What is human dignity, and how does work relate to and influence it? As part of the Lincoln Cathedral Common Good Project, British MP Jon Cruddas, author of The Dignity of Labour and Honorary Professor at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, gave a talk on, "Just Working? Why the Dignity of Work is at the Heart of Civic and Spiritual Renewal". From a talk arranged by Together for the Common Good. The following is an excerpt of that talk:
The pandemic forced a reset. Government was forced to regulate who works, where, and under what conditions. The status and significance of human labor moved center stage.
The value attached to the work of others–especially the vocations, of public service workers–increased significantly. They had renewed value because they helped keep us alive. We recognized the dignity of their labor. We confronted our own mortality and what we value in our own lives and the contribution of others.
Until recently, if we discussed human “dignity,” we were likely to be contemplating how we are to die rather than how we are to live. The pandemic changed this. In confronting death, we once again recognized the worth of others and realized the dignity of their contributions.
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What do we mean by dignity? The word retains a moral purchase, but it remains controversial. Dignity is not just about status or standing; the worth of a worker cannot simply be measured by his or her salary or position in an office hierarchy.
The word suggests something more significant, something that can be ambiguous and elusive but which can readily be recognized when it is lost. It suggests ethical duties in how we order society. For instance, in tolerating slavery, abuse and exploitation, or allowing some forms of imprisonment, we compromise both our personal and our collective dignity.
The idea of the negation of human dignity implies a process of reduction, degradation, dehumanization. It captures some intrinsic human worth, with minimal acceptable moral standards, that we can recognize, whether we come from a religious or a secular humanist standpoint.
I think the loss of personal dignity actually underscores the rage and anger that drives populism and underscores modern politics. The distinction between the lives we want to live and the lives we are increasingly forced to live–and that growing gap, that canyon between those two, creates a sense of anomie that drives the rage that we witness all around us.
Understood in these terms, “dignity” has real political significance and purchase that can be detected across a variety of spiritual, ethical, and human rights traditions. In secular traditions, human dignity relates to notions of agency or autonomy, and the ability of humans to choose their own actions. In both traditions, dignity can embrace a shared state of being that involves obligations–not just in religious traditions but also secularized traditions. This implies the ethical duty to remedy things or processes that violate that dignity–genocide, torture, tyranny, or exploitation.
Our dignity–both in a personal as well as a collective sense–is shaped by what we tolerate and what we do not, and it is an organizing method for how we build a conception of justice, a view of how society should be organized. That seems to me to have real power.
How we treat other people and are treated by them is very powerful indeed. Our treatments can either build up or wound each other. How can we affirm each other's dignity as it pertains to work? Doing so may vary on your role in the work relationship. If you are an employer, affirming dignity could involve respecting your employee's work-life balance or acknowledging their contributions to the business. Conversely, contributing your best efforts to build the business as an employee affirms your employer.
No matter who you are–whether employer, employee, client, or patron–treating each other with respect in the work environment is a baseline for affirming each other's dignity. This requirement may seem like a no-brainer, but having two sons with service industry jobs has enlightened me as to the unkind and disrespectful behavior that workers in those positions can encounter.
Economic mutuality, then, involves not only mutuality of a financial nature but also that of a relational one. A posture and mindset of better capitalism will seek to create and sustain better relationships. In this way, the dignity of work can be shared and sustained by all.
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