GENEVA – While globalization is creating wealth, it is not helping enough people either because working conditions are poor or jobs do not exist, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi told the International Labor Conference.
The Vatican's representative to Geneva-based international organizations spoke June 8 at the conference sponsored by the International Labor Organization.
According to the ILO, the global unemployment rate in 2005 remained at 6.3 percent. Although 2.8 billion people over age 15 are working, half of them do not earn the $2 a day per family member needed to raise them above the global poverty line.
Archbishop Tomasi said the benefits of the new wealth produced by globalization are not reaching millions of people, including undocumented agricultural workers, factory workers and domestic servants, women in the textile industry, and "workers labeled by their race, caste or religion" who are given access only to menial labor.
"Inequality and poverty are the overriding moral issues of the 21st century," he told the conference, appealing for safe working conditions and decent salaries that allow people to produce, create, grow and contribute to the good of society.
One ray of hope, he said, is seen in the fact that child labor has been reduced by 11 percent since 2000, although 218 million children still work.
"The prospect that children may be taken out of agricultural work or quarrying, that they may not be trafficked for forced prostitution, that they may be able to go to school and grow up with hope" should convince governments, employers, unions and civil society to work for the total elimination of child labor, he said.
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