Vatican City, Dec. 19.
Pope Francis today rejected all practices in which “human dignity is trampled on by gender discrimination” and asked: “Why does a woman have to earn less than a man?”, during an audience with the majority Italian union Confederation Italian General of Labor (CGIL).
In his speech in the Vatican’s Paul VI classroom before the 5,000 members of the CGIL, Francis also lamented: “Why is a woman thrown out of work as soon as she finds out she is pregnant so as not to pay for maternity?”
Francisco described these practices as “distortions of work” and cited, in addition to gender discrimination, precarious contracts for young people, widespread layoffs, and lamented “that many people still suffer from the lack of a job or decent work.” .
Among his denunciations of the world of work, the pope also expressed concern about “the exploitation of people, as if they were high-performance machines.”
“There are violent forms, such as the slavery of day laborers in agriculture or construction and other workplaces, the obligation to work massacring shifts, lowering wages, contempt for motherhood, the conflict between work and family. How many contradictions and how many wars between the poor are taking place around work!”, stressed the pontiff.
Francisco also denounced that “there are still too many dead, maimed and injured at work” and that “every death at work is a defeat for the whole of society.”
“Instead of counting them at the end of each year, we should remember their names, because they are people and not numbers. Let’s not allow profit and person to be put on the same level! The idolatry of money tends to trample everything and everyone and does not appreciate the differences,” he criticized.
And he reaffirmed the need to “take seriously the lives of employees and safety standards” because “only a wise alliance can prevent accidents, which are tragedies for families and communities.”
To the union representatives, the pontiff reminded that “there is no union without workers and there are no free workers without a union” and considered that “we live in an era that, despite technological progress and sometimes precisely because of that perverse system that defines itself Even as a technocracy, it has partially disappointed the expectations of justice at work”.