Labor and the Human Person

Labor is not without reason and purpose. It is what St. Thomas Aquinas calls a human act. It requires conscious deliberation and is therefore a moral action. We do not labor unthinkingly, but with the intention of achieving a clear purpose: The laborer plans and makes predictions, designs and builds, troubleshoots and solves problems; in short, labor requires intelligence. This purpose, of course, is necessity. We must eat and sleep, we must stay reasonably warm and dry, we must guard against injury and disease, etc. Labor is first and foremost what man does to achieve these ends, which are the necessary prerequisites for life. In short, man labors because he has a body.

Because labor requires intelligence and is primarily for the sake of his material body, it is a peculiarly human activity; That is, he who labors is human. Furthermore, because the level of intelligence and particular intellectual gifts vary from person to person, a great deal of one's personality is manifested in his labor. Not only does each particular person approach his tasks according to his particular gifts and temperament, but the intrinsic personality of labor can be observed even in the mastery of particular crafts and disciplines: The greater the perfection of a given work, the greater its style and uniqueness. Labor is therefore not only peculiarly human, but peculiarly personal.

Unfortunately, modern labor is not only marked by a detachment from creation, but a detachment from humanity and from the human person. The modern norm has each person primarily pursue not a specific task or trade for the sake of a specific necessity, but a career (whatever it may be) for the sake of currency (the exchange commodity). This shift in labor's purpose has been adequately expounded elsewhere, but at present it is enough to note the divorce between labor and its purpose. Whether one is a pipe-fitter, a carpenter, an insurance adjuster, or a corporate accountant, the primary purpose of his labor is to make money; for without money, his material needs cannot be met. This detachment of course is only partial, as there is still a relation, albeit obscure, between his labor and his material needs. Beyond the mere fulfillment of these needs, however, there is a further obscurity of modern labor: As money is the reward of labor, so is money the means by which persons procure their material needs from others. As labor is vitally important for man's life and involves not only his relation to the world but to other persons, so has money not only become the bridge between labor and material needs, but between persons as well. The farmer need not know the persons for whom he grows his corn, and the person who buys his corn is incidental to the amount for which he buys it.

In addition to obscuring these relationships, the immediate purpose of money is quantification. Money is only useful insofar as it is countable. Whatever is exchanged for money likewise becomes quantifiable. No longer does a man expect the just reward of his labor to be precisely what he has wrought. Rather, he is compensated, while he is immediately divorced from the product of his work. Monetized labor is only useful insofar as it is countable. And so, as the laborer has been detached from his work, which is rendered replaceable, the laborer is rendered replaceable. Labor is no longer imbued with personality because labor is no longer personal.

What is, therefore, a quintessentially human activity has become absurd, because it has become inhuman.