The Work of the Future: Dignity and Encounter

Fernando Ocariz

On May 1st we celebrated the International Workers’ Day. The human activity of work involves the person in all his or her dimensions: intelligence, will, affections, and aspirations. “It is Man’s first vocation: to work. And this gives him dignity” (Pope Francis, 1-V-2020). On that day which coincided with the International Workers’ Day, many of us remembered Saint Joseph the Worker.

The pandemic continues to lash out at the work of millions of men and women: lost jobs, and increased instability of all kinds. These two wounds, lack of work and instability, make us ask questions about the future of work. In very many places, the health crisis has replaced face-to-face work with screens in our homes, with positive and negative consequences. In on-line work we become aware of the glory of technology as well as its limits. If, on the one hand, there is an advance in efficiency and seemingly insurmountable obstacles are removed; on the other hand, we confirm that the human person needs real relationships, not virtual ones, in order for each person to share what they have in their heart.

The time that has passed since the beginning of the pandemic also confirms that the crises is transversal, as it affects the whole of humanity, and that work must be in the nucleus of a better future. Conserving and creating jobs, with the creativity of one who seeks the good of the others, is perhaps today one of the imperatives of charity. In the face of very many disrupted personal situations, work offers us the opportunity to progress in another of its dimensions: the capacity of welcoming and being open to others. In the intersection between rupture and welcome arises the nostalgia for transcendence, to go beyond oneself, to care for and to be cared for, to help and to be helped, the first consequences of recognizing vulnerability. A job in which there is room for dignity and encounter, is converted into a dialogue with oneself and with the others. It presents a shared finality, awakens currents of understanding, collaborates in pronouncing “we”, helping to overcome differences and promoting mutual recognition; it enriches through the interchange of human capacities and through the participation in creative processes.

Work thus manifests itself in its true extension, as a “place” where we can all contribute something, and not only in the economic aspect. The common vocation of men and women to work makes us converge in the task of “re-creating” the world and its relations. Therefore, when work loses its dignity in different ways, it distorts the person in their most intimate being in the search for new solutions, because there does not seem to be any turning back, love for the others pushes creativity to find those new ways together with all the other citizens.

There is not only one way, there are many, but guided by service, an integral element of the common good. In any case, the dignity of work is founded on love. “The great privilege of Man is to be able to love, in this way transcending the ephemeral and the transitory. He can love the other creatures, saying a ‘you’ and an ‘I’ which are meaningful. And he can love God who opens to us the gates of heaven, who constitutes us as members of his family, who authorizes us to speak with him also one-on-one, face to face. Because of that, Man should not limit himself to doing things, to constructing objects. Work is born of love, manifests love, is ordained to love”. (St. Josemaria Escriva, 19-III-1963).
––Monsignor Fernando Ocariz is the Prelate of Opus Dei, a Personal Prelature of the Catholic Church