Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood

Abstract

Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood1 Christine Firer Hinze This brief essay is premised on two convictions. The first is that modern Catholic Social Teaching and thought, though it has many limits, provides a contemporary, Gospel- and tradition-based understanding of human flourishing, a specific orientation toward people and institutions, and a set of moral principles or base-points. Together, these create a dynamic, imaginative, discursive and practical field within which to understand and generate policy directions for political economy, business, work and labour markets. The second conviction is that bringing into Catholicism’s angle of vision feminism, more specifically, feminist critical theory and economics, provides Catholic Social Teaching with a needed corrective lens, and uncovers potential – if surprising – alliances between two powerful forces for economic and work justice.2 A feminist-inflected, Catholic social perspective has light to shed on and policy-shaping contributions to offer contemporary debates about political economy, labour and its regulation, economic disparities linked to gender, racial and ethnic discrimination, class, citizen-status and what it takes to ensure inclusive access to dignified work and livelihood. Most readers of Studies are familiar with the palette of principles and priorities attributed to modern Catholic Social Teaching, which typically includes human dignity, the common good, justice, the dignity of work and rights of workers, civic rights and duties to participate within a free, multi-associational polity; subsidiarity, solidarity, an intentional option for/ commitment to the poor and vulnerable, and stewardship of creation. Catholic Social Teaching’s treatment of economy and work –my focus here – differs from the neo-liberal market orthodoxy that heavily influences current US, Irish and global economic thought and practice in several fundamental respects. Catholic Social Thought and neo-liberalism First, Catholic Social Teaching departs from modern neo-liberalism to put forward a classically normative understanding of economy and work. On this Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood Studies • volume 108 • number 432 377 view, political economy’s primary function is to ensure access to participation and provisioning for all members. Inclusive livelihood, not growth or the Gross Domestic Product, is the criterion by which an economy’s success is evaluated. Modern Catholic Social Teaching regards work as a necessary and valuable human activity, both personally and socially significant, whereby people toil for material sustenance, cultivate and use their gifts and talents and participate in and contribute to our communities.3 An inclusivelivelihood metric assesses an economy’s health by asking questions such as: Is everyone, according to their capacity, able to participate? In particular, can all adults participate, especially through their free, meaningful and contributive labour? And through their economic contributions, are all these adults able to provide adequately for themselves and for their families or households? Second, social Catholicism’s integrated understanding of economy regards the household sector and the public waged sectors as interdependent and complementary, rather than divorced or opposed. It also refuses to identify productive work only with paid work, and expects domestic and formal waged economies to cooperate in serving personal and social welfare. Finally, while denying allegiance to any particular economic ideology or system, modern Catholic Social Teaching bears the DNA of a kind of ‘Catholic social economics’ with roots in European corporatist and solidarist economics, and, before that, in pre-modern Western economic thought.4 In contrast to modern mainstream economics, all of these economic traditions take as given, and operate with commitments to, several premises: the basic dignity, sociality and interdependence of human beings; economy’s inclusive, participative and provisioning purposes, which in many cases lead to a priority concern for the economically vulnerable and non-elite (that broad spectrum of people outside the upper-middle or upper tiers of wealth and income); and the special obligations of government, civil society and those who are better-off to serve the common good through policies and practices that enable access to economic participation and provisioning for those currently lacking them. Monsignor John A Ryan In the twentieth-century United States, social Catholicism’s substantive brief for work justice found one of its most influential interpreters and spokespersons in Irish-American priest-economist and public intellectual Christine Firer Hinze...