WCC Public Policy Positions: Protect Workers’ Rights
As we did last session, here we continue to elaborate on each of the WCC’s 2025 Public Policy Positions. You can learn more about Catholic Social Teaching on the USCCB website.
Protect workers’ rights. Workers have the right to what is justly due them for their labor. They have a right to choose whether to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively, and to exercise these rights without reprisal. Workers also have responsibilities–to provide a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, to treat employers and coworkers with respect, and to carry out their work in ways that contribute to the common good. Wisconsin must ensure that public and private employers provide decent working conditions and reasonably accommodate a pregnant employee so that she can retain her job and not endanger her health and life or that of her unborn child.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “Work is for man, not man for work” (CCC 2428). In other words, “Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power; it is ordered first of all to the service of persons, of the whole man, and of the entire human community” (CCC 2426). Though the Church recognizes that “profits are necessary” to sustain and grow a business, the business owners and leaders “have an obligation to consider the good of the persons and not only the increase of profits” (CCC 2432).
With this view of a person-centered economic system, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church teaches that “the rights of workers, like all other rights, are based on the nature of the human person and on his transcendent dignity” (301). In that same paragraph, the Compendium goes on to enumerate a nonexhaustive list of workers’ rights, including:
- the right to a just wage;
- the right to rest;
- the right “to a working environment and to manufacturing processes which are not harmful to the workers’ physical health or to their moral integrity”;
- the right that one’s personality in the workplace should be safeguarded “without suffering any affront to one’s conscience or personal dignity”;
- the right to appropriate subsidies that are necessary for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families;
- the right to a pension and to insurance for old age, sickness, and in case of work-related accidents;
- the right to social security connected with maternity;
- the right to assemble and form associations.
While employers should uphold these rights, they do not always do so. Thus, individuals working together via a union often fight to secure these rights. The Church recognizes that unions are a form of “solidarity among workers” (Compendium 305). Furthermore, “unions are promoters of the struggle for social justice” which “should be seen as a normal endeavor ‘for’ the just good … not a struggle ‘against’ others.” However, since unions are “first of all instruments of solidarity and justice, unions may not misuse the tools of contention; because of what they are called to do, they must overcome the temptation of believing that all workers should be union-members, they must be capable of self-regulation and be able to evaluate the consequences that their decisions will have on the common good” (Compendium 306).
Individuals, unions, and the state–like every other economic actor–are called to work for the common good, to make sacrifices when required, and adjust to new economic realities. All must work together to ensure that the economy serves people, not the other way around.
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