Bodies for Sale: The Inhuman Face of Industrialism
GUEST COLUMN
“You are worth about $5.50,” gloats the statistic-monger. “If you were cremated, the chemicals in your body wouldn’t be worth as much as a ticket to a first-class concert.”
“Four dollars an hour,” says my boss, equally pleased.
I do just enough unskilled factory work (for Manpower) to cover my room and board. The money itself doesn’t affront me, as if I had gotten a low bid at the auction block. But what does affront me is the suggestion that the money could in any way compensate me for my body, my life, my time, myself.
Raw materials went into the factory and came out ennobled and man went in and came out degraded (Pope Pius XI).
You May Also Enjoy
The Church can engage in the work of racial reparations, but only while placing the project within a broader moral framework.
The working household constitutes a specific physical locus intimate enough to be personal but capacious enough to be a haven from the vicissitudes of market forces.
Why don’t the “underclass” want to leave it? Is there, perhaps, some failure not of psychology or school experience but of the moral imagination?