Rest Is Written into Every Contract

The private body that accredits every medical residency in the United States has proposed loosening the rules on when young doctors must rest between shifts. On October 7th, the emergency medicine residents’ association formally objected. A resident knows the hours when he signs on. So this issue answers an old question with a new twist: can a worker agree to give up his rest, and can anyone rightly ask him to?

The Principle

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church opens its treatment of the subject with five plain words: “Rest from work is a right.” Then it gives the reason: “As God ‘rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had done’ (Gen 2:2), so too men and women, created in his image, are to enjoy sufficient rest and free time that will allow them to tend to their family, cultural, social and religious life.”1 It is important to notice what the rest is for. A worker who spends his day off simply recovering from the toil of his work, just enough to clock in again, has rested only in the thinnest sense. The Catechism restates this truth in a single line: “human life has a rhythm of work and rest.”2

In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII wrote that “a workman ought to have leisure and rest proportionate to the wear and tear of his strength, for waste of strength must be repaired by cessation from hard work.” He adds to that: “In all agreements between masters and work people there is always the condition expressed or understood that there should be allowed proper rest for soul and body. To agree in any other sense would be against what is right and just; for it can never be just or right to require on the one side, or to promise on the other, the giving up of those duties which a man owes to his God and to himself.”3 Two things happen in that sentence. Leo writes a clause into every labor contract ever signed, whether the parties typed it or not. And he closes the door from both sides: the employer may not demand the surrender of rest, and the worker may not offer it.

Why can’t the worker offer it? Because, as Leo says a few paragraphs earlier, “no man has in this matter power over himself. To consent to any treatment which is calculated to defeat the end and purpose of his being is beyond his right.” Rest belongs to what a man owes God and himself, so he holds it in trust. That’s also why Leo insists the weekly rest be “rest from labor, hallowed by religion,” and something more than idleness.4 Consent settles most questions about wages and terms. It has no force here. One can’t consent to give up what is owed to God.

John Paul II named it outright in Laborem Exercens, listing among the worker’s benefits “the sector associated with the right to rest,” which “involves a regular weekly rest comprising at least Sunday,” along with a longer yearly holiday.5 The Compendium then says whose job it is to secure it: “Public authorities have the duty to ensure that, for reasons of economic productivity, citizens are not denied time for rest and divine worship. Employers have an analogous obligation regarding their employees.”6 The worker shouldn’t have to bargain for his rest. The duty sits with whoever writes the schedule. An employer who attempts to exploit his employees, especially those in difficult economic situations, can’t appeal to consent to eliminate their culpability.

In May, Leo XIV carried the line forward in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence: “without a proper balance between work, leisure and rest, families are weakened, and young people struggle to develop a sense of responsibility.”7 That’s a development of Leo XIII’s teaching, and it changes nothing in it. The right Leo XIII defended for the factory hand now gets defended for the family the factory hand goes home to.

Be precise about the weight of each claim. That the worker has a right to rest, and that no contract can sign it away, is the ordinary magisterium, taught without a break from 1891 to this year. How much rest, in what pattern, for which kind of work, is prudential judgment, and Leo XIII said so himself: “How many and how long the intervals of rest should be must depend on the nature of the work, on circumstances of time and place, and on the health and strength of the workman.”8 Faithful Catholics can argue about the count. The Sunday obligation is a third thing again, a precept of the Church binding the faithful, and it shouldn’t be blurred with the natural right every worker holds, baptized or not.

More on this principle: Work and the Worker. All twelve principles.