This document summarizes key points from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church regarding human work. It discusses how work represents a fundamental part of human existence and a means of sanctification. However, the Industrial Revolution led to the alienation of workers who became viewed as mere cogs in the machinery of production. While the Church has long upheld the dignity of work and rights of workers, new forms of alienation have emerged in a globalized world from unstable, uncertain work and exploitation. The Church calls for reasserting human dignity and building new forms of solidarity among workers worldwide.

1. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church Chapter 6: Human Work Archdiocese of Atlanta Diaconate Social Justice Formation 2010

3. Work As Vocation

5. “ New Things” Arise: A Spirit of Revolutionary Change For centuries the Church’s message was addressed to agricultural societies . . . . Now the Gospel had to be preached and lived . . . in the tumult of social events . . . taking into account . . . the exploitation of workers brought about by the new industrial organization. (§267)

7. A Challenge to the Church “ It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty -- but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to a barbarous type of labour, and it turns the other workers into machines. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.” ( Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts , 1844) "Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests." ( Communist Manifesto , 1848) “ What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” ( Communist Manifesto , 1848)

14. New “New Things” of World of Work The phenomenon of globalization is one of the most important causes of the current change in the organization of work. This phenomenon brings about new forms of production where plants are located away from where strategies are decided and far from the markets where the goods are consumed. . . . This entails a fundamental consequence for processes of production, as property is ever further removed and often indifferent to the social effects of the decisions made. (§310)

15. A Globe Divided Hyderabad, India. Construction workers live in tents and huts on site of new office complex where employees of Western companies work. - DaveWilson Photography

20. Globalization: Challenge and Opportunity Technology may be the instrumental cause of globalization, but the universality of the human family is its ultimate cause. The negative aspects of the globalization of work must not damage the possibility opening up for all people: that of giving expression to a humanism of work on a planetary scale, to solidarity in the world of work on this same level, so that working in similar contexts, spread throughout the world and interconnected , people will understand ever better their one, shared vocation . (§322)

21. One Shared Vocation?

22. Inspired by and based in part on Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum The work of Dr. Robert DeFina Economics Department Villanova University http://www62.homepage.villanova.edu/jonathan.doh/Centesimus%20Annus.ppt