The church and labor on the Feast of St. Joseph, the Worker | National Catholic Reporter

The church and labor on the Feast of St. Joseph, the Worker | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: Catholic religion teachers like to talk about Joseph as a tradesman, as if Nazareth were some sort of Kibbutz.  In reality, it was a pretty wild place where workers in Sepphoris let off steam.  Joseph was likely one of those workers, not operating his own shop, but working, with his sons, as a day laborer like those Latino workers you see early in the morning in front of 7-11 that the neighbors complain about so much.



The just wage is a crowning achievement in Catholic labor thought, because it implies that one is not working only for oneself, but for one's family. Of courses, the labor market does not make allowances for family size, so some type of subsidy is required from the state to provide fully for one's children, lest the childless have an advantage in the labor market while families starve.  Here, gauranteeing the ability to consume goods is essential - it is not a dysfunction or a sin.  Indeed, consumerism is what keeps workers from radicalizing for class warfare on Marxian lines.  Marx did not count on what we call the consumer surplus that keeps workers happy.



There is ultimately only one way to get rid of class warfare in the labor market - and that his to make workers the owners of the operation, which allows them to elect or hire rather than serve management and executives.  Workplace democracy should be about more than deciding how to improve the shop floor - it must be about putting the workers in control (and not just the workers on the factory floor - as these are being automated out of existence).  If the Church is serious about what it says on the dignity of workers, it has to go to employee democracy - or as some of us call it, cooperative socialism.  This type of socialism also takes consumption out of the market and places it in the cooperative - so that as much as possible the workers make what they consume, from houses to food to banking services.  It is time to quit nibbling around the edges and go all in for reform - and not just on the Distributist idea, but with large cooperatives.  Sometimes small is not beautiful if economies of scale are required to do (almost) everything a cooperative must do, including government services