For most of us, work is a central part of life. And the systems of ethics we live by tend to reflect that. As religious studies scholar Jeremy Posadas notes, that includes modern Christian thought, which often treats work as an essential part of being human. He writes that even when Christians call for dignity for all and an end to poverty, they often frame this in terms of concepts like a “living wage.”
Posadas suggests a different approach, one informed by the concept of anti-work developed by feminist scholar Kathi Weeks. This involves a fundamental critique of capitalist systems’ power in our day-to-day lives.
If work should not be the center of a meaningful, ethical existence, what should? Posadas, again following feminist thinkers, proposes that the answer is care, which he defines as “all the tasks humans must do in order to sustain the life of humanity in society from one day and one generation to the next.”
This includes unpaid and paid activities typically described as “care work,” like feeding and teaching young children and taking care of the sick. But Posadas also expands the concept of care to include all the human relationships that help people of all ages develop their social, emotional, and intellectual capabilities.
To develop an alternative framework, Posadas suggests looking to reproductive justice (RJ), a concept first defined by a group of Black American women at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. They conceived of RJ as an expansion of reproductive rights to include not just the ability to end an unwanted pregnancy but the freedom to have wanted children, and to raise them in a safe, healthy environment.
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Posadas proposes expanding the RJ framework to include not just having kids but participating in all the care tasks needed to sustain human society. In his view, the central thing society should enable is the relationships that allow us all “to pursue, as fully as is equitably and ecologically sustainably possible, living with joy and the enjoyment of liveliness.”
In practical terms, Posadas agrees with reforms to materially support people who do unpaid care work (mainly women) and to better compensate care work currently done for wages (mainly by women of color) “insofar as the goal is to make capitalism less unequal.” But he argues that we should also be pursuing more ambitious goals.
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Posadas suggests several policies that would help shift society away from centering on wage work: a universal basic income, labor unions that fight for wider social issues in addition to fair treatment on the job, greater representation of workers on companies’ decision-making boards, and support for reproductive health and childcare in all forms.
“All of these are manifestations of reproductive justice, in the expanded sense I’ve proposed,” Posadas writes. “That none of them has heretofore received serious consideration by Christian ethicists and theologians when they’ve interpreted work shows us how thoroughly we have been in thrall to capitalism.”
