He added that citizens can both approach legislators to take action as well as avoid patronizing companies that do not provide just compensation for their workers.
What should things look like now?
And business leaders themselves can and should put these principles into practice today, said Bill Bowman, Dean of the Busch School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America.
"The purpose of business is the human person. It's not to trade the human person like any other commodity," he told CNA.
Bowman said that the Church shies away from a "one-size-fits-all" approach, instead setting principles around which an employer can balance people's needs – such as a city's expensiveness or an employee's family size, with the needs of the company is able to sustain itself. The result is that all businesspeople should be able to provide their workers with a just wage if they look towards innovative solutions.
He suggested that every businessperson should look carefully at what "a just wage really look like for this particular city where we're working. What would it look like for this employee, with a big family or a person with no family at all. If what we really want to do is provide enough money so that you can live a life and maybe put a little away on the side."
"To just say 'well I can't afford it,' is, to me, to unnecessarily give yourself a 'get out of jail free' card."
For entrepreneurs or startups facing tight budgets, Bowman noted that employers could work with employees to step up base pay with a company's growth or other "innovative" solutions he has seen from employers such as incorporating family size into bonuses or covering certain expenses like college tuition.
He directed business leaders to look to the Church's "rich doctrine" and writings on wages and business, such as in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, papal encyclicals, and a short document called "The Vocation of the Business Leader," put out by the Church's Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace, among other sources of Church teaching on the topic.
"As a Catholic business man or woman, he or she should really be challenging themselves to orient their businesses in this way," he said.
Bowman also criticized companies who avoid considering how they can better provide just wages to their employees. He said that companies, particularly large ones with shareholders, should not frame paying their employees a just wage as a "competitive disadvantage."
"If a company clearly can afford to pay it, its idea of a 'competitive disadvantage' is largely nonsense," he said.
"What it generally translates to is 'my share price might go down a bit and that's going to hit me in the wallet. Well, the Church has completely rejected the idea that a business is about shareholder returns."
In addition to it being the right thing to do, providing just compensation to workers is a sound business strategy, Bowman said. He's found in practice that providing employees with the compensation they need to take care of their families properly decreases both an employee's likeliness to leave and their sloppiness on the job, which are "enormous" costs to business.
"The return on investment of these programs is enormous," he said, adding that within a year in some cases, the programs "paid for itself."
Above all, employers should keep in mind the role the Church has laid out for laypeople in prescribing its moral directions on wages and work, Bowman said: to figure out how to implement Church teaching in daily life. By taking to heart this approach, businesses and their employees can focus back on virtues and the goal of business in the first place.
"We understand that the purpose of business and the purpose of everything else in life is really the human person."
This article was originally published on CNA June 22, 2016.
Adelaide Mena was the DC Correspondent for Catholic News Agency until 2017 and is a 2012 graduate of Princeton University.