We have just celebrated Labor Day, which, in the Philippines is on May 1. It is significant that we do so on the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. On this day, the Church finds inspiration in the example of St. Joseph, and we reflect in a special way the human and supernatural value of work. All work, the Church teaches, is a collaboration in God’s own work of creation, and man was given the duty and right ”to exercise dominion over the earth”.
Man is the only creature on Earth who works, and in this activity he is distinct from animals. In a sense, work dignifies a man. While his daily life may revolve around work, it is also from his work that he affirms his dignity as a person.
Unfortunately, the development of the community, nation, or the global society is often understood as the driving force of work. The ends of work are the improvement of material conditions…the increase of the national product or income.
What seems to have been lost along the way is that economic society must respect the dignity of the man who works, as well as his intellectual, spiritual and moral needs, and not just his material needs. He must have the freedom to choose his work, and to prosper at it, because it is his innate right, given him by his Creator, and not by the nation-state. The end of the economy is to satisfy the human need for the goods required for decent existence, and the essential means to achieve that end is work, or “labor”. Unfortunately, economics speaks of labor as only one of the factors of production, equating the man who labors with capital and land, thus, an inanimate means of producing goods and services.
The error in this way of thinking is that the value of human work should not be measured by the product of work, but by the fact that the one doing the work is a person. Human work, according to Pope (now Saint) John Paul II in his Encyclical Letter, Laborem Exercens, says the dignity of work is found primarily in the subjective dimension—work is the activity of the human person as a dynamic being, capable of performing a variety of actions that are part of the work process and that corresponds to his personal vocation, because, as the “image of God”, he is a person, capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself and with a tendency to self realization.
Human work has a value all its own, it has a “particular dignity” and is not to be “considered a simple commodity or an impersonal element of the apparatus for productivity”. Thus, when man works, he is dignified by it and he, likewise, dignifies the activity.
Even as it is important for government and employers to heed the call for justice and provide appropriate wages for workers, the cause is not a one-way street: those who take up the cause of workers must also ensure that “rights” must come with responsibility. Workers must realize that work must be done well, with excellence and with honor…because honest work perfects the worker, and benefits the whole of society. More important, honest work sanctifies the worker.
Saint Joseph, the patron of workers, teaches us to love the occupation where we spend most of our lives—be it in the office, factory, home, social or religious service. The kind of work that we do defines us…there is no work that is “beneath us”. All work provides us with opportunities to become better persons, to be responsive to the needs of others, to contribute to making a more just and humane society.
Labor Day then, especially as it falls on the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, should teach us to be like him—a workman who supplied the needs of his fellow men, who persevered in all his days in the same work, who spent his whole life working honorably and joyfully.
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