J. Phillip Johnson

“Employers conversely view the work of their employees, and the employees themselves, as a thing that belongs to them as a personal possession. This extends beyond some notion that workers have sold their labor or their “time” to the employer. Employers in practice completely own a worker during a designated period of work, and measure this ownership according to time. This is why time is managed and not the quantity or quality of tasks completed. The manner by which time is managed is similar to inventory management. When a worker fails to offer himself up for the designated hours, even despite the possibility of circumstances outside his control, the worker is expected to “make up” the time lost, much like reparations paid to an employer for stolen goods. Employers handle “lost hours” as part of loss prevention for physical products. The worker’s skills, ignobly called “human capital,” comports to an employer’s existing technologies for this reason: workers themselves become capital, and capital supports other capital through modification.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Augustine’s acknowledgement toward the genius of the damned presages what only later becomes a hallmark of Catholic theology, the adage that grace perfects nature and does not destroy it. The futility of our natural powers only gains its requisite dignity with the order given to it by God, not by the arbitration of our fallen wills or a lust for death shared with lifeless machines. The bourgeois affinity for parochial labor and the polity’s need for mobilization both resound in the twilight of antiquity, when Augustine reads in Virgil’s Georgics the same poetic condescension and misplaced praise. Labor properly so called belongs to the free man and in fact makes a man free. Salvation, like work, both sets us free and enrolls us in the civic responsibility of a polity. Work, like salvation, enjoys both a metaphysical and an economic status.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work