The Strange Fad of Promoting Worker Exploitation

There’s been recent momentum around shaming people for getting high-paying physical jobs or for demanding better working conditions. Public Catholic Matt Walsh made a video last month, along with several written statements, criticizing men who call in sick when they are ill. He claimed that ‘real men’ wouldn’t do so. He elaborated:

Adults don’t have time to be sick. Sick days are for kids in school who are trying to stay home so they don’t have to take a test that day. With rare exceptions, taking a sick day as an adult should be embarrassing for you. Calling your boss and saying “Sorry I can’t come in today because my tummy hurts” is humiliating. You need to be at work.

— Matt Walsh

But it’s not virtuous to threaten one’s health (and potentially the health of others) by forcing oneself to work during times of illness when there’s another option.

There is a thread within the modern Republican movement, probably stemming from the Protestant Work Ethic, that implores a person to sacrifice their body in back-breaking labor. It commends those who work long hours and sacrifice all social life, hobbies, and home life for a toilsome work day. It therefore shows a favoritism for the corporation over the individual. In so doing, it neglects two important truths:

• Man has a soul

• This is not our True Home

The insistence that the worker should endure poor conditions without complaint is opposed to the Christian tradition, which recognizes his inherent dignity. It’s a different thing to applaud a man for working long hours because he has to, in order to support his family, than it is to insist that people seek out and endure such conditions without end because somehow their masculinity depends on it. The contrary is true. Man’s identity is not to be found in his work, but in his relationship to God and secondarily to his family.

One of the leading arguments against fair wages for employees is that demanding them would outsource those jobs to China. Thus, it is asserted that the American worker should stay quiet lest he hasten the job migration overseas. But this is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between outsourcing to China and treating employees well. In a moral framework, we would not do business with China, or at least we would penalize them for their currency manipulation, unsafe worker conditions, prison labor for private merchandise, and draconian violations of human rights. China literally uses its prison inmates, a good percentage of whom are political prisoners, for its organ harvesting program. It’s egregious that we should place the products of such countries on an even playing field and thus assert a moral equivalency that isn’t so.

There is a balance here. Of course, mandating higher minimum wages would not magically fix anything. But it’s not anti-conservative or anti-male to seek good working conditions. It’s pro-family. Higher wages and better work conditions make single-income families possible. This is what we should be seeking.

While many men have suffered (and do) grueling jobs for their families, there’s no obligation for us to laud that as an ideal. It’s noble when men choose to make that sacrifice because it’s the best option available, but we should aim for higher. We should aim for conditions that allow those men to be fathers and husbands—moreover, that treat them with the dignity owed to them as men.

Some of the online comments seem to insist that there’s a negative to well-paid and cared-for employees.

There’s a problem when we desire our fellow man to get paid less and have a lower quality of life, which seems to be becoming a common opinion.

Sure, some of this is pure covetousness, but there’s more than that. It seems to be the result of an inversion of the understanding of why we work. Do we work so we can live, worship, and enjoy leisure, or do we live so we can work? For some, the latter is true, but man is meant for more. This reductionism about the nature of man has far-reaching consequences, and reducing him to a mere worker—an instrument for the collective—is inextricably linked to such monstrous evils as euthanasia and state-sponsored suicide. Man is more than what he produces, and we should recognize that in every area of life.