As we commemorate Labor Day, a time to honor the dignity of labor and workers, the parades may be smaller and the speeches shorter, but the stakes for America’s workers have rarely been higher. Catholic Social Teaching reminds us of a timeless message: Work is not merely about economics and the Gross Domestic Product, but it has a deeply human dimension.
Catholic Social Teaching, rooted in Pope Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, challenges us to seek just wages, uphold the right to organize and collectively bargain, and affirm the dignity of every worker. Over time, further papal teachings –Laborem Exercens by Pope St. John Paul II in 1981 and his encyclical Centesimus Annus in 1991, and Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti in 2020 – have expanded this moral vision to include solidarity, subsidiarity, and a global economy of compassion.
Catholic Social Teaching in the streets and fields
Theoretical foundations find life in real-world action.
In 1933, Msgr. John A. Ryan stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, his voice carrying over the roar of Depression-era crowds, urging lawmakers to pass New Deal protections for workers. Known as “The Right Reverend New Dealer,” he spoke not in abstract economics but in the language of families – mothers who could put food on the table, and fathers who could come home with pride rather than exhaustion from an unsafe factory floor.
Decades later, Msgr. George Higgins, the “labor priest,” marched alongside César Chávez in the grape fields of California. Msgr. Higgins didn’t just write about solidarity in his “Yardstick” column – he lived it. Farmworkers still remember the image of a priest in rolled-up sleeves, dust clinging to his collar, blessing the bent backs of grape pickers under the relentless California sun, blessing their struggle for fair wages.
From Depression-era factory floors to pandemic-era farm fields, the Church’s voice for worker justice has never gone silent.
Modern-day voices for worker justice
The tradition of the “labor priest” lives on today. In Chicago, Father Clete Kiley –founder of the Priest-Labor Initiative and former director of immigration policy for UNITE HERE – mobilizes clergy in support of worker rights. In the Midwest, Augustinian Father Anthony Pizzo leads community organizing for fair housing, healthcare, and racial equity. The Catholic Labor Network connects hundreds of priests across the country who stand in solidarity with workers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Father Juan Carlos Ruiz organized pastoral care and advocacy for undocumented agricultural laborers, ensuring that those often left invisible were neither forgotten nor unheard.
‘Cathonomics’ and a new economic imagination
In his book Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy, economist Anthony Annett critiques the neoliberal focus on efficiency and self-interest, arguing instead for an economy rooted in ethics, solidarity, and the common good. He offers the idea of a “virtue economy” – one where relationships matter as much as results, and where moral principles shape markets.
Annett tells the story of a clothing cooperative in the Global South, owned by its workers, which competes successfully in the marketplace without cutting wages or exploiting labor. Their success challenges the myth that justice and profitability can’t coexist. It’s a living parable of Catholic Social Teaching in action: subsidiarity at work, solidarity in practice.
Annett also exposes the false image of “Homo economicus,” the purely self-interested actor, as too narrow to explain the richness of human motivation. The Church’s vision embraces reciprocity and community, seeing in every paycheck a moral statement about what – and who – we value.
A prophetic voice from the U.S. bishops
The call for worker justice is not just the work of individual priests – it is embedded in the teaching of the Catholic Church in the United States. In 1986, the U.S. bishops issued Economic Justice for All, a landmark pastoral letter applying Catholic Social Teaching to the American economy. It affirmed the rights of workers, the moral obligation to provide just wages, and the preferential option for the poor – declaring economic justice to be an essential dimension of faith.
Each year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops renews this commitment through their annual Labor Day statement, reminding the faithful that protecting the dignity of work and the rights of workers is at the heart of Catholic moral teaching. These statements echo the same themes found in Cathonomics and in the witness of today’s “labor priests”: an economy must serve people, not the other way around.
Labor Day’s renewed calling for worker justice
Labor Day should be more than a long weekend – it’s an opportunity for annual examination of conscience regarding worker justice. Are our workplaces structured to respect worker dignity, ensure fair wages, cultivate solidarity, and serve the common good?
In recent months, we have seen alarming moves in the opposite direction: the suspension of collective bargaining rights for over a million federal employees, mass federal workforce layoffs, efforts to dismantle public-sector union protections in multiple states, and a Supreme Court decision allowing large-scale federal job cuts to proceed. The paralysis of the National Labor Relations Board – left without a quorum –has stalled protections for countless private-sector workers. These aren’t just policy setbacks – they are moral failures, stripping dignity from the very people whose labor sustains our nation; they are direct assaults on the dignity, security, and solidarity of working people.
Catholic Social Teaching makes clear that these workers are not expendable parts of an economic machine, but irreplaceable images of God. Cathonomics gives us a roadmap for shaping policies and practices that match that truth.
Something to consider: This Labor Day, let us honor not only the past victories of justice-inspired labor advocacy, but also the people laboring in quiet heroism in our time – and recommit to resisting policies that undermine their dignity. True progress, as Pope Francis reminded us, is measured not by profits alone, but by the flourishing of all – especially those whose work too often goes unseen.
This Labor Day, let us lift our eyes from the balance sheet to the faces of the workers before us – and measure our economy by their dignity, not its dividends.
(Robert Stewart is an Ignatian Volunteer who does writing and research for the Ignatian Solidarity Network-Education for Justice and for Social Action Linking Together (SALT), a Virginia-based advocacy organization. He retired in 2007 as the director of retirement programs for a Fortune 100 company. Earlier in his career, he served as a field service representative and later as a pension and employee benefit appeals hearing officer for the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds. He also chaired the Justice and Peace Commission for the Catholic Diocese of Belleville, Illinois during the late 1970s and in the 1980s.)
