Social Justice and the Misery of Humanity
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
The United Nations has made the twentieth of February as the International Day of Social Justice and has identified the theme of the celebration for the year 2022 as achieving this justice through official employment, that is, organized by contract and guaranteed by the state through officially established procedural laws, especially labor laws, as well as laws covering obligations and contracts.
There is no doubt that the choice is good, as the whole of humanity is moving towards informal employment whereas the employee does not benefit from any social or legal protection and whereas the conditions of work in general range from being acceptable and deplorable to sometimes even illegal, despite the existence of differences between informal work and illegal work.
We will deal with this point later. But first let us examine the reason for the establishment of this occasion and lay out its components and backgrounds.
This day, which is also called the Day of Equality and Social Justice, was set up in order to emphasize the need to promote social justice, by addressing poverty, exclusion, gender discrimination, unemployment, human rights, and social protection, with a special emphasis on globalization, and this according to the literature of the United Nations and the International Labor Organization. The same literature also mentions what it calls "decent work".
But what is striking in the literature dealing with this subject is the focus on globalization and on emphasizing the convenience of reaching social justice as well as that of providing decent work for twenty-first century man who was immersed in unemployment, misery, malnutrition, lack of medical prevention and care, in addition to totally inadequate housing conditions. All these data do not need to be studied as in-depth field surveys had pointed out to the fact that they were visible to the "naked eye".
The literature of the United Nations adds that "globalization and interdependence offer new opportunities to the growth of the global economy, as well as to development and to the improvement of living standards in the world”, and this through trade, investment, capital flows and technological advances, including the stress on information technology. It furthermore emphasizes the conviction that such new venues can be achieved despite "the persistence of huge challenges, including crises of severe financial insecurity, poverty, exclusion and inequality within societies as well as between them”.
There must be a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of the nature of the brutal capitalist regimes that arose after the collapse of the scientific socialist system, which in turn, and to a degree no less than savage capitalism, had persevered in societies and ruled them harmfully imprisoning them in an ideological cage not very different than the cage that had been established by post-fall capitalism. Communism is an injustice and a delineation of souls and minds.
If there are experts who think that achieving social justice and securing decent work are exclusively the result of purely social economic progress, then they have gone far astray and have overlooked human selfishness and greed in addition to the control of the strong to the weak in socio-economic relations.
Historical facts have proven that the development of social protection in the liberal world came about solely under the pressure of the exacting movements that were inspired by socialism and communism, and that the collapse of this pressure coupled with the decay of the communist system have shown their results in the year following this collapse, as was witnessed by an established decline in the just distribution of income at the global level. As a result, the ensuing class schizophrenia wiped out the middle class which had been the only channel for social mobility in the liberal world.
Statistics have proven that poverty has increased to the point of misery, despite the strenuous efforts at the international level by United Nations organizations and NGOs in supporting the mostly deprived groups.
Since the end of the "glorious thirties" that followed World War II, unemployment has been on the rise, and it has taken frightening trends. We are hereby speaking of long-term unemployment and youth unemployment - or both - as the lifespan of the unemployed has decreased of more than two years and may in the medium if not long term reach a whole lifetime, as people fluctuate between unemployment and informal and sometimes illegal work for decades.
Since the 1990s, we have been witnessing a steady rise in informal work as well as socio-economic marginalization in all its psychological, medical, and familial aspects. This frightening phenomenon must perforce lead to stimulate entrepreneurship and thus re-form the middle class. However, these measures are not enough.
Social justice needs a liberal system based on specific social values, the core of which is the value of justice that the ecumenical movement has been advocating for decades, as it considers that there is no peace, either among specific population groups, or among nations, except by achieving justice.
As for the transition from informal employment procedures to official legally backed employment that would secure a rigorous protection of employee rights, this requires firm socio-economic policies and not a state's overlook, like that which is common today. It goes without saying that it is almost impossible to reach a status of adequate social protection, with rising
unemployment threatening the future of humanity, when work as a social value becomes dubious.
While we appreciate the efforts of the International Labor Organization in this context, we consider that the methods and policies that have been proposed to date will not go beyond the scope of wishes, or recommendations at best.
Being a Christian Faith based institution, we see that the world has gone too far in its greed, and that the huge and suspicious wealth in a large part of it - although it enjoys "legal" coverage - requires radical measures and policies aimed at redistributing incomes. Since independence, Lebanon has been a blatant model of economic injustice and oppression inflicted on the deprived classes, a situation which is aggravated today. We are sure that many other countries in the world are in the same furnace.
In the biography and sayings of the Lord Jesus, there are many examples that form a cornerstone for a culture that would drive a person to accept the idea of sharing his product with his needy brother more, and even incite him to give up part of the fruit of his production to those in need as well as for the common good.
The owners of productive establishments or those in charge of them should not forget that the wealth they reap from their communities as well as from their surroundings, should induce them to accept the fact of having to “pay” a social tax that would lead to the establishment of a sound basis for social justice.
“How difficult it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18: 24 -25). The Master said this two thousand years ago, and there is reason to fear that the matter will remain the same for two thousand more years as the big fish go on eating the small fish while humanity remains in its misery.