Video from LSE School of Public Policy
"We need a new focus on the dignity of work"
"Harvard professor Michael Sandel talks to the LSE about his new book "The Tyranny of Merit". from the video introduction.
What we do in our work is closely related to who we are. As Christians, you and I are responsible to give our all to the Lord. Your vocation then, is your day-by-day opportunity to glorify God by serving others. In doing so we serve as a faithful representative of the God who glorifies himself by serving and saving others.
Hard work is expected of us all as we are able and we must toil our entire life until we are with our Lord. But when we as a culture/society take advantage of others and overwork them and not compensate them fairly we are sinning.
The problem is our culture has lost sight of the dignity of work (the dignity of each individual, which is grounded in the image of God), we create a false and unfair “prosperity” that leaves many people without dignity?
We erroneously think that only with a college degree can people succeed. The reality is college degrees are much less valuable then they were even ten years ago.
"What we’ve done is to build a society oriented entirely toward the needs and preferences of highly educated people. We’ve created the conditions for a labor market in which those people do really well. If you go back to that list of policy areas I mention in this book for altering labor market conditions to create more of the jobs we need, they were mostly areas where the people who are thriving would have to make concessions for the sake of others." Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker (link)
As Christian workers and employers we must treat all people with dignity and care for each other through fair wages and health care. We must go above and beyond in helping especially those with families. Our Lord is calling us to care for the least of these.