It may be impossible for a textile employer in a competitive market to both offer employment and pay a living wage. He may therefore be morally justified in hiring workers at the prevailing sustainable wage. But such an employer must also do his best to rescue the Third World poor from their misery. By affirming the worker s right to a living wage, Leo XIII made a precious contribution to the moral self understanding of modern industrialized society. With his teaching on the virtue of social justice, Pius XI indicated that it is, in major part, private sector initiative working steadily for the progressive reform of the rules and procedures guiding common action that is to bring such a right to realization.
Politicians love to drop a reference to the living wage into debate about the minimum wage.
But, as a matter of fact, linking the right to a living wage with the political push for a higher legal minimum wage, as the NCCB has done, distorts Catholic teaching on wage justice and, as the discussion of the sweatshop problem indicates, could be a disastrous guide for public policy. Stephen T. Worland is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.