Leo's Legacy

The Newfound Relevance of Rerum Novarum to Organized Labor

By Jacob Turner

More than a century before the rise of AI and Big Tech, the Catholic Church confronted a similar question to today: what happens when technological change threatens to leave workers behind?

Not that long ago, it was the robber barons of the so-called “Gilded Age” who capitalized on working-class labor. By the late 19^th century, machines like the steam engine, powered looms, and the cotton gin radically changed production. These technological advances created unprecedented opportunities for economic prosperity, but in the hands of the few. It also enabled some of the most inhumane abuses of workers the modern world has seen.

Out of this transformation of work emerged intense debates over how to reconcile the growing inequality between the poor and rich, between labor and capital.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII penned Rerum Novarum, his second encyclical, a letter of teaching akin to a sermon, which was sent to all bishops of the Catholic Church. In it, Leo XIII articulated the central moral issue of the industrial age: the insistence that the human is not a beast of burden.

As the pope writes, “For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation, for the brute has no power of self-direction.”

Throughout this work, Leo XIII explains the need to affirm both the dignity of the laborer and the rights of the laborer to dispose himself and place value on his sweat as he sees fit. This argument resonates strongly in the new millennium.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, labor unions fought to protect workers from brutal conditions in mines, factories and other industrial projects, where they earned wages under conditions that would be considered barbaric today. Rerum Novarum gave moral grounding to those struggles by rejecting unrestricted capital accumulation.

Leo XIII warned against the concentration of economic power, writing, “…the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”

In the 21^st Century, the working class faces threats from automation and technological displacement. Big Tech executives see workers as pieces of machinery whose only fault is their need to earn a living in exchange for their labor.

In the last four years, public support for unions reached 60-year highs. Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers who want to join unions remain unable to do so due to our flawed system of labor laws that benefit Corporate America.

On May 8, 2025, the Church elected Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago to the papacy. He took the name Leo XIV, continuing a long-standing tradition in which the name a pope chooses often signals the priorities and focus of his papacy. It is no accident that immediately following his election, Rerum Novarum experienced a surge of renewed interest.

In a time when companies are increasingly prioritizing profits over people, and when interest in labor unions continues to grow amid economic uncertainty, the principles articulated in Rerum Novarum are poised to resonate once again. The encyclical’s emphasis on the dignities of work, the value of workers, and the moral obligations of employers has newfound relevance today.