translated from Spanish: Pope Francis proposes universal wage for the most vulnerable workers

Vatican City.- Pope Francis proposed a universal wage for the most humble and unoraled workers, in a letter sent today to popular movements and organizations at this time of the coronavirus pandemic.” The evils that afflict all of you, are beaten twice,” Francis denounces in the letter.

He explains that the difficulties of confinement are greater “when housing is precarious” or “lacks a roof”, when you live “day to day without any legal guarantees to protect them”, as workers suffer “independent or the popular economy”. Francis cites “street vendors, recyclers, carnivals, smallholder farmers, builders, seamstresses, those who perform different care tasks,” who “don’t have a stable salary to withstand this moment.” In the face of this reality, Pope Francis considers that it is “time to think of a universal wage” that dignify the “noble and irreplaceable tasks they perform” and make reality “that so human and christian slogan: no worker without rights”.

Dear brothers and sisters: The words we really want to hear in this time are not indifference, selfishness, division and forgetfulness. We want to suppress them forever! https://t.co/snk73h7g0L—Pope Francis (@Pontifex_es)
April 12, 2020

Francis stated that in this time of “so much anguish and difficulty,” popular movements “are a true invisible army fighting in the most dangerous trenches (…) with no weapon but solidarity, hope and the sense of community.” In the letter, Francis has a special recognition for “women, who multiply bread in community canteens by cooking with two onions and a pack of rice for hundreds of children” and for the sick and the elderly “so often forgotten in this society of loneliness” and the “peasants and family farmers who continue to till to produce food caring for the common home and attending to the needs of the humble and hard-working people.” I hope that this moment of danger will take us out of the autopilot, shake our sleeping consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that ends with the idolatry of money and puts dignity and life at the center,” Francis writes.You may be interested: The pope asks to keep hope during this pandemic at Misa SantoPapa to migrants: I am always ready to lay a handPapa Francisco initiates Passion of Christ prostrate before the altar

Original source in Spanish