart that goes beyond the fine print of documents and conditions.
