The Stolen Fruit of the Laborer

This one is going to get touchy, but I want to start from a blank slate. Let's forget all the jargon and empty ourselves of any emotional, gut-reactions. Let's try to engage with our world as it is.

I think Christ's call to give up our excess wealth can and should be applied to our wider economic system as well as to us as individuals and as families. It just follows logically--if the individual is called to take of God's material gifts only what he needs and to pass on the rest to those less fortunate, than the same is also asked of those individuals who "own" businesses and employ wage workers.

The only problem is that the wealth they possess does not belong to them, but is taken from those they employ.

In most cases, this is not done maliciously. Most business owners genuinely care for the people they employ, and want to give them the best they can under the material conditions they find themselves in.

But the fact still stands that it is only through the work of human beings that any value is created. All of the machinery of production--desktop computers, office cubicles, semi-trucks, company cars, pages stamped with company letterhead, lawn mowers, manufacturing machinery, and anything else needed in any workplace one could think of--are completely useless without a human being working them or guiding the process. Even in some distant imagined future where everything is automated and the human element is completely taken out of the equation, the "robots" or computer programs would still be the inventions of mankind to simulate the labor-power of mankind.

There is no value, and hence no profits, without labor--work.

Additionally, and contrary to how they act, businesses do not possess inherent rights. They are invented entities that are nothing more than a group of people striving towards the same goals. They do not have wills, and they should not make unreasonable demands on human beings who do have rights and wills endowed them by the Creator. The profit-drive of all businesses should never trespass upon the lives and well-beings of even the lowest-member of the business collective, but it does and it must. The business trespasses upon the lives of those it employs via its very foundations as a privately-owned company. This is because the owner reaps the majority--if not all--of the profits created collectively by his employees. It is the owners and the owners alone, however they are organized, that decide where any money made after expenses have been paid goes, often choosing to line their own pockets and to reward their  most loyal employees by way of bonuses and raises. The modern "business" is really nothing more than a  hierarchy wherein a small number of individuals own and dictate orders to a larger group of subordinate individuals who work. This smaller group then reaps the entirety of the fruits of the larger subordinate's group's labor, so long as they pay the individuals making up the smaller group a wage that is only a pittance of the amount of value created by their labor.

It could be a substantial pittance to the worker. He could be able to afford a nice house or two, depending on how pleasing he is to his employer, but it will always be a pittance relative to the value he creates for his employer. A person would never be hired if they weren't expected to pay back their own wage in what they provide via labor to the company. What's more, they are expected to pay back more than their wage since the company aims to make a profit from their labor. This is the core of the capitalist system--denying the worker the full value of his work.

Businesses are nothing but the collectivization of individuals creating value, and as such, we, as moral people, should advocate that when that created value is ratified in the market place via the sale of a product or service created by the business of which the individual is a part, each individual receives his fair share proportionate to the value he created by his work.

In essence, this is a socialistic system, but we Christians should call for work-place democracy and profit-sharing not from some ideological bent, envy, or a desire for class-war. Rather, we should ask for the dissolution of the business-owning class because we recognize the right of every human being to determine how they make their living and posses the fruits of their own personal labor. Someone who does no work, but simply holds the deed to a business should not be the sole beneficiary of all that that business produces.

Ideally that means a return to something akin to an artisan--a class of laborer who possesses the tools to apply a honed and marketable skill in his or her own possession, and thus is capable of making a living and supporting himself and his family without recourse to any employer. However, that does not account for vast, organized collections of laborers--something that the modern world seems to depend on to run. That said, workplace democracy and profit-sharing among all employees is our best bet for ensuring that the fruit of the laborers remains with the laborers.

This an argument based on justice, not entitlement.  All things are gifts of the Creator, and should be treated as such. No one deserves anything they receive in life--good or bad. This post is not an argument lamenting wealth disparity, but showing the injustice central to how the wealth of the business-owning class is created.

Justice demands that we, as Christians and as moral people, rightly disparage an economic system that is so blatantly wrong and that deprives the majority of our brothers and sisters of their dignity and of the fruits of their labor.