To the Employers' Delegates

On Tuesday, 15 June 1982, the Holy Father addressed the Employers' Delegates, to whom he spoke of “reconciliation and collaboration between social groups, in the common search for greater justice.”

Ladies and gentlemen.

I am particularly pleased to be able to address you personally. Your participation in the work of this organization demonstrates that it is possible to talk about reconciliation and collaboration between social groups, in the common search for greater justice.

Regarding all this, the road traveled is even a guarantee of hope. Your presence here was not implicit for everyone when the International Labor Organization was founded. But the first employers who participated in the sessions of the International Labor Conference freely agreed to establish the legal mechanisms of permanent and ever closer collaboration with all social forces. You are the heirs of these pioneers. And today, most employers' organizations see the organic participation of all components of economic and social life as a guarantee of progress and peace for society as a whole.

Your responsibilities as an employer today remain paramount and undoubtedly increasingly complex . I am thinking of the economic difficulties that competition and the crisis cause your businesses to risk, which requires on your part a greater amount of imagination, management rigor and courage.

You have had the privilege of accessing the freedom to undertake and decide, which is so important for the dignity of man; your professional organizations can constitute a space of freedom in modern industrial society where they are “intermediate bodies” that help protect individuals from the overwhelming domination of the State and economic bureaucracy. Society has a duty to recognize the role of employers.

But these advantages come with great responsibilities for you. Your social function must increasingly be based on other rights , while taking into account the mutual dependencies on the one who I called in my encyclical the "indirect employer". You are expected to make the utmost effort to create or maintain jobs, in working and participation conditions that correspond to the fair demands of today's workers, also according to the possibilities of each nation. Since the criterion, as I mentioned this morning, is that work is at the service of man and that the entire economy remains at the service of man, and not the other way around.

The organic participation you have taken here, alongside the government delegates and those of the workers, puts you on the right path. I appreciate the merit of your efforts, and the merit of many other employers that you represent here, given the challenge posed to them. I ask God to inspire you and bless you, your families and all those dear to you.

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