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| AFL-CIO President John Sweeney meets with Pope John Paul II in April 2000. |
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April 4—Working
people around the world are mourning the death of Pope John Paul II, a
strong champion of workers’ rights during his nearly 27-year reign.
John Paul, 84, died April 2. “Pope
John Paul II espoused the notion of worker solidarity as a central
dimension of the human condition and a necessary ingredient of a just
society,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who met with John Paul twice, most recently in April 2000.
“More
than anything, we remember and will rededicate ourselves in his memory
to the optimism of what the bountiful love of the Creator can
accomplish. His suffering is ended; ours is made tolerable by his
teachings and his example.”
The
pope is widely known for his role in the development of Solidarity, the
Polish trade union that led the fight for workers’ rights and for
freedom from Communism in that country. In addition, the pope
reaffirmed the dignity of work and the rights of workers to join unions
in three papal encyclicals, or statements.
The pontiff’s most powerful statement on workers came in 1981 in the encyclical Laborem Exercens—“On
Human Work”—in which John Paul called for “ever new movements of
solidarity of the workers and with the workers. This solidarity must be
present whenever it is called for by the social degrading of the
subject of work, by exploitation of the workers and by the growing
areas of poverty and even hunger.”
The
encyclical goes on to reaffirm the support of the Roman Catholic Church
for a just wage, available and affordable health care, the right to a
retirement pension and workers’ compensation for work-based injuries or
illnesses.
To
secure these rights, John Paul said workers must have the right of
association, “that is, to form associations for the purpose of
defending the vital interests of those employed in the various
professions. These associations are called labor or trade unions....The
experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an
indispensable element of social life.”
Pope’s Support Touched Workers Around the World
Pope
John Paul also on several occasions stressed the need for economic
globalization to “be attuned to the needs of man, and not that man be
sacrificed for the sake of the system.” Speaking in 2001, he said
globalization “does not assure fair distribution of goods among the
citizens of various countries. In reality, the wealth produced often
remains in the hands of only a few.”
Less
than eight months after the Polish-born pope’s 1978 inauguration, the
pontiff visited Poland, where he spoke openly and strongly in favor of
human rights, and publicly embraced Lech Walesa, the leader of
Solidarity.
During
the visit, John Paul told a crowd of about a million people, “You are
men. You have dignity. Don’t crawl on your bellies.”
In the 1980s, the
AFL-CIO and affiliated unions helped support Solidarity by providing
the organization with funds to purchase computers, copying machines,
printing presses and other equipment. After the communist government
fell in Poland and Solidarity swept the elections there, Walesa visited
the federation’s 1989 convention and received the George Meany Human
Rights Award, one of the union movement’s top honors.
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