Essential and Exposed: COVID-19 and The Indignity of Work

By Andrew T. Vink

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re constantly bombarded with messages telling us to practice social distancing, work from home, and #flattenthecurve. All of this is necessary advice, and, if implemented properly, will save lives. However, what is someone to do when this isn’t a real option? What happens when you’re considered “essential personnel” and have to go into work?

Essential, but Not Invaulable

According to the San Francisco Department of Public Health's March 16 Shelter in Place Order (one example among plenty of others), "essential personnel" are workers for businesses, like child care facilities, delivery suppliers, gas stations, grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, and pharmacies, which are deemed essential to sustain society in a crisis. As a result, employers can demand, and in fact must demand, that their employees come in to work in order for necessary goods and services are available to the public at large.

There are two classes of essential personnel, and they stand in stark contrast. In the first class are professionalized experts, like doctors and nurses, who receive a living wage (or much more), are ensured a variety of benefits from employer-provided health insurance to paid sick leave, and, because of their profession, have an expectation of some risk. When you work to heal the sick, you’re bound to come into contact with disease and are normally compensated for it. In the second class are attendants, janitors, and other “unskilled” laborers, who normally receive payment barely above minimum wage (for reference, San Francisco minimum wage is $15.59/hr). These workers often do not receive benefits like paid sick leave or employer provided health care because their hours are intentionally kept below the threshold for such benefits. In short, these workers are expected to take risks similar to doctors and nurses but with less than half the pay and almost none of the thanks. Justice oh so clearly abounds, that when both classes are exposed to risk during a shortage of personal protective equipment, the first-class becomes the focus to the neglect of the second-class.

These second-class workers will be among those most significantly impacted if they or members of their families fall ill. They are treated as a means to an end for our food/medicine/goods without being afforded basic human dignity. Constantly exposed to a potentially deadly virus, required to maintain a professional manner while dealing with an anxious, self-absorbed public, and forced to deal with the normal stresses of a job that barely makes ends meet, these workers are required to carry on with a wink and a smile. Nothing to worry about, right?

Without question, this is denigrating treatment for those deemed “essential” to sustaining our society. Such treatment violates their inherent dignity, established in Genesis 1:26-27, that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. God directs humans toward flourishing, gives them provisions for that flourishing, and calls them to cultivate creation. This cultivation, as a divine call, entails that the work itself is dignified.

Catholic Social Teaching and the Dignity of Work

There is a theological answer to this question of indignity, one that is simultaneously attentive in general to society’s “material conditions” and insufficient in the concrete ways it attempts to address material injustice. While there are many theological approaches to the question of social and material justice, such as Left Anglicanism and left-leaning Methodism, I will explore my own tradition, Roman Catholicism, not only because it is my area of expertise, but also because of its central focus on human dignity. Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is a set of doctrines that marry scripture and tradition to address social, political, and economic issues.

One of seven precepts in CST is “The Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers,” which insists that all work ought to be carried out for the holistic and full flourishing of the person. This means that workers are entitled to a living wage, safe working conditions, and benefits, such as paid sick leave. This precept is distilled from various sources, three of which we will use as examples: The parable of the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-6, Thomas Aquinas’s thought on the common good, and St. John Paul II’s encyclical Laborum Exercens (On Human Work).

The parable of the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16 narrates a scene in which laborers working in a vineyard arrive at different times of the day but are still paid a full day’s wage, as agreed upon with the landowner. Jesus’s point is that all who labor, regardless of kind or length, should be provided their daily bread. As CST developed, it insisted that every worker is entitled also to rest and the ability to live with all needs met, without impeding the well-being of others. Such is the meaning of the common good—where all persons share common needs, where all have an inherent dignity, where all have their needs met and dignity respected, and where all are therefore able to flourish together.

The Catholic tradition codifies this scriptural parable with St. Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of the common good. In Summa Theologiae II-II question 26, article three, Aquinas states that maintaining the common good is in accordance with the goods we share together, where we are goods to one another, meaning that we are to love each other, and, ultimately, God. Thomas is arguing that all members of a community, not just one group, like “unskilled laborers,” must love each other and meet the needs of one another. Since all people should be able to live a dignified life with their material needs met, then everyone in the community must come together, even if it cuts into profits, to ensure those in need are supported and protected. This codifies the above-mentioned parable into Thomas’s idea of a living wage: a level of compensation that allows one, while living frugally, to provide for all the needs of their family and allows them to flourish.

This robust notion of the common good was further developed in the twentieth century in relation to wages by St. John Paul II. In the encyclical Laborum Exercens §19, he streamlines Thomas’s logic of a just wage into a more explicit moral principle, one that serves as a litmus test for whether or not a society respects the inherent dignity of workers and their labor.

“In every system, regardless of the fundamental relationships within it between capital and labour, wages, that is to say remuneration for work, are still a practical means whereby the vast majority of people can have access to those goods which are intended for common use: both the goods of nature and manufactured goods. Both kinds of goods become accessible to the worker through the wage which he receives as remuneration for his work. Hence, in every case, a just wage is the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system and, in any case, of checking that it is functioning justly.”

A Lackluster Theological Solution

These three sources clearly demonstrate that CST consistently demands that workers be compensated for their work in a fair and dignified manner. And yet, while CST provides moral guidance that is not up for debate among Catholics, it is often simply ignored when it becomes practically inconvenient. For example, administrators of Catholic hospitals and universities regularly fight against unionization, refusing to actualize those institutions’ Catholic mission and ignoring CST’s affirmation of the right to unionize. And somehow these administrators consistently get away with denying in practice what their institutions espouse.

The recalcitrance of these administrators exposes a deeper problem for CST, namely that it does not sufficiently provide a concrete, material standard for how its moral principles should be met. In other words, where is our contemporary John A. Ryan—who provided not only a theological response but also a concrete mathematical explanation—to answer such questions as: What dictates a just wage and fair compensation? What specific goods are for the common use? Does this apply only to an absolute minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, or to a higher standard of a living wage? At worst, we are only left with lofty ideas disconnected from the concrete material conditions that the moral ideas are supposed to address. In the context of marginalized, second-class workers in the time of COVID-19, this disconnect serves to obscure the needs of this class, as well as the concrete forms of justice owed to them.

There is a conventional “solution” to this disconnect between moral precepts and practical applications, one that takes a largely additive approach. It assumes that CST’s teaching on the dignity of the worker is a stable, theological foundation that can then be built upon with concrete measures and policy. And so, the tendency to moralize about political, social, and economic issues is only deemed problematic when the moralizing is disconnected from the practical. The remaining work is to explicitly apply the moral to the practical, often through asking and answering questions such as: What would be justice for these workers and those who rely on them? What do these workers need in a turbulent and uncertain time?

There is an immediate difficulty for the conventional approach, however, given that the pandemic is only intensifying a much deeper, protracted crisis. An integral moral-practical response must address both the needs of second-class workers for the duration of the pandemic crisis and needs that must be met in the long term. This current crisis is only a microcosm of the wider economic and social injustices these individuals face every day, pandemic or not, and these injustices must be systematically addressed. And so one finds that the additive approach to CST ends up introducing further moral quandaries as soon as it strikes upon a discrete practical policy.

Even worse, this approach does not actually re-connect the moral and practical because the conventional assumption and solution are both fatally problematic.

The additive solution is undermined by the actual material commitments of those developing and promoting CST. Their moralizing tendency is not only an internal feature, but is also the product of accepting the obstructions of external administrators and refusing to discipline them. This refusal materially enforces the moral-practical disconnect, and de facto and restricts CST to an indirect moral sphere of “influence.” In consenting to these administrators’ cheapening of grace, CST becomes a form of Christianity that only the corporate class could love: feckless, apolitical, and immaterial, paying only neutered lip service to the most important matters of social justice. The developers of CST would need to confront the administerial obfuscations of the integral connections between moral principles and material conditions. If not, CST will continue acquiescing to the bourgeois betrayal of Christianity’s liberative and material slant.

There is a further danger in the conventional solution. If theological moralism is a stable foundation from which to begin, then we have here a solution in search of a problem. The moral language may seem like a way to help ‘second-class’ workers. However, the moralizing tendency end up framing these workers in an abstract category, disconnected from their concrete conditions, differentiated oppressions, and class position. Thus, through abstract moralizing, these workers and their plight are turned into an example for the moral foundation––a tool for articulating and developing the moral foundation. This much is, to summarize James Cone, the navel gazing of bourgeois narcissism.

To truly be of service, we must decisively overcome the moral-practical. Right belief (orthodoxy) and right practice (orthopraxy) must go hand in hand from the beginning. And so there is some re-connection to do in regards to answering the vital questions above: What does justice look like for these ‘second-class’ workers and those who rely on them? What do these workers need? Against the moralizing tendency, these questions and their answers cannot be abstract nor self-referential. To truly be of service to ‘second-class’ workers and to ensure that their dignity is maintained and respected, there must first be a fundamental attentiveness to the concrete terms and conditions of these workers. In other words, the totality of material conditions and an analysis of them must be front and center. Dignity and justice are only discovered in the details. And in attention to the details, we can therefore make visible and address what has been made invisible: the laboring second class and the systemic injustices they suffer.

Unmasking the Scandal and Answering Injustice

By way of conclusion, I offer three concrete proposals to address the urgent needs of these second-class workers. First, they must have an enforceable right to adequate protection, such as gloves and masks, to decrease the likelihood of illness. Resources may be limited, but the people who are slicing our deli meats, filling our prescriptions, and handling our bank transactions need material protection from the virus. It is simply unacceptable to treat worker sickness as an inevitability because their employers say that they have no choice but to come to work. Instead of the labor providing the ground for these workers to flourish, labor and its demands are injuring them. It is ridiculous to assume that these individuals do not need robust protection when they cannot always keep 6 feet from customers, and some have already died because of it. While some employers have recognized the need for protection, others have to be pressured into that concession. But either way, how can the workers in general be reasonably protected when even doctors and nurses are re-using personal protective equipment because of its shortage?

The second requirement for these workers is mandatory paid sick leave. If these workers contract the COVID-19 disease, they face the outrageous dilemma of choosing between working while contagious or losing their job. This false dilemma has both individual and social ramifications. Without paid sick leave, there is no way to allow laborers to make payments with job security and to follow isolation guidelines for preventing the spread of the disease. Laborers are thus forced into deciding between short-term economic security or their own health and the health of others. Moreover, the imperative of paid sick leave cannot be an exceptional concession during a pandemic. These same workers are routinely forced into the same false choice even when they have an ordinary illness. All workersdeserve the ability to stay home and heal when they are ill without losing their livelihoods.

Third, these workers have a right to a living wage so that they can adequately provide for themselves and their families. St. John Paul II’s litmus test, when applied to these second-class workers, identifies a huge red flag. If these workers cannot be given the means to feed their families and flourish, then they are never truly compensated for their labor. These workers become indentured servants to corporate profits, expected to be content with the pittance they are given. This system and its inherent exploitations send a clear message: you are less than human and we will treat you as such.

In his essay “Latin American Quincentenary: Discovery or Cover-up?,” Jesuit philosopher Ignacio Ellacuría makes the root of the problem abundantly clear. “Any order where the dynamic of capital prevails over the dynamic of labor is an unjust order, an order that shapes a structural sin, which generates other sins. In contrast, a civilization where the dynamic of labor prevails over the dynamic of capital is an order that really focuses on Christian inspiration.” These workers must not suffer and potentially die for the sake of others’ sins. Such an allowance is unjust. It violates their person, other persons, and therefore the common needs and good of humanity’s life together. Instead, we must work for, in Ellacuría’s words, a labor that develops humanity. Our first step is to stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers who are forced to take needless risks in their labor. We must labor with them to empower their voices, come together, and thereby begin building a better culture of work.

Andrew T. Vink is a Ph.D. candidate in Systematic Theology at Boston College, focusing on Latin American Liberation Theology, political theology, and the relationship between theology, philosophy, and economics. His dissertation is a critique of neoliberalism through the lens of the Salvadoran Jesuit martyr Ignacio Ellacuría.

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