Having just "celebrated" May Day in NYC last week, an article by Chris Gerhz (click here for a short bio) caught my eye for understandable reasons. The title of his article is The Cold War Origins Of A Christian Alternative To May Day (click here for the article).
Though not a Catholic, Gerhz retells how the Catholic Church responded to May Day. Though he starts his story about how Pope John Paul II employed a 100-year-old encyclical by Pope Leo XIII which warned of exploiting workers, John Paul II added to that a warning against 'unfettered capitalism' because it provided much to meet our material needs while neglecting to address our spiritual needs. Then he added the importance of unions to the cause of the worker. John Paul II did all of that on May 1st not just to honor workers on International Labor Day, but to also honor and bring Joseph, Mary's husband, into the picture. For May 1st is known to the Catholic Church as the feast to Joseph The Worker.
But the creator of the first Christian alternative to May Day was Pope Pius the XII. Gerhz noted that the Catholic Church had been opposing Communism (a.k.a., Bolshevism) with Pope Pius's XI warning that Communism was undermining Christian Civilization. Pope Pius XII was also concerned with the rise of Communism. Thus in 1955, Pope Pius XII talked to an Italian trade union group. He said that in light of how falsely the Church has been accused of favoring the wealthy, he established the May 1st liturgical feast of Jospeh The Worker because of how Joseph's life as a worker qualifies him to represent workers. He then follows up with Dorthy Day's celebration of May 1st where she also references Joseph The Worker.
Gerhz then directs his attention to his fellow evangelicals. That, rather than supporting a candidate that promotes the exploiting working people, they should, in their own Protestant way, reflect on Joseph the Worker and work on how to respond to the problems of working people. He says that knowing that Protestants lag way behind Catholics in terms of social thought.
In order to adequately critique Gerhz's recounting of the first Christian alternative to May Day, we need to understand what workers need. The call for more unions, though a step in the right direction, is a call for inadequacy. Why? Because many people, especially owners of companies, correctly look at unions as a foreign intrusion into private property despite the fact that unions are made up of a company's own workers. The problem is that unions still don't figure into a company's decision making structure. Rather unions seek their power through persuasion and that persuasion is sometimes threat-based. Yes, unions are better than nothing. But because they are a foreign entity, they have been greatly reduced in both numbers and power.
In addition, creating a Christian alternative to May Day also misses the mark. For it calls on Christians to separate from their fellow non-Christian citizens and fellow workers in trying to forge solutions for the working person. Yes, there are areas in life that we Christians do not share with non-Christians. And thus we Christians must decide alone on how to act in and view those areas. But work is not one of those areas. Work is an area which we share with non-Christians. Thus, for us Christians to develop our own views on work and how to respond to exploitation must seem rather arrogant to the many unbelievers.
We must also note that those who celebrate May Day as leftists do not make up a monolith. Bolshevism and its aftermath in the then totalitarian Soviet Union do not represent what many leftists believe. And thus, perhaps the Church could get over its phobia of leftists and work in conjunction with those leftists to jointly find solutions to the problems that working people face.
Perhaps the biggest problem that workers face in our Capitalist economy is something Marx noted about the Capitalism of his day: that workers are considered to be disposable objects of profit. Why? It is because our society has come to value wealth over work so that unless work leads to wealth, it is often seen as worthless. And even when it leads to wealth, the worker has not really achieved any real status until they have become wealthy.
The solution to the above problem is to make the position of the worker ingrained into the structure of every company. There are at least two distinct ways of accomplishing that. The first is to promote worker-owned companies that are democratically run by all who are employed.
But such an option leaves out the many publicly-owned and rivately-owned companies that exist today. In addition, workers alone are not always able to raise the capital needed to start or maintain company. Thus, with such companies that have a significant size, we must change the structure of the company's leadership so that workers are well represented as part of that company's executive board. That is the idea behind Germany's codetermination policies. And though Germany's implementation of codetermination still leaves owners with having less power than owners, that can be changed so that workers and owners share power equally in their executive boards.
The problem with Capitalism and why it leans toward exploiting its workers is because it uses greed as the fuel for its engine. And that greed is willing to cut out all competitors who have claims on the wealth of a given company. Certainly, not all capitalist companies exploit their workers, but capitalist economic systems naturally lean toward exploiting others. And the Free Market delusion is that we can create such a market so that greed works for us without omitting any toxic emissions.
The structures of capitalist companies often fail to account for those toxic emissions. That is because the structure of such companies tend to be top-down and those at the top are called on to represent those with wealth only. Thus the solution to the exploitation of workers requires more than just meditating on St Joseph The Worker, it requires changing the structure of companies so that workers are duly recognized by allowing workers and owners to equally share company decision making power. That increasing the power of the worker at work is a leftist idea. While recognizing the rights of the owner is a capitalist idea. So perhaps we need a hybrid of both the left and capitalism to enable companies to survive while paying due attention to the welfare of their workers.
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