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
Wendell Berry has written of "the real work of planet saving," that it will be "small, humble and humbling." Dorothy Day faced the problem "one small life at a time."
The possession of great riches, though not to be condemned in itself, nevertheless presents grave difficulties to the soul that seeks perfection.
Free enterprise in its earlier stage was the unwitting and ungrateful beneficiary of generations of hardworking, God-fearing people.