Catholic News 2
BEIRUT (AP) -- A cease-fire brokered by Russia and Turkey went into effect in war-ravaged Syria at midnight Thursday, a potential breakthrough in the six years of fighting that have left more than a quarter-million people dead and triggered a refugee crisis across Europe....
HONOLULU (AP) -- The United States struck back Thursday at Russia for hacking the U.S. presidential campaign with a sweeping set of punishments targeting Russia's spy agencies and diplomats. The U.S. said Russia must bear costs for its actions, but Moscow called the Obama administration "losers" and threatened retaliation....
Police in Bangladesh say garment manufacturers have dismissed at least 1,500 workers after protests over pay led to a week-long shutdown at dozens of factories, which supply clothes to top Western brands.Police described the protests as illegal and said that they had arrested 30 workers, including seven union leaders, as well as a television reporter covering the unrest, the AFP news agency reported on Wednesday.The strike had started on December 12 with Windy Apparels Limited, a clothing company in the manufacturing centre of Ashulia industrial belt, on the outskirts of the capital. Thousands of workers were on strike, demanding an increase in the minimum wage hand in hand with the increase in the cost of living. This followed tens of thousands of workers walking out of factories in Ashulia, that make clothing for brands such as GAP, Zara and H&M, prompting concerns over supply during the holiday season.The protesters complained that the current salary, around 5-6 thousand ta...
Police in Bangladesh say garment manufacturers have dismissed at least 1,500 workers after protests over pay led to a week-long shutdown at dozens of factories, which supply clothes to top Western brands.
Police described the protests as illegal and said that they had arrested 30 workers, including seven union leaders, as well as a television reporter covering the unrest, the AFP news agency reported on Wednesday.
The strike had started on December 12 with Windy Apparels Limited, a clothing company in the manufacturing centre of Ashulia industrial belt, on the outskirts of the capital. Thousands of workers were on strike, demanding an increase in the minimum wage hand in hand with the increase in the cost of living. This followed tens of thousands of workers walking out of factories in Ashulia, that make clothing for brands such as GAP, Zara and H&M, prompting concerns over supply during the holiday season.
The protesters complained that the current salary, around 5-6 thousand taka (just over 80 Euros), is not enough to bridge a relentless inflation. Therefore they demanded a negotiation with management and the adjustment of salaries at least up to 15 thousand taka (about 180 euro). Following the strike, 59 factories that package clothing for foreign giants - such as Zara, H & M and GAP – were forced to freeze production.
After days of discussions and bargaining, the protest resulted in a stalemate and the workers returned to the factories. The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has rejected the workers' demand for their pay to be trebled from the current minimum monthly wage of 5,300 taka ($67). The police chief of Ashulia said only those involved in violent protest had been arrested.
"All the factories have resumed their operations. Some 90 percent of the workers have joined work," said Nur Nabi, assistant superintendent of police.
However, the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation put the number of dismissed workers at 3,500, adding that dozens of protest organisers had been forced into hiding.
Babul Akhter, head of the federation, accused authorities of using a controversial military-era law to shut down the protests. "They used [the] Special Powers Act to detain union leaders and workers," he told AFP. "Up to 3,500 workers have been sacked and 50 leaders have gone into hiding."
The protests were the latest blow to the country's $30bn garment industry, which provides employment to millions of people in this Asian nation of nearly 160 million.
The country is the second largest exporter of packaging after China. Garment manufacturing makes up 80 percent of Bangladesh's exports and a prolonged interruption would have a major impact on the economy. Bangladesh's 4,500 garment factories have a woeful history of exploitation, poor pay and appalling conditions for their four million workers, and protests occur frequently.
They gained intensity after the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in which 1,130 workers were crushed to death. The tragedy prompted international outrage, forcing US and European clothing brands to improve deplorable safety conditions at their supplier factories.
(Source: AsiaNews; Al Jazeera)
As always, to coincide with the end of the year, the Prefecture of the Papal Household has published a note summing up the participation of the faithful during meetings and audiences with the Pope in the Vatican.It notes that in the course of the year 2016 Pope Francis received some 4 million people.That’s counting General and Special Audiences, Jubilee Audiences, liturgical celebrations, Angelus and Regina Coeli.March and September were the months with the highest numbers of faithful present in the Vatican during the Pope’s activities – in March during Holy week, and in September for the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is clear that the numbers refer uniquely to the Pope’s activities inside the Vatican and do not include visits to Rome Dioceses or apostolic visits and journeys to Italy and abroad, where Pope Francis met with millions of people.
As always, to coincide with the end of the year, the Prefecture of the Papal Household has published a note summing up the participation of the faithful during meetings and audiences with the Pope in the Vatican.
It notes that in the course of the year 2016 Pope Francis received some 4 million people.
That’s counting General and Special Audiences, Jubilee Audiences, liturgical celebrations, Angelus and Regina Coeli.
March and September were the months with the highest numbers of faithful present in the Vatican during the Pope’s activities – in March during Holy week, and in September for the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
It is clear that the numbers refer uniquely to the Pope’s activities inside the Vatican and do not include visits to Rome Dioceses or apostolic visits and journeys to Italy and abroad, where Pope Francis met with millions of people.
Washington D.C., Dec 29, 2016 / 09:51 am (CNA/EWTN News).- “To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.”This statement from Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” is jarring, especially in an economy that appears to have as much to do with Church teaching as spiders do with spelling bees.But the Church's view on wages and compensation has a long history reaching back centuries – and remains relevant today to employers and employees alike – say businesspeople and theologians seeking to find a moral response to today's changing economic landscape.“The Church starts really from the perspective of the human person, and wants to see why the relationship between the employer and the employee is more than just an exchange of money for a certain part of time,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, who teaches systematic theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate...
Washington D.C., Dec 29, 2016 / 09:51 am (CNA/EWTN News).- “To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.”
This statement from Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” is jarring, especially in an economy that appears to have as much to do with Church teaching as spiders do with spelling bees.
But the Church's view on wages and compensation has a long history reaching back centuries – and remains relevant today to employers and employees alike – say businesspeople and theologians seeking to find a moral response to today's changing economic landscape.
“The Church starts really from the perspective of the human person, and wants to see why the relationship between the employer and the employee is more than just an exchange of money for a certain part of time,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, who teaches systematic theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.
“It’s a personal relationship, and that means that there are rights and duties on both sides of that.”
The Church's stance on wages as bound to the concept of justice reaches back centuries. Teachings against defrauding workers of wages can be found in Catholic Catechisms for families as far back as the 1600s, and the principles of justice within Catholic teaching reach back even further, to the Bible itself. The development of Catholic thought on how wages and compensation for work should be considered is rooted not in laws of supply and demand, but in the human person and natural law.
“It’s not just reducible to the market. Just because the market would allow you to pay someone less does not mean that you have a right in justice to do that. Nor does it mean that it is just, for a laborer, to charge an extravagant amount of money for his work,” Fr. Legge told CNA.
He explained that the teaching surrounding the just payment of workers received substantial attention as part of St. Thomas Aquinas’s work elaborating upon the nature of justice. What's striking, he said, is that St. Thomas Aquinas uses just wages as the first “and most obvious” example of what justice actually is.
However, the the concept of just compensation is clearly not the most obvious example of justice to contemporary thinkers, “which is a way of telling us that the way we think about wages now is very different from the way that someone like Aquinas in the Middle Ages thought about it,” Fr. Legge said.
Instead of viewing it as a situation where the employee, the business and the state were the only parties involved in making a person’s livelihood, the Church’s thought on just wages also incorporated all of the relationships and institutions an employer and employee interacted with.
“There’s a much richer texture to human life, and the Church has always respected the place of family, private organizations, the family, local organizations, the Church.”
Fr. Legge said that until the 19th century, “you often had people who were tied to their employment, their employer through lots of bonds – family, community, history.”
In many circumstances, employees were incorporated into their employer’s family structure and physical needs were taken care of both by their employer as well as by community supports, such as the parish. “We wouldn’t imagine that the person providing daycare would be lodged in the family home, and would remain there even after the children are grown,” he said.
How the nature of work changed
This interplay of different supports for workers, however, is largely absent from contemporary approaches to work.
“Once you get to the Industrial Revolution, work changes radically for the worker,” said Fr. Thomas Petri, OP, Dean of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate conception.
Shifts in labor and mass-production made it more difficult for some to see the dignity of work and the importance of the worker as a person.
“There’s a problem in markets when workers are depersonalized,” he told CNA. “It takes away in some way the dignity of the worker and makes work into some sort of a monotonous, humdrum thing.”
In part as a response to the changes facing the world during the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII wrote “Rerum Novarum,” outlining the Church’s teaching on the proper relationships between people, the state, labor and capital. Along with discussing the role of private property, unions, and a worker’s duties to their employer, Pope Leo XIII emphasized the importance of an employer’s duties to their employees.
The document, Fr. Petri said, aims “to remind people that work still has dignity,” as well as to serve as a reminder to all that business should serve the common good.
It also states that while “the state has to be involved in the adjudication of just wages,” Fr. Petri said, “there has to be communal support for the person.” The Pope emphasizes that institutions like the family, the Church, other institutions along with the state can help provide a living for workers.
“Minimum wage isn’t the only thing that can help support families,” Fr. Petri said.
While the state has a role in making sure all its citizens receive what they need for a good and virtuous life, “it seems to me that the Church’s social justice teaching suggests that this should also work in business,” he said.
Fr. Petri pointed to examples of company towns that provided housing, the provision of healthcare or education benefits, or employee-ownership of companies as examples of ways a business could expand its provision for its employees.
However, while the Church’s teaching, both in “Rerum Novarum” and other documents, does not provide strict prescriptions for all the ways employers can provide for their employees, not all contracts or forms of payment are morally acceptable.
“Just because an employee agrees to work for a certain wage does not therefore make the wage inherently just,” Fr. Petri said.
“Sometimes people work for a pittance because they’re socially forced to or they have no other opportunities for a greater income. Leo XIII speaks about that as an evil.”
He pointed to many companies' practice of hiring of undocumented workers for very low wages as an example of this kind of mistreatment. To compound the issue, Fr. Petri said, illegal immigrants can't speak up about their mistreatment without fearing for deportation or other consequences.
In cases were businesses are acting immorally, “I think the government has a right to exert legislative authority in those cases where it’s clear that they are mistreating their workers,” Fr. Petri said.
“That’s what unions were supposed to do, that's why unions were started.”
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.
By Junno Arocho EstevesVATICAN CITY (CNS) -- More than3.9 million pilgrims visited and attended papalevents, liturgies or prayer services during the Holy Year of Mercy in 2016, theVatican said.The Prefecture of the PapalHousehold, the Vatican office that coordinates the audiences and distributesthe free tickets to papal audiences and liturgies, said a total of 3,952,140 people attendeda papal event at the Vatican. The Vatican released the statistics Dec. 29.Although the total was slightlyhigher from the 3.2 million visitors received by Pope Francis in 2015, for a jubileeyear it still fell short of the 5.9 million pilgrims who visited in 2014.Terrorists attacks in Europe throughout the year are also thoughtto have discouraged visitors from traveling during what are typically busytourist seasons in Italy.During 2016, 762,000 people attendedthe pope's 43weekly general audiences while 446,000 attended the 11 jubilee audiences held one Saturday a month.More than 169,000 people took part...
By Junno Arocho Esteves
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- More than 3.9 million pilgrims visited and attended papal events, liturgies or prayer services during the Holy Year of Mercy in 2016, the Vatican said.
The Prefecture of the Papal Household, the Vatican office that coordinates the audiences and distributes the free tickets to papal audiences and liturgies, said a total of 3,952,140 people attended a papal event at the Vatican. The Vatican released the statistics Dec. 29.
Although the total was slightly higher from the 3.2 million visitors received by Pope Francis in 2015, for a jubilee year it still fell short of the 5.9 million pilgrims who visited in 2014.
Terrorists attacks in Europe throughout the year are also thought to have discouraged visitors from traveling during what are typically busy tourist seasons in Italy.
During 2016, 762,000 people attended the pope's 43 weekly general audiences while 446,000 attended the 11 jubilee audiences held one Saturday a month.
More than 169,000 people took part in special group audiences; more than 924,000 people participated in papal liturgies in St. Peter's Basilica or St. Peter's Square; and more than 1.6 million people joined the pope for the Angelus or the "Regina Coeli" prayer on Sundays and major feast days in St. Peter's Square.
The statistics released by the Vatican stand in contrast to the numbers published on the Jubilee of Mercy website, which states that over 21 million participated in the Holy Year of Mercy. The number includes pilgrim groups and individuals who crossed through the Holy Door that are not included in the Vatican's statistics.
The papal event statistics do not include papal events in the city of Rome or international visits made by Pope Francis. They also are based on the number of ticket requests and estimates of crowd size.
- - -
Follow Arocho on Twitter: @arochoju.
- - -
Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.
MINNIE, Ky. (AP) -- Donna Dye saw the coal truck come barreling over the horizon and her head started spinning with that familiar, desperate urge to end it all....
Of the many events marking the closing year of Barack Obama's time as the nation's first black president, none had deeper resonance than his opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall. Tracing the history of black America from its dark beginnings in human bondage to Obama's historic election, the museum has already welcomed more than 600,000 visitors....
ATLANTA (AP) -- When President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January, Republicans will have the opportunity to pull off something they have wanted to do for years - overhaul Medicaid, the program that provides health care to tens of millions of lower-income and disabled Americans....
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Russia's president and the Syrian army said Thursday that a nation-wide cease-fire agreement has been reached with opposition rebels, set to begin at midnight. The deal was confirmed by the Turkish foreign ministry....
