The cover picture on last week’s Tablet, taken from Lewis Hine’s photograph “The Power House Mechanic”, was also used on the cover of Gavan Duffy’s book on the worker in Catholic Social Teaching, Labour and Justice.

The cover picture on last week’s Tablet, taken from Lewis Hine’s photograph “The Power House Mechanic”, was also used on the cover of Gavan Duffy’s book on the worker in Catholic Social Teaching, Labour and Justice.

Duffy’s book traces workers’ dignity through the ages, showing how the Guild system ensured that workers had a living wage and a respected place in society; how the dissolution of the monasteries put power and wealth in private hands to the detriment of the poor; and how the industrial revolution provoked a reaction in social teaching.

Does thought lead action or action lead thought? The successful matchgirls’ strike against appalling working conditions and pay in July 1888 led the way for the dockers’ strike in August 1889, in which Cardinal Manning strongly supported the workers. Cardinal Manning is thought to have been influential on Rerum Novarum, published in 1891, which referred to “grasping employers” and how “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself”.

Pope Leo XIII spoke out against the Marxist solution of class war and instead encouraged people to join and support new trade unions, saying it is “greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous”. Pope Leo XIII succinctly summarised the benefits of union membership: “If one fall he shall be supported by the other. Woe to him that is alone, for when he falleth he hath none to lift him up.”

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