Labor Day 2025

Good work and bad work are very much in the news this Labor Day Season of 2025. At the foundation of both is the issue of conscience and values. Here are a few examples to meditate on.

This past week four very qualified experts at CDS quit. They walked out the door in protest a day after their director, Susan Monarez, was fired by Robert Kennedy, Jr., United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. She refused to go along with his vaccine policy and demand to fire qualified personnel in the department. Conscience played a role since she said she refused to either break the law or disregard good science and the current leadership was doing both.

Those who quit to protest her firing included the chief medical officer, the head of the agency’s center overseeing respiratory illnesses and vaccine recommendations, the head of the center that oversees emerging diseases and vaccine safety and the leader of the office of public health data.

It is good to know that people with conscience are manning some of our government institutions. Or were. Would that we could find some conscience among those congress people and senators who voted to approve Robert Kennedy as head of HHS! 

To say nothing of what is clearly the most corrupt and compromised Supreme Court in history. Workers with conscience? One would hope.

Work matters. Work is where we most affect one another and leave our imprint on the larger community and even on history. An imprint for good or for evil. Conscience matters and especially at work. What are the values that guide us in decisions we make and don’t make in our work worlds? And policies we create and espouse?

Another happening this Labor Day promises to be 1,000 protests in all 50 states around the theme “Workers Over Billionaires.” Labor unions and advocacy groups are sounding off against Trump administration policies. “This is about organic, grassroots organizing, and…outside of Washington DC because that’s where the impacts are being felt,” Lis Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said.

Some policies being protested include efforts to rescind collective bargaining rights from one million federal workers—“the largest single act of union busting in US history”; cutting minimum wage for federal contractors from $17.75 an hour to $13.30 per hour; eliminating federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million childcare and home care workers; and withdrawing minimum wage requirements for disabled workers.

All this while billionaires are raking in more tax cuts.

A recent poll found trust in labor unions is at 55%. In contrast, trust in the Democratic and Republican parties poll at 36% and 35% respectively. Shuler remarks, “People are waking up to the fact we don’t have to just sit back and take it, and the labor movement is the place to go to channel that activism, to build what’s next, and we’re putting forward a vision for what the economy can be.”

The target is “the billionaire agenda” according to Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “The corruption we’re seeing is changing the way government is functioning” that results in “real-time and impactful ramifications for regular people.”

Such actions as “the gutting of Medicaid, all the firings we’ve seen of federal workers, the ravaging of families through ICE raids. It’s just all coming together to cause people to stand up and say, ‘we are the people of this country. It is workers over billionaires.’”*

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Find a Protest near you. Put your conscience—and your moral outrage—to work.

* Michael Sainato, “Nearly 1,000 ‘worker over billionaire’ actions planned for Labor Day in US,” The Guardian, August 29, 2025

See Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time.

And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.

And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

And Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.

And Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.

And Fox, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.

To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.

For more information on Pronoia and Rob Breszny, quoted in Matthew’s video reflection, click HERE.

Banner Image: Clergy, UAW, Unite Here, City Council members, and other protestors rally for “Workers, Not Billionaires” in Philadelphia, May 1, 2025, before being arrested. Photo by Joe Piette on Flickr.

Queries for Contemplation

What does Labor Day 2025 mean to you? How are you putting your conscience to work at work and beyond?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time

Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox.  He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story

The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance

In what may be considered the most comprehensive outline of the Christian paradigm shift of our Age, Matthew Fox eloquently foreshadows the manner in which the spirit of Christ resurrects in terms of the return to an earth-based mysticism, the expression of creativity, mystical sexuality, the respect due the young, the rebirth of effective forms of worship—all of these mirroring the ongoing blessings of Mother Earth and the recovery of Eros, the feminine aspect of the Divine.
“The eighth wonder of the world…convincing proof that our Western religious tradition does indeed have the depth of imagination to reinvent its faith.” — Brian Swimme, author of The Universe Story and Journey of the Universe.
 “This book is a classic.” Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work and The Dream of the Earth.

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them. 
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science.  A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election

Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE. 
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE. 
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.