Joseph the Worker and Church indifference to selling our labour

Today, 19 March, the Church (well, parts of it) celebrates St Joseph the Worker. His Feast Day is important to me, for two reasons. The first is that the Church is largely uninterested in the commonplace necessity of selling our labour (physical and/or intellectual). The second is that as an ordained Christian I have attempted to follow the model of the worker-priest.
 
March the 19th has been dedicated to Joseph from at least the 10th century. But it was in 1955 that his feast day was modified to St Joseph the Worker. Reportedly, a change instituted by Pope Pius XII in response to the May Day celebrations sponsored by the Communists in celebration of the ordinary workers of the world.
 
I have an interest in the questions raised by Christian faith and paid work, and lament the fact that much of the church does not. In theology, in religious and ‘spiritual’ writing, in sermons, serious treatment of the ordinary business of earning a living is surprisingly rare. True, professional theologians have at times written about Christian faith and paid work, but much of it is frankly disconnected from reality. A good deal of the so-called ‘theologies of’ or ‘the spirituality of’ work is sentimental, implicitly patronizing, for the large part written by those unacquainted with the demands, stresses, compromises and challenges of selling their labour in industrial, commercial, private and public settings.
 
I remember one writer on the spirituality of work advising that ‘employees are to work as though God were their boss’ (many of us have worked for bosses who seem to think they are God); and another offered reassurance that ‘exploitation of workers by employers does not escape God's notice’. No doubt an effective break on all workplace exploitation. Let the Trades Unions pack up and go home.
 
Part of the hapless befuddledness of where we are arises because many of those who write or speak about Christian faith and paid work not qualified to do so. And the Christians that are qualified by their experience of being Christian people at work too often lack the voice, the encouragement or the confidence to do so.
 
This may not be that surprising when you consider how estranged professional Christians (mainly clergy) and theologians are from ordinary working cultures. (OK, they will dislike that, citing comparable stress, targets and the loss of some aspects of untouchable job security). But (largely) estranged they are. The Church and academia are bubbles: very creative in many ways, but (largely) estranged from ordinary working life.
 
In the Olden Days (and still around in varying degrees in mainline historic churches) this estrangement was seen as a good and necessary thing: leaving the world for the cloister and study, being paid a stipend rather than a wage. Not seen as estrangement but as a vital separation. In my view it has caused much trouble. The mission and life of the Church has suffered in consequence.
 
Marx may be out of fashion (he always has been with church authorities) but much of his analysis of the harm and injustices of the world of work (premised as so much of it is on maximising financial profit, privately owned) rings true, not least with some of the insights of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
 
For the bulk of humanity, paid work is the great shaper of its experience and whether it is a grim cycle of low paid work which never quite allows escape from debt, or some broadly tolerable activity providing some degree of creativity and routine, or one which provides lavish rewards by way of status and pay and pension pots, it is for everyone at some time or other a form of bondage. As Rousseau observed, ‘Man is born free but is everywhere in chains’.  And many of those shackles are economic, closely related to our work.
 
Let me repeat: the church, the saints and theologians, the writers of religious books, the priests and bishops, the faithful members of the church – we have all failed to adequately address the position of the human person in the context of paid work, a position that gets more compromised and clouded as businesses get bigger and markets get ever more competitive, as persons become more expendable and as pay gaps seem endlessly to widen.
 
When did you last hear a sermon intelligently address the experience of selling our labour?
When did you last hear intercessions address this without sentimental overlay?
When did your priest last ask if s/he could shadow you in your work one morning rather than ask you to take on more in church?
 
Hugh Valentine