Pope calls for safety at work in ‘Steel City’

BY SARA ANGLE
THE CHURCH supports every effort to guarantee each person a job that is safe, dignified and stable, Pope Benedict XVI has told a group of Italians, including many unemployed steel workers.
The Pope said: “Work is one of the fundamental elements both of the human person and of society. Difficulties or precarious conditions of work make it difficult and precarious to live an ordered life in line with the needs of the common good”. He was speaking during an audience with Catholics from the Diocese of Terni-Narni-Amelia, Italy.
He said that every precaution must be taken “to break the chain of deaths and accidents” that happen in the workplace.
Pope Benedict’s meeting with more than 7,000 members of the diocese commemorated the visit Pope John Paul II made to Italy’s “Steel City” 30 years earlier. Italy’s first steel plant, built in 1886, was located in Terni, a town in Umbria.
The Pope entrusted the steel factory workers to the protection of St Joseph the Worker, whose feast day was March 19.
The International Labour Organisation reported that in Italy’s manufacturing segment alone there were 38 fatal injuries in the period from 2000 to 2008 and just in 2008, there were 2,912 non-fatal injuries on Italian job sites.