Why should Christians care about industrial action?
In this next instalment of our series on Christian ethics, Fr Jonathan Jong reflects on the on-going industrial actions taken by the University and College Union.
As I am writing this, universities across the United Kingdom are participating in industrial action—including strikes—over a variety of disputes: pension contributions are being cut, pay over the last decade has decreased by about 17% relative to inflation, women and people of colour are paid less than White males (by 9-15%), workloads are increasing, staff are being evaluated in reductive ways, and work contracts are becoming more “casual”, which makes employment more precarious, especially for junior staff, women, and people of colour. Besides being a priest, I also happen to be employed by a university, and this raises a question for me: should Christians support and participate in industrial actions of this kind?
Perhaps a better place to begin is to think about work more generally, and see if a theology of industrial action emerges from a theology of work. Unfortunately, this is where our troubles begin. The Scriptures are ambivalent about work. On one hand, early in the book of Genesis, God commissions the first man and woman to “be fertile and increase; fill the earth and master it”: but by the very next chapter, this work becomes cursed, “by toil you shall eat”. This ambivalence is seen even in God’s own doings: creation is described as work, which is good, but God also rests from labour, which is also good. Throughout the Old Testament, work is sometimes commanded by God, as with Noah’s building of the ark and Solomon’s building of the temple, or condemned, as with the construction of the Tower of Babel and of altars to Baal. Besides this focus on the intentions behind work—obedience or arrogance; true worship or idolatry—the Bible also very quickly observes that work can be the locus of injustice: the people of Israel are enslaved in Egypt, and God liberates them from their forced labour. The New Testament is somewhat more positive about work, and not only in spiritualised form: Jesus’s parables often feature work, and St Paul is famously proud of having a day job as a tent-maker. But even here, there are obviously things that take priority over work: the sons of Zebedee are called away from their fishing nets, and Matthew from his tax booth. Indeed, the New Testament more frequently calls people from work than to it.
True to this biblical ambivalence, theologians have vacillated between positive and negative evaluations of work. On the negative extreme, work is a practical necessity in an imperfect world: we work, or we go hungry. On the positive extreme, work—including secular work—is the means through which human beings participate in God’s creative work, so that we are co-creators [1]. This disagreement is not so easily resolved simply by pointing out that some jobs are tedious while others are fulfilling. No one disputes that there are dehumanising jobs; nor does anyone dispute that there are indeed jobs through which God’s work is accomplished. The disagreement is deeper: it is about the nature of work itself, its relation to human nature, abstracted from any particular manifestation.
A classic move in an impasse like this, always in the theologian’s back pocket, is to say that true work is good but that the things that pass off as “work” in our fallen world is bad. Here Christian theology finds a strange bedfellow in Karl Marx. For Marx, true unalienated work is free, in the sense that it is neither compelled by physical needs nor by coercive powers. The Christian would agree, adding that true work draws us closer to knowledge and love of God and neighbour. The problem therefore is not work as such, but the perversions of work that we see around us and experience in our own lives. A lot of “work” is tedious and isolating, back-breaking and morally-compromising, and Christians should reject these idols of true work. It might seem uncontroversial to say that dangerous work is bad, but this view is diametrically opposed to the dominant neoliberal framework in which it is good for people to be free to choose the work they do, even if it is tedious, isolating, back-breaking, and immoral.
Although my own intuition is toward thinking that work is essentially bad, and not just accidentally so, I do not think that this is really a tenable Christian position, for the basic reason that Christians ought generally to shy from believing that anything is irredeemable. The commitment to work’s inherent badness entails only one possible course of action: to retreat from it, by carving out some time and space for nonwork. In effect, this is the status quo in most modern liberal democracies, which might be another cause for Christian suspicion. Most of us work most of the time, with periodic breaks, such as on weekends or bank holidays or on annual leave; then, after several decades, we retire from paid employment. This option is also open to those who think that work is only accidentally bad, but they have another possible course of action. That is, to seek to transform work, to liberate it and ourselves and others from sources of coercion, whether they may be the ownership of the means of production by capital or other specific conditions of work, such as tedium, danger, and so forth. The first option is passive and privatised: the individual seeks not to change work itself, but to find refuge from it for him or herself. The second option is active, and is typically a collective effort.
Dorothy Day with farm workers during the United Farm Workers rally, 1973. Photography by Bob Fitch.
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The Christian case for passivity is fairly straightforward. After all, ours is the religion of turning the other cheek: Nietzsche was not wrong to call ours a slave-morality, even if he was wrong to denigrate this view. The notion of fighting for our own rights and privileges, including our own working conditions, is foreign to our morality. But there are bad reasons for passivity, as well as good.
The most popular bad reason is the idea that Christians should always be subservient to earthly powers. Christians get this idea from various places, chiefly Jesus’s (oft-misunderstood [2]) exhortation that we “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar” and St Paul’s claim in Romans 13 that earthly powers are ordained by God. Implicit in this idea is one way of thinking about the relationship between divine authority and human authority, in which God is King and Caesar is God’s representative on earth. This was a venerable view throughout Christendom, culminating in the belief in the divine right of kings. Contrary to this view is the notion that God is King, and therefore Caesar is not. This is not to put God and Caesar at the same level, such that one can replace the other, but to say that God’s sovereignty is already manifest through human representation: the human being in whom God’s authority rests in its fullness is neither Caesar nor any other earthly power, but Jesus Christ. Indeed, we have just celebrated this past Sunday the Feast of Christ the King, which makes this affirmation. Among other things, this affirmation of Christ’s kingship provides us with a standard by which to judge earthly powers: if authority is not Christ-like—that is, self-sacrificial and loving—it is not authority at all.
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There are bad reasons for passivity, but Christians cannot dismiss the idea quickly mentioned earlier that fighting for our own rights and privileges is at least foreign to Christian morality, if not simply opposed to it. This is especially relevant in the particular context of industrial action at universities. It is difficult to conjure up Christian sympathy for middle-class professionals who make about £50,000 per year—£20,000 more than the UK average—deciding not to teach in the name of improving our financial situation. Even if it's true that our wages have stagnated, and our jobs have become less secure, it is not as though we are especially underprivileged: wages across industries have stagnated, and about half of all employment is now part-time, temporary, or otherwise precarious. It is much easier to see Christian justification for industrial action on behalf of others less fortunate than ourselves.
Indeed, it is difficult to see Christian justification for passivity in the face of injustice against others less fortunate and more vulnerable than ourselves. Within any industry—including tertiary education—there will be people with more power and privilege, and people with less power and privilege. And it is incumbent for those with more to stand up for the welfare of those with less. Alongside the commitment to the redemptive possibility of all things, the commitment to defence of the vulnerable is a fundamental element of Christian morality. Our obligation is toward the weak against the injustices wrought against them by the powerful. In other words, germane to our current circumstances, the obligation of those of us whose jobs are relatively secure is toward those whose jobs are relatively precarious. Yet another fundamental element of Christian morality is a commitment to human dignity, which generates the obligation to fight against dehumanising powers that devalue people and their work. To the extent that the treatment of people as resources for the accumulation of capital is a form of exploitative dehumanisation, our obligation is clear.
So far, I have implied that the unjust powers are others, but of course, we—who are relatively powerful and privileged—are often complicit in the injustice of power structures from which we derive some benefit. At least in part, my job security comes at the price of someone else’s precarity. If so, then the obligation to transform whatever industries is simply an extension of the call to repentance.
What all this means is that industrial action is both permitted and even obligatory to the extent that people weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves are being unjustly treated, exploited, and/or otherwise dehumanised. Based on these guidelines, it will be difficult to justify industrial action on behalf of ourselves to enrich and empower ourselves relative to others; and, at the same time, it will be difficult to justify non participation in industrial action on behalf of others in the face of unjust treatment.
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There is a further worry that Christians and others have about taking industrial action, that is to do with the duties of care they have toward those who will be affected by such action. This is no small thing. At the university, we have to consider how our students are affected. In other sectors, the relevant people might be patients or commuters or just members of the public at large.
This description of things—industrial action in one sector of the economy adversely affects those in other sectors—identifies a crucial problem related to thinking about industrial action as action on our own behalf. Insularity breeds this sense of competing interests between different groups of vulnerable workers. It is therefore important for those who want to take industrial action within their own sectors to also support others who do the same in other sectors. If we are willing to inconvenience our students, we have to be willing to be inconvenienced by rail workers or nurses or whomever, when they take industrial action. More: we have to actively support their willingness to transform work too. Or, as Marx and Engels might say, the workers of the world should unite. It would be a sign of our self-serving motives if we are willing to go on strike for ourselves and those like us, but not for teachers and nurses, farmers and factory workers. The fact that inter-industry strikes are rare is, I’m afraid to say, a bad sign.
In any case, we—especially those of us whose jobs can reasonably described vocational—might think that our obligations to those directly under our care might trump our obligations to our co-workers. This is fair enough, and calls for some creativity about the form in which our industrial actions take. Academics might continue to teach students, but elect not to do paperwork or attend meetings or participate in peer-to-peer evaluation, for example. This might put us at variance with our trade unions, but our allegiance is no more primarily to them than to the owners of the means of production.
1. The term “co-creation” does not necessarily imply that God’s work and human work are put on equal footing, such that their accomplishments are additive. Admittedly, however, it is difficult not to read this sentiment into the term, as in the term “co-author”, which implies that different individuals contribute to different bits of the written product.
2. The common misunderstanding comes from the failure to see a joke built on the premise that everything belongs to God.
