Dignity Of Labor Research Articles

What's Wrong With Being Governed By the Talented?

This is an invited review essay of Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (FSG 2020), for the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Inequality (R. Kennedy, M. Minow, C. Sunstein, eds.). Sandel makes three principal arguments: (1) meritocracy is deeply flawed because it worsens inequality and fills meritocracy's winners with hubris and losers with shame; (2) universities should introduce a lottery into the admissions process; and (3) this reform, coupled with increased emphasis on the dignity of labor, will repair the politics of resentment that now roil our country. I respond in the following ways. First, treating meritocracy as an ideology, I assess the underlying tension in Sandel's logic, which accords primary moral value to the form of politics over outcomes, and status over materiality. Given the complex culture of meritocracy, I question whether its excesses can be curbed, or gross inequality reduced, with an approach that fails to stress material outcomes. Second, I conclude that Sandel's proposal to reform university admissions could only be realistically implemented at a handful of highly selective and wealthy institutions. Even then, its impact on meritocratic faith or tangible inequality is likely to be exceedingly modest. Worse, randomizing distribution may in fact lead to a backlash among communities that have (over)invested in the means to compete for slots at elite universities and colleges, which would undermine Sandel's objectives. Despite these misgivings, his idea may still be worth a try. Third, I praise Sandel's concern that meritocracy is contributing to the broader politics of resentment. But I say that his approach to emotions in politics is incomplete, for it focuses too narrowly on white grievance in a single election, and we need to get better at assessing historical claims of anger and disillusionment from multiple communities across time. I conclude by suggesting that Trumpism was not a coherent attack on meritocracy, but one that tried to harness resentment to introduce meritocratic logic into new domains, such as immigration and refugee policy. If we want to reduce meritocracy's dominance in particular social domains, I argue, we must offer a potent substitute that can bring elites and everyday people together. In certain domains such as university admissions or border control where the politics are fraught, that alternative may be the rhetoric of fairness.

Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka Etyka Społeczna as Precursor and Hermeneutic Key to Pope John Paul II’s Economic Teaching

AbstractThe highly anticipated publication of Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka etyka społeczna (KES) in 2018 provides a novel and important basis for understanding the economic thinking of Pope John Paul II. The text is comprised of Wojtyła’s extensive lecture notes from the 1950s on the topic of Catholic social teaching and spans almost 500 pages. KES illustrates the future pope’s deep concern for economic justice as a young priest and his ambivalence towards capitalism, which persisted throughout his papacy. Given the size of KES, this article selectively focuses on Wojtyła’s treatment of topics of continuing relevance: the right of the Church to pronounce on economic matters; private property and the “social mortgage” on it; inequality, the just distribution of resources, and the “option for the poor”; the moral assessment of capitalism and Marxism; the dignity of labor and workers’ rights; and the role of conflict in promoting the common good. I contend that KES is consonant with the later papal teaching of John Paul II on economic justice and that it provides a hermeneutic key to understanding it. Furthermore, I argue that the “radicalism” of Karol Wojtyła on matters of economic justice in KES coheres with papal social teaching from Pope Paul VI through that of Pope Francis.

The Dignity of Labor

Even before the coronavirus hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that the highest demand for labor in the next decade would be seen in occupations where average pay is less than $35,000 a year. Among these jobs were personal care and home health aides, medical assistants, warehouse workers, janitors, and others now on the front lines of the pandemic.

직장괴롭힘과 경영 · 인사관리의 한계 : 노동 인격에 대한 존중

직장괴롭힘은 기업의 노동생산성을 떨어뜨린다는 점에서도 문제지만, 무엇보다 근로자의 노동 인격을 침해한다는 점에서 결코 간과할 수 없는 문제다. 직장괴롭힘에 대한 사회적 여론이 환기됨에 따라 많은 연구들이 진행되고, 구체적인 직장괴롭힘의 유형들이 체계화되고 있다. 이러한 유형 중 가장 근로자들에게 강한 심리적 압박감을 가하고 있는 것이 ‘가학적 인사관리’이다. 따돌림, 모욕, 명예훼손, 폭행 등 외견상으로 명백한 폭력 행위와는 달리 가학적 인사관리는 사용자가 정당한 인사권을 행사하는 양태를 띠기 때문에 직장괴롭힘으로서 인정받기 힘든 경우가 많다. 정당한 이유 없이 계속 업무에서 배제하거나, 업무상 필요 없는 행위를 반복적으로 시키는 지시, 그리고 업무와 관련 없는 시설로의 전보 명령 등을 예로 들 수 있다. 이러한 가학적 인사관리는 피해 근로자에게 모멸감과 공포감을 심어줄 뿐만 아니라 근로자 집단전체에게 공포감을 내면화하고 부조리에 둔감하게 하여 사용자에 대한 집단적 · 자발적 복종을 유도한다.BR 가학적 인사관리를 규제하기 위해서는 먼저 정확한 개념부터 설정해야 하는 바, 직장괴롭힘의 일반적 정의규정을 참조하여 “직장 내외에서 직장 내의 지위나 다수의 우월성을 이용하여 특정 근로자나 특정 근로자 집단을 대상으로 의식적 · 지속적 · 반복적으로 신체적 · 정신적 공격을 가하거나 소외시키는 일체의 행위” 중 하나로서 “조직 및 경영상 목적으로 인사 권한을 수단으로 한 것”으로 정립할 수 있다.BR 또한, 사용자 측은 가학적 인사관리가 정당한 인사권의 일환이며 이는 경영권에 기반한 것이라고 주장하기도 하는데, 경영권은 그 권리의 실체성조차 불투명하며 그것이 물적 시설이 아닌 인적 자원에게도 미치는지가 의심된다. 따라서 인사권이란 어디까지나 사용자와 근로자 간의 근로계약의 성립에 따른 계약상의 채무라고 볼 수 있고, 인사권이 남용되어 가학적 인사관리가 됨에는 사용자 측의 악의가 필요 없다.BR 법제적으로 가학적 인사관리를 포함한 직장괴롭힘을 막기 위해서는 특별법의 제정이 가장 효과적이라 생각한다. 재직 중인 근로자 외 채용절차 중인 구직자와 특수형태근로종사자까지 직장괴롭힘 방지의 보호를 받아야 하기 때문이다. 이러한 특별법 제정에는 많은 사회적 논의가 필요한 바 현행 법제의 보완으로는 「근로기준법」 내 별도의 ‘괴롭힘編’을 만들어 직장 내 성희롱과 직장괴롭힘을 동시에 규정하는 방법을 생각할 수 있으며,「근로기준법」제8조의 ‘폭행’의 개념을 ‘폭력’으로 확대하여 여러 가학적 행위를 금지할 수도 있다. 또한, 당장 일어나고 있는 직장괴롭힘을 피하기 위해 현행 「산업안전보건법」 제26조상의 ‘작업중지권’ 적용을 해석론으로 인정해주는 것도 제안한다.

The Retreats of Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920 by David Goldberg

Reviewed by: The Retreats of Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920 by David Goldberg Steven E. Nash The Retreats of Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920. David Goldberg. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8232-7272-3. 188 pp., paper, $28.00. David Goldberg's The Retreats from Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865–1920 continues the historiographical trend that expands our understanding of Reconstruction and the Civil War's consequences beyond the plantation South. In this case, Goldberg examines the politics of race and segregation in the resort communities of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. He argues that over the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, consumption and consumer freedom replaced the free labor political economy of the Civil War era at the Jersey shore. Subsequent clashes between working-class African Americans, middle-class white tourists, and white business elites prompted the implementation of Jim Crow segregation there by 1920. Early shore promoters hailed their community as a free-labor paradise where workers could rest secure in their upward social mobility. Of course, their comfort depended on African American seasonal workers, which bred conflict in the 1870s and 1880s. Asbury Park founder James A. Bradley claimed that any [End Page 224] form of segregation in his resort town reflected visitors' social preferences rather than racial discrimination. Goldberg argues, however, that white exclusivity was precarious through the first decades after the Civil War. Common law tradition required businesses to remain mindful of the public's welfare; such traditions and lingering free labor ideals created space for African Americans to challenge segregation on the grounds of equal opportunity and the dignity of labor. In 1893, local business leaders supplanted free labor's thrift, restraint, and obedience with the market, consumption, and property rights. White elites embraced visitors' aggregate spending power to structure the shore's leisure spaces. Under this revised social view, property owners' rights to determine the use of and access to their property trumped labor's right to integrated spaces. By 1920, Goldberg concludes, the pursuit of profit and property reigned supreme at the Jersey shore. African American leaders assisted this transition by pushing for municipal reform aimed at public health and by working to promote black businesses. Such efforts undermined earlier attempts to integrate leisure spaces and established a consumer culture at the Jersey shore that emphasized commercial development. Retreats from Reconstruction attempts to do a lot in 131 pages. It could have done more. First, it needed more maps. Since the book is rooted in two shore communities, Asbury Park and Atlantic City, a map showing their relative places within the state would have been helpful. Second, this book lacks the sort of larger context typical of community studies. While the author depicts the Jersey shore as a unique mixture of leisure seekers, he also recognizes the important roles played by local groups. But he never firmly establishes the local communities' place within the state, North, or country. New Jersey had a long and complicated history with race and slavery, dating back to the colonial period. Furthermore, the state's gradual abolitionist policy rendered many black New Jerseyans still slaves in all but name by the Civil War. How did the shore fit within this larger history? What impact did this history have on the shore's development? These questions gain greater significance due to the author's use of the term "Reconstruction." It is not within the scope of a review to try to settle arguments over terminology, but readers will likely debate Goldberg's definition of "Reconstruction" as both the long battle over African Americans' civil rights and a "process by which Americans continued to negotiate critical questions about the rights of consumers and producers in a unique social space where traditional distinctions between work and play were in flux" (5). The author connects reconstruction to a long-range assessment of the free labor ideology, [End Page 225] race, and political economy, which challenges definitions of reconstruction...

Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor eds. by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth

Reviewed by: Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor eds. by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth Stacey Connelly Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. Edited by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. vii + 246 pp. $40.00 paper. Editors Elizabeth Osborne and Christine Woodworth, much like archeologists, discover artifacts, treasure, and the spooky remains of forgotten theatrical traditions in Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. In this collection of essays dedicated to the sweat and toil that make a theatrical performance seem cool and effortless, Osborne and Woodworth, along with twelve other historians of American theatre, recover work of all kinds—from the most manual and menial labors to the most intuitive and inspired creative acts—that often goes unacknowledged in the theatre, because it is either obscured, unpleasant, undervalued, or simply unfathomable. In the introduction to their subject of invisible work, Osborne and Wood-worth articulate the paradox of trying to capture and study work that is meant to remain hidden: "The legacy of shrouding the work of artists and craftsmen in order to foster a deceptively seamless or even intentionally ruptured night at the theatre has created enormous challenges for theatre and performance scholars hoping to document the creative process—the specific people and acts required to realize a work of theatrical art" (2). But the editors and their fellow scholars accept that challenge with essays spanning the eighteenth century to the present, covering a range of topics, from cake walks to comic operas, from domestic labor to domestic partnerships, from massive make-work programs like the FTP's Caravan Theatre to the obsessive, lonely labor of the tortured creative artist. What unites them all, however, is an intense focus on the hidden and sometimes grueling labor from which a finely crafted product or performance emerges. Mindful of the intrinsic connection between theatrical work and imaginative play, Osborne and Woodworth guide readers through what might seem like an eclectic exhibit of unrelated curiosities. Their coauthored essay, "The Work of Play in Performance," ties together this scholarly collection through logical groupings, persistent themes, and important questions: "How do we theorize the work of play when it has intentionally or unintentionally been hidden from view? What is missing from the current conversation about theatrical work? In short, what does it mean to work, and to create work, in the theatre?" (2). Moreover, these questions are situated within the larger context of recent events and conversations surrounding economics, employment, labor unions, wages, and [End Page 323] work-life balance. No matter how far afield some of the essays might seem from contemporary notions of theatrical work, the authors draw striking parallels between their subjects and the current discourse surrounding workers' rights and the dignity of labor. The first group of essays unites under the rubric "Working Conditions" and reveals the decidedly unglamorous day-to-day of work in or around the theatre: from labor unions and commercial scenic studios to underemployed actors trying to pay the bills. Sara Freeman discusses the working/life partnership of director Les Waters and designer Annie Smart, and Chrystyna Dail pulls back the curtain on the remarkably progressive UAW workers' theatre and its groundbreaking satire Discrimination for Everybody! Tom Robson's analysis of nineteenth-century scenic studio catalogs challenges prevailing assumptions about New York as the center for this highly competitive industry, and Christine Woodworth's "Don't Quit Your Day Job: Situating Extratheatrical Employment in the Performance Archive" weaves a fascinating tale of two actresses, Neysa McMein, a brilliant painter, and Kitty Marion, a housemaid, teacher, and union organizer, who made their names not in theatre but from their important work as artists and activists who drew inspiration from their theatrical milieus. Part 2, "Inscription, Erasure, and Recovery: Palimpsests of Labor," presents essays about faded traditions and forgotten workers, including Dorothy Chansky's "Retooling the Kitchen Sink: Representing Domestic Labor in American Performance after 1963" and Jerry Dickey's illuminating analysis of the cake-walk contests of the Gilded Age, as performed by African American waiters. In "Beaten, Battered, and Brawny: American Variety Entertainers...

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 by Gleb Tsipursky

Reviewed by: Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970 by Gleb Tsipursky Catriona Kelly Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970. By Gleb Tsipursky. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. x + 366 pp. Paper $29.95. The title of Gleb Tsipursky’s new study neatly encapsulates what may at first sound like an oxymoron. Where, one could indeed ask, was the place of “fun” in a culture committed to self-sacrificing heroism and the dignity of labor? But as Tsipursky demonstrates, even in the first years of Soviet history, work with young people, despite pressure from “militants” committed to Communist orthodoxy, was to a considerable extent driven by a sense of pragmatic populism. It was simply much easier, and indeed more profitable, to recruit participants in dance evenings than at lectures about the international situation. [End Page 289] During the post-Stalin era (with which the book is mainly concerned—five out of its eight chapters deal with the period after 1953), the revival of “enthusiasm” and of ideological fervor did not impede an increasing commitment to the provision of “socialist fun” in the networks of youth clubs and other state-sponsored venues for licensed youth leisure. “The new Soviet leadership. . . regarded pursuit of a wide variety of interests as legitimate and as part of a greatly broadened path towards communism” (151). Despite occasional reassertion of the hard line in 1957, 1962, and 1968, this strategy was broadly consistent, and, as Tsipursky suggests, was in many ways successful. According to his own interviews, enthusiasm for global, particularly American, popular culture proved compatible, at this phase of history, with Soviet patriotism: admiration at one and the same time for Yuri Gagarin and the Beatles did not cause internal conflicts or “cognitive dissonance.” Youth culture in the Soviet Union is one of the better-researched areas in private life, and Tsipursky’s monograph follows on studies such as Hilary Pilkington’s Russia’s Youth and its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (1994); Anne Gorsuch’s Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (2000); Juliane Fürst’s Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism, 1945–56 (2010); Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until it Was No More: The “Last” Soviet Generation (2006); and Sergei Zhuk’s Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk (2010), as well as work in Russian by Dmitrii Gromov, Elena Omel’chenko, and others. Tsipursky’s contribution, aside from the ambitious chronological spread, lies in his attention to the institutional work of the Komsomol and other Soviet agencies. Drawing extensively on archival documentation, he gives sustained attention to the club movement, always mentioned, but hitherto not extensively explored. He provides an informative discussion of the planning and realization of the International Festival of Youth in 1957, and discusses the official management of jazz in depth. Tsipursky employs the useful term “conformist agency” to suggest the manner in which young people took advantage of sponsorship, and managed to get their own tastes for, say, jazz music on the agenda of official clubs and “youth cafés,” maneuvering at the boundaries of state control. To sum up his argument, one might say that boundaries were “pushed” if not necessarily broken. Foxtrots and tangos could be gotten past moral arbiters if renamed “slow dances” and “fast dances,” but this was also, of course, a form of domestication; satires of “the twist” made Soviet young people familiar with the dance to begin with, but also conveyed that there was something faintly ridiculous about performing it. [End Page 290] If former studies were often concerned with youth subcultures first and foremost (for instance, the stiliagi in Fürst’s work) and tended to project a metropolitan perspective (Moscow in Fürst, Leningrad in Yurchak), Tsipursky’s book, like Zhuk’s, is valuable for its introduction of provincial material (particularly but not exclusively records from the large industrial city of Saratov). As well as chronological spread, there is a sense of geographical and social diversity here, and there is consideration...

Vocational Education in Higher Secondary Schools

The competent and trained manpower would be contributing significantly to the industrial development of the nation by establishing small industries. Rapid changes in technology, expansion of market, industrial policies of the Government, coming in of more multinationals due to liberalization have revolutionized the aspect of Vocational Education at present the object of vocational education can be achieved by adequate school management. When we talk about objectives of vocational education, we mean to prepare students for self-employment and develop them as skilled manpower. Vocationalisation of Secondary Education is important from the point of view of the economic development of the developing country like ours. Such an education will inculcate the habit of hard work and dignity of labor among the students. This programme will help to solve the problem of unemployment and prepare the way for self-employment. The Present paper is the outcomes of the study of vocational education in higher secondary schools of Bhopal division Bhopal Division comprises of Bhopal, Raisen, Vidhisha, Sehore and Rajgarh districts. Vocational Courses were introduced for the first time in 1988. According to the figures of 1996- 1997 Vocational Courses introduced in thirty-one schools of Bhopal division. For study ten schools where vocational courses are running, selected by investigators randomly. Data collected with the help of various tools like questionnaire and interview schedules. Results of the study reveal that there is a need to strengthen vocational education in the region. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5p455

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston Brian Greenberg (bio) David A. Zonderman. Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2011. xii + 312 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $28.95. In November 1865, the ardent abolitionist and acclaimed orator Wendell Phillips told a group of Boston workers meeting in Faneuil Hall in support of the eight-hour workday that, throughout all his years of antislavery activity, he had opposed the idea that the “laborer must necessarily be owned by the capitalists or individuals.” As that struggle for the ownership of labor appeared to be ending “we fitly commence a struggle,” Phillips declared, “to define and arrange the true relations of capital and labor.”1 The demand for an eight-hour workday was a key goal of the newly invigorated labor movement after the Civil War. In Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement was chiefly identified with Ira Steward, a prominent official of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union. In the summer of 1869, Steward and other labor activists, along with middle-class reformers, founded Boston’s Eight Hour League. By then, Steward and Phillips were well acquainted, and, like Steward, Phillips underscored the benefits to the community if workers had greater leisure. Echoing a precept basic to Steward’s reform creed, Phillips identified eight hours as “the first measure to be urged and the first rule to be established.”2 Steward and Phillips had a public falling out in 1872. In May of that year, the Eight Hour League, under Steward’s direction, censured Phillips, charging that the patrician reformer’s expansive rhetoric and agenda were “distracting public and political attention” and, as a result, were undermining the factory operatives’ current campaign for ten-hour legislation (p. 142). Phillips, in anticipation of the league’s censure, had already persuaded the Massachusetts Labor Union to pass a resolution that appeared to deliberately snub George McNeill, Steward’s closest ally and president of the Boston Eight Hour League. Shortly after Steward and Phillips’ personal and political breakup, the vigorous coalition of worker-activists and middle-class labor reformers in Massachusetts became hopelessly fragmented, a point that David Zonderman [End Page 271] makes in Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston, his illuminating study of Boston’s labor reform movement from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the twentieth century. Uneasy Allies traces the often-tenuous cross-class alliances that Boston’s middle-class reformers forged with working-class activists during the nineteenth century. In his well-researched and highly informative study, Zonderman chronicles the activities of the numerous labor reform organizations that campaigned for better working conditions and the dignity of labor in Boston during this period. Unlike David Montgomery, who’s magisterial Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) explained the underlying ideological and political meaning of labor reform, Uneasy Allies follows the tactical debates and evolving structures and strategies that dominated Boston’s labor reform movement. Zonderman’s account is one of uneven progress and internal tensions through the century’s middle decades and of decline by century’s end. Boston in the 1830s was a thriving port city of more than sixty thousand inhabitants. The broad-based labor reform coalitions that began to form in these years championed both immediate and more utopian goals. Early labor reformers agreed that securing a shorter workday was a necessary first step to achieving more extensive social change. The key questions that animated the first cross-class alliances continued to energize the cross-class labor reform movement in Boston throughout the nineteenth century: whether to focus on immediate improvements in working conditions, especially the shorter workday, or on long-term changes in the social structure; whether to function primarily as educational or as activist organizations, and, if the latter, whether to agitate for an improved workplace or to engage in electoral politics; and whether to concentrate their efforts on local, state, or regional labor reform. Boston’s first cross-class labor reform organizations emerged as alternatives to the city’s struggling trade unions and workingmen’s parties. Founded on February 16...

Going My Way? Wending a Way Through the Stumbling Blocks Between Georgism and Catholicism

This essay surveys the issues between Georgists and Roman Catholics in three classes: issues that are not peculiarly Roman Catholic (RC) but play out across faiths and denominations, issues that are peculiarly RC, and points of similarity and agreement. Addressed in this fashion are the tensions that arise between the social gospel and individual salvation, between specifics and glittering generalities, between noblesse oblige and governmental reform, between the doctrine of original sin and tabula rasa, between the rich and the poor, between the dignity of labor and the honor of predation, between democracy and authority, between the regulatory emphasis rooted in the philosophy of Aquinas and free markets, and between plain talk and gobbledegook.

Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor

AbstractSimone Weil had an ambivalent attitude toward Marx. While she thought that the young Marx's celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers. Marx, in her view, was insufficiently materialist and excessively wedded to a hierarchical model of science that maintained the domination of management. Weil and Marx's attitudes toward the dignity of labor and the necessary conditions for socialism are analyzed. The most significant cleavage between them is ultimately due to the differing manner in which they conceive of the relationship between thought and action. Through this comparison, the philosophical underpinnings of the two radically different conceptions of labor and its dignity as a human activity are explained.

Being human: dignity of labor as the foundation for the spirit–work connection

There is little doubt that creating a workplace that fosters and values spirituality is a worthwhile aim, but if we are to explore the spirit–work connection then we need a little more emphasis on the actual work – what is it that people do, how do they do it, how do they feel about it, how are they rewarded, is the work dirty, dangerous, devalued? And, the ultimate question underscoring all of these workplace experiences, do we derive dignity from our labor? Before we can enjoy the good working relationships and human connectedness that workplace spirituality demands, we need to identify objective and subjective factors that might make bad jobs better – factors that are introduced in this paper as a dimensions of dignity at work framework. We ask too much of workplace spirituality if we expect it to foster human connection, heal the wounds of bad work and at the same time meet the demands of a market economy.

Tales for little rebels: a collection of radical children's literature

In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, Strike down the wall! and liberates itself from the egg state. In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it. Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. Tales for Little Rebels collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination.Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising message of Johnny Get Your Money's Worth (and Jane Too)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo (1971), and Sandburg's mockery of war in Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history - and anyone with a love of children's literature, no matter what age.

Christianity and Democracy

In this engaging APSA address, Jacques Maritain outlines the essential relationship between Christianity and democracy. In Maritain's view, it is the Gospel or the Christian leaven which has awakened the secular, temporal consciousness to supreme moral principles and the real content of democracy understood as the earthly pursuit of Gospel truths conceming the transcendent origins and destiny of man and society. Christianity teaches the inalienable dignity of every human being fashioned in the image of God, the inviolability of conscience, the unity of the human race, the natural equality of all men, children of the same God and redeemed by the same Christ, the dignity of labor and the dignity of the poor, the primacy of inner values and good will over external values, universal brotherhood, love, and justbe. Maritain distinguishes between the procedural aspects and the substantive content of democracy, but anchors the Gospel vision in the free exercise of rational and moral faculties as key to democratic self-government. He cautions that without a superior moral law by virtue of which men are bound in conscience toward what is just and good, the rule of the majority runs the risk of being raised to the supreme rule of good and evil, and democracy is liable to tum to totalitahanism, that is, to self-destruction. Maritain concludes that what has been gained for the secular consciousness, if it does not veer to barbarism, is the sense of freedom consonant with the vocation of our nature.

Industrial Citizenship, Social Citizenship, Corporate Citizenship: I Just Want My Wages

The Article critically examines the adaptation of citizenship rights to industrial relations and labor law. Starting with T.H. Marshall’s discussion of industrial citizenship, the Article examines the coupling of industrial citizenship with trade unions. While Marshall’s concept of industrial citizenship may seem to be in decline, other labor market institutions are trying to bridge the divide between citizenship and labor rights: workplace democracy, which assumes the constituency of workers in the corporation; and corporate citizenship, which is used to entrust corporations with obligations that are traditionally expected of human citizens. Citizenship’s contribution to the analysis of labor market institutions lies in the emphasis on the public nature of workers’ rights, in the association of rights with obligations, and in the emphasis on active participation. However, citizenship also has "blind spots" that other theories address more coherently. Human rights are a preferred concept for distinguishing fundamental rights (including rights of citizenship) from "ordinary" rights. Labor rights are more effective in identifying power structures that citizenship rights may overlook. Consequently, the concept of citizenship may compromise workers’ capacity to negotiate fair remuneration, protection from dismissal and the dignity of labor.

The Dignity of Labor?

The Dignity of Labor?

Theology as Work: The Mandatum and the Rights of Labor

ABSTRACTMany oppose the mandatum as a threat to the academic freedom of Catholic scholars and the autonomy and credibility of Catholic universities. But the imposition of this juridical bond on working theologians is also in tension with Catholic Social Teaching on the rights and dignity of labor. Work is the labor necessary to earn our daily bread. But it is also the vocation by which we realize ourselves as persons and the profession through which we contribute to the common good. Thus, along with the right to a just wage and safe working conditions, Catholic Social Teaching defends workers' rights to a full partnership in the enterprise, and calls upon the church to be a model of participation and cooperation. The imposition of the mandatum fails to live up to this standard and threatens the jobs and vocations of theologians while undermining this profession's contribution to the church.

Participation and Recognition: The Transforming of (Un)employment in China

China's mounting unemployment in recent years is an unintended but predictable consequence of the economic reform with an open labor market. It has turned into a major political crisis in a "socialist state" where not only security but also sovereign dignity of labor remain central to the constitutional mandate and, however lingering, to popular expectation as well. This article traces the origins of the crisis, explores linkage between participation and recognition, explains mutual relevance of the EuroAmerican "future of work" debate and the Chinese experience, and argues for creative adaptation toward an alternative. It concludes with an observation that participatory activities beyond salaried jobs would require guaranteed social security; and only institutional innovations in public policy that enable democratic control by citizens over resources and management can forge a new social contract for overcoming unemployment.

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism David Bennett (bio) “Erotic conduct,” Georges Bataille tells us in his study of Sade, “is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting.” Glossing the rigorous antirationalism of the libertine doctrine, Bataille goes on: If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions . . . use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. . . . [W]e always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. 1 By contrast with the so-called “producer ethic,” which preaches the ascetic virtues of frugality, sobriety, and the self-repressing postponement of pleasure in the interests of productive labor, the so-called “consumer ethic” stimulates the economy by promulgating the values of spending not saving, self-gratification not self-denial, the pleasures of consumption rather than the dignity of labor. The emergence of consumerist culture in the “West” has been variously dated from the “decadent” 1890s, the “modernist” 1920s, and the “countercultural” 1960s—the decade when Heffner’s Playboy and Penguin’s Lady Chatterley helped to turn countercultural recreational sex into what has been called the “dominant pornographic culture” of contemporary transatlantic consumerism. 2 By identifying the “decisive discovery” of “what spending can really mean” with a Sade pictured as being struck by this “violent truth” in the loneliness of the Bastille as he watched the guillotine at work from his cell window, Bataille dates the emergence of the consumer ethic—and of the spender as “sovereign”—from the very moment of the Bourgeois Revolution itself (SSM 169, 171). It is with the figure of the “sovereign” spender that this paper will be concerned: a figure ambiguously positioned on the dividing-line between [End Page 269] law and the underworld, between “white” and “black” economies, in the writings of early twentieth-century sexual psychologists like Freud and D. H. Lawrence, whose inconclusive efforts to separate a discourse of desire from the discourse of economics reveal (I shall argue) the profound complicity of the consumer and producer ethics in the early twentieth-century moment of that other “long revolution,” the sexual revolution, which is coterminous with modernity itself. Like Lawrence, Freud prided himself on plainspeaking. In 1913 he warned his colleagues that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy,” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”: “money matters” and “sexual matters.” 3 An ironic warning, you may think, since it was psychoanalysis that taught the twentieth century the impossibility of speaking plainly about money: taught it that speech about money is invariably metaphoric, to be decoded into speech about sex—taught it, in other words, a cardinal principle of the consumer ethic: the imperative of eroticizing money, never economizing on sex. Freud’s case histories continually “dematerialize” economic relationships—the relationships of unequal property and power enacted in the taking, giving, lending, or withholding of money—decoding them into symbolic expressions of erotic desire and denial, secondary transcriptions of a truth anterior to money, the originary truth of sex. This, at least, is the familiar Freud, the one whose “overvaluation of sexuality,” as Jung put it, “has brought upon him the justified reproach of pan-sexualism.” 4 But now consider how the opposite process can occur in Freud’s writing. Addressing fellow clinicians in his 1913 paper “On Beginning the Treatment,” Freud explained why the bourgeois patrons of his new therapeutic technique were making a sound investment in spending their income on the unorthodox practice of purchasing a daily hour of the doctor’s time. Laying down what he called the “rules of the game” for...

?The human significance and dignity of labor?: A keyword in Marxian anthropology

Marx was active as revolutionary agitator, economist and journalist. What makes his work interesting today ? more than a hundred years after his death ? however, are not these aspects in themselves but the connective and philosophically grounded claim to be changing the 'world'. Kolakowski is quite correct when he writes in his three-volume work on the history of Marxism that "Karl Marx was a German philosopher". In its unity with political economy and historiography and with its goal of changing the world, Marx's philosophy is essentially different from contemporary philosophies that limit themselves to a great extent to the analysis of human knowledge and to the meaning of propositions. Marx' philosophy wants to be the con sciousness of the historical subject, of the proletariat, that changes the 'world', but which is brought forth along with its will for change by this same 'world'. This philosophy wants to be the consciousness of the 'world' that is being changed by the proletariat. The notion of 'world' is central to the work of Marx ? both by itself and in combination: 'world consciousness', 'world thrust', 'world order', 'state of the world'. This underlines the claim of Marxian thought to embrace the whole of reality, even though the 'world' that is the object of the will for change (including nature as its ground) is the world of man. The 'world' comes to be ? to join Marx in a moment of rhetoric as proceding from the efficacy of the historically culture-creating human species. The human species is 'world'-creative. Marx grasps the 'world' as unitary by deriving and explaining all of its forms ? be they relations of production or ideologies, political structures or cultural goods ? on the basis of the principle of motion of this world, the socially productive force of man. What remained for Goethe's Faust an unfulfilled wish, Marx thinks he has reached; namely, to understand what 'holds the world together from inside'. The assertions that the 'world' is a humanly created world and that the subject of decisive changes in the world is the proletariat allow us to see the central role of labor in Marx' worldview. In all of his important works, Marx sings the praises of labor. "Labor is