On 1 May, the Feast of St Joseph the Worker, CSAN hosted a webinar on the Dignity of Work in the 21st century. John Battle, Clifford Longley and Maria Exall were the speakers. Here, you can read CCSTP steering group member Maria Exall’s contribution to the webinar.
The aspiration to express our humanity through meaningful productive activity with others is essential to our human dignity.
The first Encyclical of the modern industrial age, Rerum Novarum addressed concerns about how industrialisation had undermined the dignity of working people. We are now in the fourth industrial revolution – very different workplaces and societal context - but Catholic Social Teaching principles still apply.
In my contribution here I will focus on the principle of the self organisation of working people. For Catholic Social Teaching recognises the collective rights of working people themselves to form their own associations. In the UK that means the Trade Unions and other areas of the labour movement.
I shall consider how economic inequality, the erosion of Trade Union rights, and prevailing ethoses in the modern world of work undermine our human dignity .
Economic inequality
The predominance of market dogmas in the UK for the last four decades has massively increased economic inequality between the few at the top and the majority of working people.
This contrasts with the post-World War 2 settlement in the UK which lead to steady improvements in working class incomes and job security. This together with the introduction of new protections including the founding of the NHS, the expansion of social housing and secondary education, and a comprehensive but minimum floor of social security, greatly improved millions of working people’s lives.
But the wage share of British national income has declined sharply since 1979 when the Conservative Government led by Margaret Thatcher began to implement neo liberal/market fundamentalist economic policies in many industrial sectors and public institutions.
While the apparent rationale for these market liberalisations was greater economic efficiency, it has predominately resulted in a significant shift of profits in the economy from labour to capital and a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
The majority of the profits of market liberalisation including privatisations and outsourcing have come from reducing worker’s pay and conditions, not from greater efficiency. They came from lower pay rates, cutbacks on maternity provisions and time off for caring responsibilities, the scaling back of sick pay, annual leave, pensions provision and other entitlements, and the miserly provision of support and reasonable adjustments for workers with disabilities.
Economic liberalisation has led to a ‘race to the bottom’ on decent terms and conditions. Even where Trades Unions have managed to maintain certain standards through collective bargaining, there is often a two tier workforce with newer recruits, mainly younger people, losing out in terms of pay, conditions and hours and migrant workers are doubly exploited.
UK workers have the longest working hours and the highest level of unpaid overtime in Europe. This combined with ‘work intensification’ means working people’s ability to contribute to their communities and civil society in the way they could in the past has been drastically curtailed. The trend is for people to work harder for longer, for less. Family and leisure activities and the time and energy for community involvement are reduced as a consequence.
In short ‘trickle down’ economics has not contributed to the common good. Given all the evidence it is amazing people still promote this idea.
Workers Rights and anti-Union laws
Thatcher organised the power of the State against Trades Unions’ right of association, most notably in major industrial clashes with the Mining Unions and the Print Unions in the 1980s. The Labour Government of 1997-2010 reversed the trend and brought in some positive employment legislation but many of the existing anti-union laws stayed in place.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of 2010-15 and subsequently the Conservative Government until 2024 brought in more restrictions on Trade Unions especially in the area of the rights to take industrial action.
The effect of these laws and the use of ‘Union busters’ by many multi-national companies continues. The most recent examples are the ongoing GMB Union campaign for recognition and collective bargaining in Amazon fulfilment centres in the West Midlands, and the most egregious example was the immediate mass sacking of 800 P&O ferries staff in 2022.
There is persistent low pay in many sectors, minimal pension entitlements and many other benefits. There has been an explosion of casualised work in all its forms, with more than 4 million working people in the UK without any proper employment rights, those on zero hours contracts, temporary and agency work.
This current Government’s Employment Rights Bill is the most significant attempt to an attempt to deal with problems in the world of work for a generation. The rights the Bill will introduce will help tackle the problems of increasing inequality of income and job insecurity in the current world of work and should be supported.
The modern workplace experience and future challenges
Objective changes in the structure of the workforce in accordance with market liberalisation have been matched by major subjective changes, the focus of Pope John Paul II‘s Laborem Exercens. This has had a drastic effect on wellbeing and job satisfaction for many.
The experience of many is that as Rerum Novarum says, ‘human beings are used as mere instruments for money making’ with little room for human flourishing and workplace bullying is a significant factor in the epidemic of mental health issues in the workplace. The treatment of those with mental and physical disabilities has become a cutting edge of the struggle for dignity at work, an area of workplace injustice that was highlighted by Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti. Instrumentalism and the denial of autonomy at work leads to day-to-day pressure and stress for everyone at work from the professional to the lowest paid.
We need to move on from a market dominant approach to an ethos where good work practices in both the objective and subjective sense are promoted. Good work can be the basis for better productivity and growth that benefits all. Investment in improved skills training and more career pathways, including proper apprenticeships are necessary.
After decades of ideological attacks on the principle of collective organisation at work, including a lauding of individual economic success as essential for social status, there appears to be a sea change in attitudes. Many younger workers consistently rate issues of work life balance, equalities, wellbeing and opportunities for training highly. These are all things that Unions promote in the workplace and work positively with good employers to achieve.
An increasingly diverse workforce in the UK (including a doubling of women in work in the last decades) has led to an expanded conception of fairness at work. This fairness ranges from the unacceptability of sexual harassment, the urgent need to tackle racism at work, a greater respect for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT+) workers. The increase in insecure work in the UK has disproportionally affected Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers.
The development of the world of work in the UK is closely connected, now and in the future, to standards of international labour rights, including for those working for multi-national companies based in the UK and those involved in their global supply chains. Further the effects of economic inequality, ecological destruction and wars, means migration on an unprecedented scale. All workers need rights wherever they come from and wherever they are going.
In response to environmental and climate change itself we need a transformation in our society driven by a ‘just transition’ to environmental sustainability in the workplace . This means replacing good jobs with good jobs, not a move to no jobs or worse jobs..
Another key contemporary challenge is how the accelerating profitability from global new technologies will be shared between owners and employees, and indeed Corporations and Governments through the tax system . Who will gain - those who already have billions – or all of us?
CST also recognises the need for just regulation of the labour market and for social protections. It is difficult to separate labour and social protections out as they directly affect working peoples incomes and the structure of employment. Austerity economics introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, and the Conservative Government for 14 years between 2010-2024 has caused massive increase in ‘in work’ poverty. Now two thirds of children in poverty live in a working household.
The current Government has begun to turn round some of the decline in local and public services that working class people rely on. However I am sorry to say, as a Labour Party member for many years, that they are not yet reversing policy on social security cuts such as the two child benefit cap and reduction in disability payments such as PIP.
It is the role of elected politicians to deliver change in a democratic society but the commitment they are prepared to offer the electorate is also dependent on popular support for policies to help those most in need.
To conclude
Rerum Novarum states ‘the conditions of the working classes is the pressing question of the hour, and ‘justice...demands that working classes...who contribute so largely to the advantage to the community…may themselves share in the benefits which they create’.
I believe that is as true today as it was in 1891. We need to act for justice at work and the common good.
Improving dignity for workers is key to developing social solidarity. Experiences of indignity at work lead to profound alienation from democratic politics. Proper jobs and decent homes for all is the antidote to the contemporary pull of reactionary nationalist populisms that promotes social division.