Michael J. Naughton’s Getting Work Right might be viewed as a treatise on the divided life, which puts our working lives into conflict with whatever there might be of our contemplative lives. Naughton says that the main thesis of the book is that “we will not get our work right unless we get our leisure right” (ix). But leisure isn’t to be understood merely as watching football or going bar-hopping. Instead, Naughton understands leisure in a deeper sense, having to do with “time set aside for remembering the most important things, for rediscovering ourselves and thinking about who we ought to be.” (26) If we can’t do that right, then how can we figure out how (or even whether) we ought to work?
The book begins with a chapter on the “two Adams” of the two creation stories in Genesis. This is not a hermeneutic I have much sympathy for, and Naughton’s main sources are Rabbi Soleveitchick and David Brooks, neither well-known Catholic exegetes. Still, taken as a metaphorical application of the biblical witness, I don’t see any harm. On this interpretation, then, Adam I is the active Adam, man the maker: focused on labor, achievement, and creativity. Adam II is the contemplative Adam, man the receiver, religious man: focused on leisure, and on being rather than doing. These two Adams illustrate the book’s theme of the divided life. Each of us is both of them, but all too often we are one to the detriment of the other.
There are two ways to try to heal this internal alienation. One way is to try to balance the two: be all Adam I in your work life and all Adam II in your home life, but try to get the two lives to hang together intelligibly. This isn’t really a healing, though, it just is the divided life. Naughton suggests a healing brought about not through balance but through integration, “by which each element informs, corrects and complements the other.” (17) But the task of integration itself is tricky, and can easily go astray.
In Chapter Two Naughton presents two common failed attempts at integration. The first attempts to integrate a “job-oriented” Adam I with an Adam II who thinks of leisure as amusement. One has a job-orientation when one views work as an unfortunate intrusion, undertaken solely because one needs the pay. This orientation makes a certain amount of sense, Naughton thinks, because jobs in the contemporary world are often “designed so poorly and managed so bureaucratically that the only possible good one can get from them is money.” (25) And this leads to a corresponding Adam II who naturally enough flees this tedium in escapism. Leisure becomes a soma tablet, allowing one to forget one’s troubles for a while.
The second integration is that of the careerist who sees leisure strictly for its instrumental value. The careerist Adam I is fully turned loose and stimulated, because he’s pursuing some kind of interesting or rewarding work. But there’s no place for contemplation or reception, and the whole point of leisure in this integration is to allow a recharging of the batteries. Leisure is for work: it simply allows us time to relax so then we can return to our careers more fully energized.
Although these attempted integrations are widespread, neither is a true integration. Chapter Three presents the proper kind of integration: work is seen as the vocation of the active life—a response to a divine call—and leisure is seen as receptive contemplation of God and his creation. The integration of these versions of Adam I and Adam II brings about true human wholeness.
The book next turns to a treatment of work itself, and begins by urging us to think institutionally. We are creatures of institutions, and must see ourselves so. The primary institutions are the family and the Faith. Business, schools, hospitals and so on are secondary institutions. It is in family and faith that we find our true meaning: this is, then, the home of Adam I. Work must have limits placed on it by the primary institutions. Business can’t be guided solely by profit—maximizing shareholder value or whatnot. It must focus on a core group of goods: good work, good wealth and good goods.
I’ll talk about the first two here and ignore the third.
Remember the job-oriented Adam I whose work is designed for him (poorly)? This is a common phenomenon in the industrialized world: work designed by someone else. As we saw, this can help lead to a degraded version of Adam I, because so often the work is inhuman, and in such cases it will be extremely difficult for the worker to achieve a proper integration. So work design is a major problem for Naughton—in order for work to be good work, it must be well-made by its designers. And the designers are, to a large extent, not the doers.
Interestingly, Naughton embeds the notion of work design within the principle of subsidiarity. As you know, subsidiarity is a fundamental principle of Catholic Social Teaching which says (roughly) that it is a grave evil to arrogate to higher levels tasks which can be reasonably performed at lower levels. When a business is run wholly from the top down, the talents and contributions, and indeed the humanity, of the workers at lower levels tend to be systematically ignored. Work is designed for maximum efficiency, maximum profitability, maximum simplicity or what have you, but not for maximum human stimulation or maximum development of human potential. Naughton points out that a subsidiarist approach to work design would focus much more attentively on the capabilities and needs of the workers.
He gives a case study: the Reell Precision Manufacturing company’s decision to move a particular inspection step out of the hands of dedicated QC inspectors and into the hands of the line workers who set up the production line for the manufacture of certain products. The manufacturing process for some of Reell’s products involved a line set-up; a brief run of the line followed by a shut-down of the line pending an inspection of some sample products by an official inspector; the performing of whatever tweaks to the set-up inspection might call for; the reinspection of the products; and finally (perhaps after more tweaks and inspections) the restarting of the line at full production. This process often took a very long time, principally because inspectors weren’t always immediately available—and when they finally arrived and performed their inspections, the set-up crews weren’t always immediately available to tweak the line. Lots of down time, lots of lost productivity. Reell solved this practical problem by teaching the set-up staff to do their own inspections. In other words, they made part-time inspectors out of full-time technicians. Needless to say, this increased profitability and led to raises in wages. I’ll come back to this.
Turn next to the problem of good wealth. Here, I can consider only one element: the family wage. Naughton gives us the case of Ruby, a nurse’s aid who lovingly tended his mother during her in-home hospice care. Ruby is a single mother without much education and without great technical skill, and her employer pays her poorly. Is she entitled to a family wage? Naughton say no. “The hospital is not responsible for paying employees more than a sustainable wage (a wage consistent with the sound financial management of the firm), even if that wage falls below a family wage. To do so would unjustly place the hospital—and all the firm’s employees—at risk of economic failure.” (139) And anyway, “Ruby must take responsibility for the fact that she does not have the skills to warrant enough wealth to pay her a living wage” (138).
The book ends with a chapter on Sunday—Naughton’s suggestions about how to structure our leisure so that we can better structure the rest of our lives. He offers three habits (silence, celebration and charity) and several practices as some specific ways to better spend the Lord’s Day. Instead of allowing our Sundays to become just another day to run errands or amuse ourselves or work, he argues we must use them to grow in knowledge and love of the Lord.
I find much to like about Naughton’s book. Surely, the kind of instruction he provides for managers and other business leaders is sorely needed in our culture, and offers much wisdom. Nevertheless, I think he does not go nearly far enough. For one thing, Naughton’s comfort with the denial of a family wage is hard to square with magisterial teaching. To take just one example:
Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family means remuneration which will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future. Such remuneration can be given either through what is called a family wage-that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the other spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home-or through other social measures such as family allowances or grants to mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families. (Laborem Exercens 19)
The late Holy Father teaches here that a family wage is just remuneration, and that hence paying less than a family wage is unjust (absent some outside addition to the wage). I grant Ruby’s responsibility to increase her skills, but the Church doesn’t say that employers get to treat her unjustly in the meantime.
In fairness to Naughton, he does not simply deny Ruby her just wage and leave it at that: “low wages are merely a symptom of a much larger problem of how the organization structures the work itself” (139). We’ve got some structural problems to address, as he sees it. Note the appearance of two themes we saw earlier: the dominance of institutions (the organization) and the top-down nature of work design. Naughton thinks these features need tweaking. I think no tweaking can help. There are some deep reasons for this. Consider the words that immediately preceded that above passage from John Paul II:
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. It is not the only means of checking, but it is a particularly important one and, in a sense, the key means.
The Holy Father does not, then, teach merely that a wage that falls beneath the family wage is unjust. He teaches that a system such as ours that allows—nay, demands—unjust wages can thereby be seen to be an unjust system. The “much larger problem” that Naughton speaks of, then, is actually that our system as a whole is functioning unjustly. Can this be healed via institutions making some adjustments to their methods of work design?
Recall the work redesign pulled off by Reall. It’s a top-down re-arrangement of factory assembly line procedures that does indeed give the line set-up crew an additional task to perform, and a correspondingly higher level of autonomy in that respect. But the factory workers continue to do work designed for them by others—by the organization—and this will be an inescapable fact about the work design at any such organization. In reality, the bosses control the work, and subsidiarity is a fairy tale, irrespective of whether the little slices of it are more or less humanely designed.
But an even deeper problem with the dominance of institutions is that being an employee as such is not viewed as a desideratum in Catholic Social Teaching. As Leo XIII puts it:
If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. (…) The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. (Rerum Novarum 46)
The ownership in question here is not (as such) the ownership of a house or what have you, it is the ownership of the means of production. Leo XIII envisions a social order where workmen labor for others only until they become able to labor for themselves. The family wage’s job, ultimately, is to make wages unnecessary. The goal is real economic freedom, which entails genuine subsidiarity. We do not envision a society of hirelings, and no such society can be an embodiment of Catholic Social Teaching.
Needless to say—needless to say!—in no actual system whatever will it turn out that each and every person is capable of holding productive property and serving effectively as his own master. In this shattered world, we will never fully embody the ideal. But we must nevertheless recognize the ideal as the ideal. For all its excellence in its own place, I would like to have seen Naughton’s book present that ideal more fully.
Getting Work Right
by Michael J. Naughton
Emmaus Road Publishing, 2019
Hardcover, 200 pages
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How much IS a “family wage.” Dollars amounts, please, not the fuzzy
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“Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family means remuneration which will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future…”
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Is a teen entitled to a “family wage”? What if he has an extraordinary talent that earns him quite a large sum? I imagine a father of two children needs quite a bit less than a father of five, six, or seven. But what if the father of two is the company CEO, and the father of seven is a new hire with a GED and minimal skills?
And they get all this from the story of Adam in Genesis? Really? The problem is that too much of “magisterial teaching” is the result of feverish theologizing over matters that are really none of the church’s business (not to mention entirely beyond its competence). A bit of genuine exegesis, as in “trying to figure out what the author’s actual point was in telling the story” would go a long way towards curing what ails the contemporary church.
“For one thing, Naughton’s comfort with the denial of a family wage is hard to square with magisterial teaching.”
But, where, one also can ask, is the injustice of providing legitimately lower paying entry-level jobs (i.e., lower entry-level job descriptions) for those who are NOT responsible for families? Is this option actually “a subsidiarist approach to work design [which] would focus much more attentively on the capabilities [?] and needs of the workers,” and enable some chance at qualified advancement? Or, where is the reality that statutorily ramped-up minimum-hourly-wage requirements have often been shown to result in bottom-line layoffs and reduced hours, actually hurting many (not all) of those intended to benefit? Intentions are one thing; multiple outcomes can be another.
Yes, there is an injustice that families can no longer make ends meet, and that corporate profits often accumulate in ways that surely ignite envy and, in this way, rip Solidarity out by the roots. But magisterial statements of principle, alone and in complex economies, do not substitute for the needed informed prudential judgment which, as a distinct and basic moral virtue, is an equally-absent and necessary ingredient.
The broader questions about economically viable families (a “primary institution”) bring us to such systemic abuses as old-fashion “usury” (!)—-currency devaluation to fund personal and public debt, job-substituting robotics and offshoring (…but, with family-friendly price reductions), and the need for a society which, in the first place, is less indifferent to absentee fathers and other single-parent outcomes (the cited Ruby case also involving limited skills).
It really does get back, then, to “the family” itself, too, as a core principle of Catholic Social Teaching, like Subsidiarity (as in “work design”), and Solidarity.
It’s highly amusing how the sacrosanct “family” get conveniently pulled out of the closet so that higher wages might be justified. Is the author aware that the “family” no longer exists? In this Era of Progressivism, Instrumentalism and Constructivism, “family” is whatever you want it to be. Since “family” is just about every possibility, it is about nothing. Yesterday I followed a car whose bumper sticker read, “Dog Mom.”
A fair days work for a fair days wages. Working one family member, working forty hours a week, can sustain a family, as the lady stays home, and take care, raises the family. Once a standard, in a stable, economic and social times. A norm, that is great for a nation.
Never borrow money, but rather save to attain what one might want. Nor, should or can a government borrow money.
These facts, decades years past, were all know as common sense, a standard.
Today claimed intellects ignore these facts, or common sense.
Failing to recognize the doom of every civilization, lies in the destroying of the very foundation of a great society, country, nation, is the Family.
Never can a people look to a government to save them, and deny God, and expect to be Great… Never proven more than the USA today…
If the farms prosper, the nation prospers, if the “family” farm fails, the nation is doomed, is another proven fact, the US proves today… Yet today, the US is the most food import nation, it has destroyed, the family farm of direct human food consumption. Hunger, is greater in the US, and World today, than ever in history, also speaks to the reality, of not only can a family not earn enough to mere shelter, feed, and cloth themselves, but the food doesnt exist, nor are monopolized food industry obligated to exist, that have now, destroyed the family food stores.
The government failed to protect, the family, entity, chain, that feed the nation..
Goodness lyle, do you know anyone who’s starving in America? Outside of those suffering from mental illness or other troubles that would deter them from seeking assistance there’s no shortage of food in the US.
Even the panhandlers are well fed. Our local soup kitchen and food banks are all helping them and operating well. Walmart has donated so many groceries that a local food bank has run out of shelf space in the past.
America has problems for sure but food shortage isn’t one of them. Not yet at least.
Goodness Mrscracker, the issue, as example. In recent times a foreign country and the people of have essentially purchased a large percentage of a “certain” grain out of the US.. What will the US now use to replace that grain, but what else can that country cleanout of the US at the same time. A grain is not now available to produce human food in the USA.
In a spiritual sense, yes, we do not look to God to provide, but to ourselves.
In a larger issue, to this article, and the plain ignorance of, is summed up in.. Its common that one Sports Person in the USA is paid more in the USA, than some entire countries total yearly Production, GNP.
We do not value the family, nor the family workers.. they new exist for profits to the stock markets, the rich made richer, on the backs of the common man, the family.
We in the USA also when we talk about Wages, need to recognize the USA spends near two thirds of a Trillion on arms to exterminate humans a year, but our total food production is a fraction of that at the farm gate level.
which brings up the classic example of the politician being told of the atrocity and crime of the US genocide of Yemen.. That we need to feed them, not genocide them.. and the US politician remarking, We the US cannot afford to feed the people of Yemen! When we spend more on arms in a a few months, than it would cost to feed ourselves and others for Years..
.Dr. Patrick Toner needs to write on the US military budget, verse the US wages doubled in the 1970’s. but today it will take decades to double again.. Yet health care insurance will cost a family business, 20,000 a year.. Or, minium wages for a year, wont provide health insurance alone, for a family for a year..
Dr. Patrick also needs to recognize the issue of borrowing to exist, that now exists in the USA, a Wage and Debt wage society. Student loans a big example of this, of now children are instanously debt slave due to education.
Never borrow money, most directly, the government cannot borrow money, needs to be relearned, to write any factual comments, to wages and human social existence.
How does, in Philosophy of learning, How does one man come to be a slave of another? Borrowing of money…
A real interesting philosophy of the US, is the US destroyed itself by war, in it spent the nation so far into debt, the nation can no longer feed itself..
This essay fails to get deep enough into one of, if not the core issue, behind all the secondary issues. Whether worker or owner, underpaid or overpaid,head of family of 7 or single, if we do not have some basic spiritual and transcendent values tugging at us when we wake up and begin our daily routines of work, play,or even religious rituals, are we different from rats in the lab who do what researchers are testing to get their food. We work to get means to provide food and housing so we can get up the next day and do it again, and again and again. We work to eat and eat to work, no matter how satisfying our work or fancy our food. If we cannot keep ourselves open to graces of God we are doomed to live our lives as rats on our treadmills, however hard or easy we find our treadmills.
Jim Adams makes an insightful point. Just as we toil each day to feed our body, we should also toil each day to feed our souls. The difference is that feeding our soul is very easy if we do what Cardinal Desire Mercier said: “If every day during five minutes, pray: ‘O, Holy Spirit, I adore you. Enlighten, guide, strength and console me. Tell me what I ought to do and command me to do it. I promise to be submissive in everything that you permit to happen to me, only show me what is your will.” Be quiet for five minutes and listen. How hard is that to feed our soul each day.
One solution to low paid nursing assistants like Ruby who haven’t been able to invest the time to advance their training is to privately assist them. Either personally if you feel they’ve rendered exceptional service or through a church community.
Or alternatively, the hospice itself could assist CNA’s to further their education and increase their income.
There have to be entry level jobs and corresponding wages to be fair to those who have sacrificed time and money to advance their degrees. But there’s no reason why entry level workers shouldn’t be encouraged and supported to to be able to do the same.
Peter Beaulieu said, “But, where, one also can ask, is the injustice of providing legitimately lower paying entry-level jobs (i.e., lower entry-level job descriptions) for those who are NOT responsible for families? Is this option actually “a subsidiarist approach to work design [which] would focus much more attentively on the capabilities [?] and needs of the workers,” and enable some chance at qualified advancement? Or, where is the reality that statutorily ramped-up minimum-hourly-wage requirements have often been shown to result in bottom-line layoffs and reduced hours, actually hurting many (not all) of those intended to benefit? Intentions are one thing; multiple outcomes can be another.”
The only injustice that I can determine is not providing enough (in terms of job AND wages) for a single or head of household breadwinner to get by financially – given all of his responsibilities. Ways that this could happen are arbitrary/unjust dismissal (e.g. profit maximization), reducing hours, blacklisting/refusal to hire, or not paying high enough wages.
Any consequences of change in minimum wages under the current scheme that you note assumes (1) that a person can be morally laid off for reasons which are possibly related to improving the bottom line, and NOT necessarily company solvency, and (2) companies are morally able to change how many hours a person works. What is forgotten is that (3) companies set the prices. While (3) MAY be possibly unjust (e.g. pharmaceuticals), and could be regulated it also is within a company’s current discretion. If personnel, hours worked, and wages are largely determined by law, then the only variable which a company can control is prices.
Good points. Thank you. Some tangential clarification, here. My attention was too narrow–distracted by researched outcomes in Seattle and the state of Washington, with minimum-wage statutes now on the books for a few years. In my comments I was thinking of hourly-wage earners. In these cases after-the-fact research did show, in many cases, layoffs and reduced hours (e.g.,restaurants). The Law of Unintended Consequences for this set, and not what the policy wonks were so sure would happen.
My armchair thought, at the time, was that whatever the minimum wage was in, say, 1940, could be adjusted to current dollars, and that this made more sense than what appeared to be an off-the-wall figure. My napkin calculation–which could be wrong–showed a new minimum wage of $11.00/hour rather than the statutory $15.00, also assuming that an economy of hamburger flippers matches the 1940 economy (well before so many valuable jobs were offshored to subsistence conomies–the larger issue). In general, we do have some real equity problems, but on a shifting and fragmenting landscape. An inviting environment for bumper-sticker slogans.
Here’s an idea that will fix the “just wage” problem.
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All those who insist businesses should pay a “living wage”–such that a man can support himself, his stay-at-home wife and his three Catholic-schools educated offspring–please start a business and practice what you say morality and justice demand.
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“But the factory workers continue to do work designed for them by others—by the organization—and this will be an inescapable fact about the work design at any such organization. In reality, the bosses control the work, and subsidiarity is a fairy tale, irrespective of whether the little slices of it are more or less humanely designed.”
Given that the bosses are a part of management, what is the other option? Somehow work has to be coordinated. It may be possible and desirable for customer input (possibly by law), but once a decision has been made concerning the product or service, it needs implementation – and that requires authority.
“The ownership in question here is not (as such) the ownership of a house or what have you, it is the ownership of the means of production. Leo XIII envisions a social order where workmen labor for others only until they become able to labor for themselves. The family wage’s job, ultimately, is to make wages unnecessary. The goal is real economic freedom, which entails genuine subsidiarity. We do not envision a society of hirelings, and no such society can be an embodiment of Catholic Social Teaching.”
Technically people already own the means of production – their labor. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any wage required in justice. The only way that wages could be abolished would be for every household to produce all of its necessities. If one wanted to “devolve” back to largely agricultural times, then this may be somewhat feasible, but there is a question of its desirability.
“Needless to say—needless to say!—in no actual system whatever will it turn out that each and every person is capable of holding productive property and serving effectively as his own master. In this shattered world, we will never fully embody the ideal. But we must nevertheless recognize the ideal as the ideal. For all its excellence in its own place, I would like to have seen Naughton’s book present that ideal more fully.”
The first sentence is true, but how do we know that the ideal is correct? I would settle for job security under conditions of just cause dismissal, and the state’s ACTIVE help in obtaining a new position when conditions require a job change.