VI. Conclusion
What, therefore, are Dorothy Day's lessons for the transformation of work? Her life, her work, and her writing certainly are important parts of labor history. Does her life with workers and with the poor, her many essays on workers' rights and on the dignity of work, stand only as eloquent, but ultimately irrelevant, witness to twentieth century labor history? On the contrary, study of, and reflection on, Dorothy Day's life and work is very valuable from the standpoint for the study of labor history alone. History, especially labor history, can teach many lessons with contemporary relevance. I submit that Dorothy Day's lessons for the future of work both encapsulate and transcend history. The challenge is to translate her personalism and subsidiarity into new forms of political and social organization, focusing on human relationships for the communal good.
Although the domestic and international economies of the Depression, mid-century, and this century's end are each quite different and distinct from one another, dramatic parallels do exist between them. Economic volatility is as unsettling as ever. Work collapsed during the Great Depression. Work in the late twentieth century, as a defining thread of the social contract, is unravelling. Many domestic and international economies no longer rely on manufacturing or industrial models to provide the sources of wage jobs and growth in the private sector. The workplace has increasingly stratified itself into a camp of highly skilled, knowledgeable workers who are served by the other, a large population of precariously situated and low paid service workers. 558 All are surrounded by vast seas of the underemployed and unemployable. The unemployed and the unemployable possess no viable concept of, nor realistic aspiration to acquire, a dignity providing, meaningful work experience. It is very difficult to speak realistically, or even sanely, of the nobility of work in such dire circumstances.
The effectuation of the National Labor Relations Act, 559 was accomplished in response to express findings that the individual worker, without protection of the right to unionize, was helpless and atomized in the face of the formidable power of major corporate employers. 560 The current situation is no different and, in many quarters, is even more egregiously stratified than in 1935. Today, individual workers are also atomized in the face of the concentrated power of multinational corporations who, unlike their early capitalist predecessors, have the ability to execute instantaneous transfers of massive amounts of wealth into the international bond and finance markets through computer technology.
When Dorothy Day was born in 1897, the concept and reality of a job with an eight hour day and a forty hour work week was only an idealized union dream (and an employer's nightmare). Now, upon the centennial of her birth, the concept of the eight hour day, forty hour work week job, briefly achieved through the efforts of organized labor in mid-century, is rapidly fading away. Most workers are working harder and longer for less money, with disturbing stagnation in wages for the past two decades, and more ominously, with dramatic stratifications of wealth on levels not seen since the days of the robber barons. 561 Currently, the top one percent of the United States population controls forty percent of the national wealth. 562
Today, in the face of transnational corporate employer power how can an atomized and relatively helpless worker seek meaningful dignity and community in work? Technology may be both opening and closing doors, but it is probably not the primary means to new work communities.
Peter Maurin's high romance of the beauty of agriculture, of the imperative of physical labor, and of the return to the land, 563 remains utopian. This is not to say that physical work in agricultural environments is not worth consideration. 564 Such an approach is simply not capable of mass realization in urban regions, or, in any other areas dominated by agribusiness. "A return to the land, a living out of Peter Maurin's vision of decentralism, a re-creation of the medieval village with its self-sustained economy based on craft—these are regularly unrealized dreams of many Catholic Workers." 565 Agricultural employment, the dominant source of output and work in the pre-industrial age, represents less than three percent of all jobs in the 1990s. 566
*146 The increasing disappearance of the workplace, with increasing numbers of persons working in highly decentralized environments, without central offices, and who telecommute from their homes, seem to make the physical reality of organizing community networks literally impossible. Does the community of the computer offer "frictionless capitalism" or are we in the Darwinian, pioneering environment of the new "Wild West?" In either environment, achieving worker dignity in the new electronic, computerized workplace remains a largely unfulfilled aspiration.
Dorothy Day was an internationalist, like her universal Catholic Church. She was not just another Luddite. 567 She clearly warned against the dehumanizing aspects of technology, which, in her day, was exemplified by the assembly line and the typewriter. As a journalist and a writer, she put the technology of the typewriter and the printing press to very good and valuable use. What, therefore, would Dorothy Day say regarding high technology and computerization in the workplace today? Her healthy apprehensions would no doubt be part of the fabric. She would also see, however, some means within computerized work environments for the realization of dignity and human fulfillment.
As an internationalist seeking to manipulate technology to the benefit of workers, she sought protections for the rights of all workers in the domestic and international regimes. The world of work, throughout this century is clearly and increasingly global in its dimensions and ramifications.
There is bitter truth to many of Dorothy Day's lessons, such as her understandable wariness of employer domination of unions, a specter currently resurrected with the initiatives for the statutory modifications of section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act. 568 She would no doubt see the need for the continuing independent voice of workers in protecting workers' rights. The world of workers is part of the larger world of all persons, including employers, each entitled to maximum human dignity. Therefore, Dorothy Day would also see the need for the maximization of human dignity as inextricably interwoven with the need for community coherence and fruition beyond work and the workplace.
Dorothy Day, however, did not offer formulaic prescriptions for the achievement of strategic objectives. She was a journalist who had identified her life and her living with the workers and with the poor and not with the ruling elites. She was an eloquent voice, a visionary, and perhaps a saint. Saints are those who lived in the world, but were not fully of the world. Therefore, one must not be surprised by those aspects of Dorothy's thinking that were based primarily on exhortation, as they were grounded on ideal aspirations and visions for a world not yet realized; a world that ought to be. Saints and labor organizers have much in common; they see the world as it is and urge the continuance of the struggle to create the world as it one day ought to be. These aspects of her life certainly merit admiration and emulation. Her labor theory, however, is much more problematic, and must be adjusted to contemporary circumstances. 569
If workers are not to decline into an irredeemable state of helplessness and shattered individualism or to prostrate before transnational corporate employer power, perhaps, through the revitalization of Dorothy Day's lessons, the workplace can once again be made the focus of possibilities for achieving lives of dignity and worth for all and a place to promote the consciousness of the unemployed and the underemployed. Meaningful work of dignity in the late twentieth century is as difficult to obtain as it was a century ago. Work is a delicate and precious thing; an important means to the attainment of the maximization of fundamental human dignity. If traditional, industrial work is no longer the unifying thread of the social contract, some third way of work, such as nonprofit community service, still incorporating fundamental notions of work and transcending the capitalist political economy of individual profit maximization, may become the central focus of meaningful social life, and informed by the enduring lessons of Dorothy Day.
Dorothy Day stood up for workers who stood up to their bosses. 570 She thus focused primarily on the labor-management relationships, and probably less so on the nature of work itself. The courage and activism of organized workers, standing against corporate employers, was perhaps perceived by Dorothy Day as a means of empowerment, and as more politically ennobling than the work itself. Now, in the "post-work" world, workers and the vast masses of former workers and the unemployables must stand together politically to find means of social reconstruction for meaningful lives for all, including those precluded from the realms of conventional employment. 571
Jeremy Rifkin, in his powerful new book, The End of Work, 572 addresses the problems that face labor today 573 and sets forth an agenda for dramatically expanding the non-profit community work sector, 574 which already accounts for six percent of the domestic economy. This future non-profit community work draws implicitly but thoroughly upon the personalism, subsidiarity, and labor solidarity themes of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. 575 It is a compelling agenda that Dorothy Day would have endorsed, and it merits serious attention.
The stability of industrial employment in the post-war era is disintegrating. Manufacturing accounted for 33% of the United States workforce in the 1950s. 576 "Today, less than 17% of the workforce is engaged in blue collar work." 577 By the year 2000, manufacturing jobs are projected to offer only 12 percent of United States employment. 578 In whatever forms the future of work will manifest itself, certain ineluctable truths will remain. But hard truths are being challenged, paradigms are shattered, and fundamental questions that have historically incorporated meaningful work into the dignity of the identity of the person, are being radically reformulated. 579
Work is a "fundamental dimension of human existence." 580 How work remains may be influenced in some measure by Dorothy Day's lessons for the transformation of work. If her lessons are lost or dismissed as completely irrelevant, and if workers fail to find new ways of social organization, the future may be grim indeed.
NOTES
558. See Barbara Crossette, U.N. Survey Finds World Rich-Poor Gap Widen, N.Y. Times, July 15, 1996, at A3; Andrew Hacker, Who They Are, N.Y. Times, Nov. 19, 1995, (Magazine) at 71; Lester Thurow, Why Their World Might Crumble, N.Y. Times, Nov. 19, 1995, (Magazine) at 78.
559. 29 U.S.C. ss 151-169 (1994).
560. See id. s 151.
561. The Robber Barons were corporate buccaneers during the second half of the nineteenth century who were noted for their audacity, lucre, and slaughter within big business. See Allen D. Boyer, Activist Shareholders, Corporate Directors, and Institutional Investment: Some Lessons From the Robber Barons, 50 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 977, 978 (1993).
562. Keith Bradsher, Gap in Wealth in U.S. Called Widest in West, N.Y. Times, Apr. 17, 1995, at D4.
563. See Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness 219-26 (1959).
564. The New York Catholic Workers continue Peter Maurin's commitments, via the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlboro, New York. See Voices from the Catholic Worker 573 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993).
565. Id. at 249.
566. See Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future 102 (1995).
567. There are, however, powerful and resonating Luddite themes in many aspects of Catholic Worker philosophy. "Katharine Temple of the Catholic Worker movement has said it, calling on her comrades to 'find even more ways to be latter-day Luddites."' Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddities and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age 258 (1995); see also Dirk Johnson, A Celebration of the Urge to Unplug, N.Y. Times, Apr. 15, 1996, at A12 (reporting on meeting of Luddite Congress, 350 contemporary Luddites in Ohio, April, 1996). But even the Catholic Worker has two web sites on the Internet. See Anne G. Fullerton, Catholic Workers Online, Nat'l Cath. Rep., Mar. 1996, at 29.
568. 29 U.S.C. s 158(a)(2) (1994).
569. I especially appreciate Dennis R. Nolan's critical comments accentuating the "two Days"--the American Mother Theresa worthy of admiration, and the failed policy advocate and social philosopher. I personally do not so view these latter aspects of Dorothy Day's thinking and practice.
570. See William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker Movement 134-35 (1973) (discussing when Dorothy climbed through the window to be with the United Automobile Workers who were striking).
571. I thank Michael Zimmer for these insights. Many authors cited throughout this article, and certainly including Dorothy Day, have focused upon the psychological importance of meaningful work-and the devastating consequences likely in its absence. See generally Thomas Earl Geu & Martha S. Davis, Work: A Legal Analysis in the Context of the Changing Transnational Political Economy, 63 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1679 (1995).
572. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (1996).
573. Rifkin specifically identifies the following:
Now that the commodity value of human labor is becoming increasingly tangential and irrelevant in an ever more automated world, new ways of defining human worth and social relationships will need to be explored........
Our corporate leaders and mainstream economists tell us that the rising unemployment figures represent short-term "adjustments" to powerful market- driven forces that are speeding the global economy into a Third Industrial Revolution. They hold out the promise of an exciting new world of high-tech automated production, booming global commerce, and unprecedented material abundance.
Millions of working people remain skeptical. Every week more employees learn they are being let go. In offices and factories around the world, people wait, in fear, hoping to be spared one more day. Like a deadly epidemic inexorably working its way through the marketplace, the strange, seemingly inexplicable new economic disease spreads, destroying lives and destabilizing whole communities in its wake. In the United States, corporations are eliminating more than 2 million jobs annually....
Id. at xviii, 3.
574. He suggests that:
[T]hose with leisure hours and those with idle time--could be effectively directed toward rebuilding thousands of local communities and creating a third force that flourishes independent of the marketplace and the public sector.....
The foundation for a strong, community-based third force in American politics already exists. Although much attention in the modern era has been narrowly focused on the private and public sectors, there is a third sector in American life that has been of historical significance in the making of the nation, and that now offers the distinct possibility of helping to reshape the social contract in the twenty-first century. The third sector, also known as the independent or volunteer sector, is the realm in which fiduciary arrangements give way to community bonds, and where the giving of one's time to others takes the place of artificially imposed market relationships based on selling oneself and one's services to others....
....
Community service is a revolutionary alternative to traditional forms of labor. Unlike slavery, serfdom, and wage labor, it is neither coerced nor reduced to a fiduciary relationship. Community service is a helping action, a reaching out to others. It is an act entered into willingly and often without expectation of material gain....
....
Preparing for the decline of mass formal work in the market economy will require a fundamental restructuring of the nature of human participation in society. By providing shadow wages for millions of working American who are devoting more of their time to volunteer activity in the social economy, as well as providing a social wage to millions of the nation's unemployed and poor who are willing to work in the third sector, we can begin to lay the groundwork for a long-term transition out of formal work in the market economy and into service work in the social economy.... Forging new working alliances between government bodies and the third sector will help build self-sufficient and sustainable communities across the country.
....
Third-sector service and advocacy groups are lightning rods for rechanneling the growing frustration of large numbers of unemployed people. Their efforts to both kindle the spirit of democratic participation and forge a renewed sense of community will, to a large extent, determine the success of the independent sector as a transformative agent for the post-market era....
....
We are entering a new age of global markets and automated production. The road to a near-workerless economy is within sight. Whether that road leads to a safe haven or a terrible abyss will depend on how well civilization prepares for the post-market era that will follow on the heels of the Third Industrial Revolution. The end of work could spell a death sentence for civilization as we have come to know it. The end of work could also signal the beginning of a great social transformation, a rebirth of the human spirit. The future lies in our hands.
Id. at 239, 242, 273-74, 287, 292-93.
575. See generally id.
576. See id. at 8.
577. Id.
578. See id.
579. By, for example, Professors Aronowitz and DiFazio:
[T]he "meaning" (in the survival, psychological, and cultural senses) of the work--occupations and professions--as forms of life is in crisis. If the tendencies of the economy and the culture point to the conclusion that work is no longer significant in the formation of the self, one of the crucial questions of our time is what, if anything, can replace it. When layers of qualified--to say nothing of mass--labor are made redundant, obsolete, irrelevant, what, after five centuries during which work remained a, perhaps the, Western cultural ideal, can we mean by the "self"? Have we reached a large historical watershed, a climacteric that will be as devastating as natural climacterics of the past that destroyed whole species?....
To raise the question of the partial eclipse and decentering of paid work is to ask crucial questions concerning the purpose of education, the character of economic and social distribution, and, perhaps more profoundly, what it means to be human.
Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work 16, 33 (1994).
580. David L. Gregory, Catholic Labor Theory and the Transformation of Work, 45 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 119, 130 (1988).