On 15 May 1891, when Pope Leo XIII promulgated his encyclical Rerum Novarum – a response to the degradation of working people and their families by the merciless logic of laissez-faire capitalism – he turned to the principle of human dignity to justify the intervention of the state to ensure better conditions for workers.

If employers laid burdens on their [workers] which were unjust, or degraded them with conditions repugnant to their dignity as human beings”, he declared, then it would be right to invoke the aid and authority of the law.
Many believe that the levels of inequality and the treatment of workers are as egregious now as they were at the end of the nineteenth century: the “gilded age”, to use Mark Twain’s ironic description of the era of the “robber barons” who accumulated immense wealth from the labour of their low-paid workers toiling in unsafe and undignified conditions.

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