World Movement of Christian Workers

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In a world beset by conflict, marked by deep inequalities and ecologically unsustainable, decent work represents a route to peace and social justice. In fact, as the Universal Church1 states, it is access to free, creative, participatory and inclusive work, as well as land and shelter that enables each of us to earn a dignified living. It also ensures that we are collectively able to take care of the planet and make this world a more habitable and beautiful place. Decent work enables us to walk together as a people towards a more dignified life. Access to work for all is an inalienable priority.

We have embraced His Holiness Pope Francis’ appeal to remain engaged and move forward together on the path of intergenerational dialogue, education and work.2

We condemn the exclusion of many migrant workers from employment and social rights. Workers who provide essential services often lack sufficient social recognition and decent working conditions. Working conditions, resulting in increasingly impoverished working families, do not ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, nor are they compatible with personal and family care needs, particularly in a global context of soaring prices and rampant inflation.

“Informal” work does not promote personal, family and community development and endangers the fundamental principles underlying social cohesion, peaceful coexistence and social justice. It does not promote the implementation of collective social achievements and does not offer many people, particularly young people and women, any prospects for the future.

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Confinement due to Covid-19 began two years ago and in Uganda, after almost two years workers have experienced unspeakable stories of suffering and despair. Many workers have lost their jobs due to the long period of confinement and unemployment levels have risen.

Uganda was one of the countries with the longest lockdown period, from 1 April 2020 to January 2022, when the economy was fully reactivated. Informal entrepreneurs had no income during this period and had to dip into their own savings, rely on government food aid or seek help from family and friends to survive. This means that during the period of closure, most workers found themselves in a subsistence economy.

The conditions of confinement have affected almost all sectors of the labour market. The number of people employed in Uganda has declined from 9 million in 2016/17 to 8.3 million in 2019/20. This led to many wage earners losing their jobs. Other workers were forced to close their businesses.

Due to the unemployment situation in the country, even before the pandemic, Uganda used to export labour to the Middle East, especially to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This was despite reports of poor working conditions. The number of Ugandan migrants has decreased from 25,363 in 2019 to 9,026 in 2020, due to the effects of the pandemic. This explains the extent of the impact of confinement on workers in Uganda and globally.

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International Women’s Day, that has its origin in a tragical event on 8th March in 1908, we receive it again in 2022 in the midst of a health pandemic which has wreaked havoc in the economies and societies in the world and, at the same time, it has showed us the structural inequalities in the development in all areas of our lives.

In this particular time of crisis, women have been at the frontline inside and outside the home. In the private sphere, more than three times the hours of unpaid care work already fell on their backs, the pandemic increased them; and, in the social sphere, their role has been essential in running the soup kitchens, the neighbourhood self-organising, the health promotion, in the neighbourhoods, even when the personal resources and institutional capacity have been limited and the rights recognized, have also been threatened. Despite this work by women, social and protection systems were broken up and calls for help, complaints of violence and the sexual abuse have increased. Women were left at the expense of domestic violence in conditions of greater vulnerability, taking place a rise of feminicides as the cruellest expression against them.

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The Church and the world are expecting a lot from us. I start with this statement because we are looking at the effort and commitment of our Pope Francis in doing that the great community of Jesus Project’s followers joins around him, understands the dimension of this proposal that it goes far beyond from those who confess our creed, that reaches to all workers around the world and in every corner of planet, this our House, threatened dangerously today by the disease of consumerism, the greed, negationism, intolerance, rotten fruits of selfishness, this evil that was so struggled by the one who, by Love, gave his life by all us.

These times living are really strange, saddened by the number of deaths resulting from a pandemic, but also by the precariousness in which millions of victims of unemployment live, aggravated by the disease, but also by the mechanisms of wealth concentration of the powerful. We are saddened deeply to see to millions starving to death, despite all the technological advances in food production, but even more saddened by the waste. How worrying it is to see whole families moving aimless, hopeless, frightened by ethnic, religious and political conflicts, looking for a place where they can have peace; families barred by barbed wire, electrified fences, police with water jets and dogs that scare, humiliate and kill. This horrible scene we are witnessed, designed by a death project and produced by a system that nothing has to offer to humanity, is also wounded of death, as Mother Earth, it is dying; but the Mother will recover, due to the wounds, but the perverse system will pass, as others have done.

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Nowadays, according UN data, there have not been so many people in the world who are displacing and living outside their place of origin. In 2019, there were 272 million of migrants all over the world, 51 million more than in 2010, Is this a problem? No, quite the opposite!

Migration is a historic opportunity to meetings, cultural enrichment, and exchange of skills among peoples and citizens of the world to progress together and to face the great challenges of humanity. The pandemic we are experiencing shows that migrants often bring their skills to face it, in particular by working in health services, transport, catering and many personal services. We cannot forget that migrants are, above all, workers. They are our brothers and sisters.

Many economists agree that migration is often an opportunity for the economy of the host country.

And, however, recent news reports us terrifying pictures. The Mediterranean Sea has become a cemetery for people who flee from poverty and wars. All over the world, migrants are singled out, arrested, persecuted, and harassed. We have still on mind the images of the police tearing the tarpaulins of migrants’ tents in several French towns, as Calais, but also in Paris! We are horrified to see women, men and children sleeping outdoors on Polish and Belorussian frontier. Europe has the duty of hospitality. But, today, migrants are used as scapegoats. This is useful to hide to those who are really responsible of social and environmental crises, those who run a system in which the financial gain predominates over the human beings.

Instead of welcoming and knowing people, walls are being built in many places. Today, there are more than 1000 km of walls in Europe and the world has never seen so many built. As if many countries were trying to entrench themselves against the poorest.

We are movements of workers. We are well aware that precariousness in which the migrant populations are, force them to work in indecent labour conditions. This situation also serves to question the social benefits of workers in the host country and to divide the workers among them. Acting for and above all with the migrants also means to act for all the workers’ rights. This was reminded in France by the undocumented workers who dared to go on strike in November 2021, with their trade union to demand the regularization of their situation.

We also think of all the activists of WMCW movements who work with migrants. In this way, ACO activists in Bordeaux, France, explain why they are involved: “This lack of humanity strikes us deeply, because the dignity of these people has been violated. Our commitments of fraternity, of support with the associations are reinforced before the violence with the human beings are treated”. The activists are taking measures in other cities of France, as Calais, in the region of Paris, in the south of France, etc.

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Brothers, sisters, dear social poets,

1. Dear social poets

This is what I like to call you: social poets. You are social poets, because you have the ability and the courage to create hope where there appears to be only waste and exclusion. Poetry means creativity, and you create hope. With your hands you know how to shape the dignity of each person, of families and of society as a whole, with land, housing, work, care, and community. Thank you, because your dedication speaks with an authority that can refute the silent and often polite denials to which you have been subjected, or to which so many of our brothers and sisters are subjected. But, thinking of you, I am convinced that your dedication is above all a proclamation of hope. Seeing you reminds me that we are not condemned to repeat or to build a future based on exclusion and inequality, rejection or indifference; where the culture of privilege is an invisible and insurmountable power; and where being exploited and abused are common methods of survival. No! You know how to proclaim this very well. Thank you.

Thank you for the video we have just seen. I have read the reflections from the meeting, the testimonies of those who lived in these times of tribulation and anguish, the summary of their desires and their proposals. Thank you. Thank you for including me in the historical process that you are going through, and thank you for sharing with me this fraternal dialogue that seeks to see the great in the small and the small in the great, a dialogue that is born in the peripheries, a dialogue that reaches Rome and wherein we may all feel invited and engaged. “If we want to encounter and help one another, we have to dialogue”, [1] and how much!

You felt that the current situation merited a new meeting. I felt the same. Although we have never lost contact, it is already five years, I think, since the general meeting, isn’t it? A lot has happened in that time; a lot has changed. These changes mark points of no return, turning points, crossroads at which humanity must make choices. And new moments of encounter, discernment and joint action are needed. Every person, every organisation, every country, and the whole world, needs to look for moments to reflect, discern and choose, because returning to the previous mindsets would be truly suicidal and, if I may press the point a little, ecocidal and genocidal.

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