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Sometimes it’s a song that captures the zeitgeist more than any other art form. I expect many of you know Dolly Parton’s, 9 to 5, with its catchy tune and its refrain of “working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living”? When it came out 40 years ago, it summed up the working life of millions of office commuters, tied to their desks, and the demands of their boss, for seven hours a day. Today that’s all changed. Millions are working from home in the national lockdown – but that too has its own complications and stresses. Earlier this week I was talking to the organizers of a conference on the world of work where the key text will be a nineteenth century document about employment. But can that paper - Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 theology on the rights and duties of capital and labour, inspired by conditions in Victorian factories - have anything to say to today’s world of laptops and digital working? Back in 2009, Pope Leo’s document which had become the foundation stone of a body of ethical writing called Catholic Social Teaching, inspired Pope Benedict XVI’s response to the 2008 financial crash. He wrote of the importance of dignity, fairness and justice at a time of unstable financial markets and the risks of widening inequality. Then, more recently, Pope Francis adapted the warning from St Paul’s epistle to Timothy that love of money is the root of all evil. He Tweeted that today it is inequality that is the root of all evil, and about the dangers of being subject to a new tyranny. Key workers and the unemployed might think people working at their kitchen tables are privileged. But there can be tyranny in this form of work: when the working day becomes fluid, seeping into family life, and the boss can make email demands any time. The cameras during Zoom meetings can intrude into private spaces. Even if the working world has been changed by the pandemic, it still needs an ethical context. Whatever our working status, Christian scriptures insist that each of us is equally cherished by God. Translated to the world of work, that means being valued, and for work not to be carried out at the expense of one’s dignity, but to be meaningful, and for work to benefit the whole of society. The economist Will Hutton has written of his surprise when he discovered that Catholic teaching has long been advocating the idea of the world of work as subject to a moral system. Or as Leo XIII, put it: work is not there to make a few people immensely rich but is for the common good.