Laborem Exercens

Background and Occasion

John Paul II intended to publish Laborem Exercens on 15 May 1981, the ninetieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Two days before that date he was shot in St Peter’s Square. After his recovery he revised the text, and it was published on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14 September 1981.

The context was also Polish. In August 1980 the strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard had led to the founding of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. The Pope himself had worked in a quarry and a chemical factory during the Nazi occupation, and he wrote about work from experience. The encyclical’s subject is not one aspect of the social question but the key to the whole of it: human work.

Structure

After an introduction, the encyclical has four main parts: Work and man; Conflict between labour and capital in the present phase of history; Rights of workers; and Elements for a spirituality of work.

Central Teaching

Work and the person

The encyclical starts from Genesis. Man is created in God’s image and given the command to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). Work is therefore part of the human vocation from the beginning, not merely a consequence of sin, though toil and sweat are (Genesis 3:17–19).

The Pope distinguishes two senses of work. In the objective sense, work is the activity by which man subdues the earth: agriculture, industry, technology. In the subjective sense, work is the activity of a person, a subject capable of acting in a planned and rational way and of deciding about himself. The dignity of work comes above all from its subjective dimension: the value of work is measured by the fact that the one doing it is a person. Work is for man, and not man for work. This rules out any system that treats workers as mere instruments of production or that measures work by its economic output alone.

Work is a good for man, because through it he transforms nature and also achieves fulfilment as a human being, becoming in a sense more a human being. It is also the foundation of family life and is bound up with the life of the nation.

Labour and capital

The second part analyses the conflict between labour and capital that marked the industrial era. The Pope teaches the principle of the priority of labour over capital: capital, the whole collection of means of production, is the result of work and an instrument of it, while labour is always a primary efficient cause. The error he calls economism, considering human work solely according to its economic purpose, lies behind both rigid capitalism and Marxist collectivism.

On property, the encyclical restates that the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use. It criticises a rigid capitalism that treats ownership of the means of production as untouchable, but it also rejects the mere transfer of ownership to the state as a solution. What matters is a true socialisation, in which each worker can be fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he works with everyone else, for instance through shared ownership, profit-sharing or participation in management.

The rights of workers

The third part introduces the concept of the indirect employer: not only the direct employer, but also the state, international institutions and economic systems that shape the conditions of work, bear responsibility for just labour relations. It treats the problem of unemployment, the just wage, which is the concrete means of verifying the justice of a socioeconomic system, and a family wage, sufficient to support a family without obliging mothers to work outside the home.

It defends the right to form unions, which it calls an indispensable element of social life, and the right to strike, within limits and as an extraordinary measure. It also treats agricultural workers, disabled people and migrant workers.

A spirituality of work

The final part offers a theology of work. By working, man shares in the activity of the Creator. Jesus himself, the carpenter of Nazareth, belonged to the working world and gave work a new dignity. The toil of work is united with the Cross of Christ, and through it the Christian collaborates with the Son of God in the redemption of humanity. Work also has a place in the new heaven and new earth: earthly progress, though distinct from the Kingdom, is of vital concern to it (Gaudium et Spes 39).

Theological Significance

Laborem Exercens is the most philosophically developed social encyclical. Its distinction between the objective and subjective senses of work draws on Karol Wojtyła’s personalist philosophy, especially his analysis of the acting person, in which action reveals and shapes the person who acts. Its principle of the priority of labour over capital placed Catholic social teaching in a critical position toward both Western capitalism and Soviet communism.

The encyclical was followed by Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991), which complete John Paul II’s social teaching. Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026) returns to its theme of the dignity of work in the context of automation and artificial intelligence.

For readers of this site, the encyclical belongs with the moral theology tract and with the tract on Creation, whose doctrine of man made in God’s image it applies to daily work.