The Social Dignity of Work and Its Violations: Labour- -Market Precarisation in the Perspective of Selected Documents of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church
Abstract
This article analyses precarisation in the labour market from the perspective of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), combining a discourse analysis of the encyclicals Laborem exercens, Centesimus annus, and Caritas in veritate with an interpretation of secondary data from Eurostat, the OECD, Statistics Poland (GUS), and the ILO. Its point of departure is the assumption that work is not merely a source of income, but also a condition of social participation, recognition, agency, and security. The article reconstructs the relationship between work, participation, recognition, and security as the normative and social core of social dignity, and then confronts this perspective with the empirical picture of contemporary precarisation. The analysis demonstrates that insecure employment, labour market segmentation, weakened social protection, and the concentration of risk in peripheral segments lead to an erosion of security, recognition, and full social participation, which may be conceptualised as “dignity-based marginalisation”. The findings indicate that CST provides not only a normative language of evaluation, but also a useful interpretative framework for the sociology of work and for the analysis of contemporary labour market inequalities.
Keywords:
precarisation, social dignity of work, decent work, labour market, Catholic social teachingReferences
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Akademia Łomżyńska
dr, Wydział Nauk Społecznych i Humanistycznych
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