The Number Came First

On September 13 and 14, Omnicom's chief financial officer told an investor conference that the advertising group will end 2026 with about 105,000 employees, down from roughly 120,000 a year earlier, and that the reduction is tied to a cost-savings promise made when it bought Interpublic. The question this issue answers is older than the merger: when a company cuts 15,000 jobs, what exactly does the Church say has gone wrong, if anything has? The answer turns on the order in which the reasoning ran, and the company described that order in public.

The Principle

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts the principle in one sentence, and the sentence is a ranking. "Work, because of its subjective or personal character, is superior to every other factor connected with productivity; this principle applies, in particular, with regard to capital."1 Then it says how old the ranking is: the Church "has not failed to insist on the relationship between labor and capital, placing in evidence both the priority of the first over the second as well as their complementarities," and labor's priority "is part of the abiding heritage of the Church's teaching."2 Two claims sit inside that paragraph, and you need both. Labor comes first. And labor and capital belong together, since "the very logic inherent within the process of production shows that the two must mutually permeate one another." A reader who carries only the first claim into an argument will sound like he wants companies run without money, and the Church has never asked for that.

What the priority means is best learned from the document the Compendium is quoting. John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens in 1981, and section 12 carries the heading "The Priority of Labor." The principle, he says, "directly concerns the process of production: in this process labor is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause."3 Efficient cause and instrumental cause are Aristotle's terms, carried into the Church's vocabulary by Aquinas, and they are exact. The efficient cause is the agent that makes a thing happen; the instrument is what the agent works with. A carpenter builds the table, and the saw is what he builds it with, and nobody sizes the carpenter to fit the saw. Capital, on this account, is the saw: the accumulated result of earlier work, with no purpose of its own apart from the person who picks it up.

Three sections later John Paul II settles how much weight the principle bears. "Thus, the principle of the priority of labor over capital is a postulate of the order of social morality."4 A postulate is a starting point you reason from, and the order of social morality is the moral law as it applies to economic life. So this is ordinary magisterium, drawn from natural reason as much as from revelation, and a Catholic does not get to file it under opinion. How a particular firm honors it in a particular restructuring is a prudential judgment, and faithful Catholics may weigh that differently.

The principle has a history. In 1891, Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum into a world where a wage was whatever the market would bear, and he addressed the free-contract argument head on: "there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner."5 Once you grant that a contract between a person and a firm answers to a justice older than the contract, you have granted that the person is the measure and the firm's capital is the instrument. Ninety years later, John Paul II named the order. The Catechism keeps the whole of it in one line: "Work is for man, not man for work."6

Leo XIV, in May of this year, carried the principle into the age of automation and cost-cutting without altering it. In Magnifica Humanitas, he writes that the old concern about unemployment "is even more acute, as innovation is often pursued solely for reducing costs and increasing profits."7 Then he names the place where the reasoning goes wrong, which is the clock. "In the short term, it may seem advantageous to reduce labor costs or maximize financial efficiency, but in the long term this undermines the very foundations of social coexistence."8 John Paul II told you which cause comes first. Leo XIV tells you why a balance sheet cannot see the error: it scores the saving this quarter, and the erosion never appears on it.