Pope rebukes fascist Milei, backs “indispensable” unions

Pope Leo has given a speech in Argentina as an open rebuke to the fascist Milei regime’s war on working people, their rights and their collective action.

Speaking at the Catholic University of Argentina, Leo rebuked businesses that harm or disregard humanity and “technocrats” who enable them, adding that trade unions are “indispensable institutions” if they “defend those who have no voice and resist the commodification of labour” against corporations that have become “structures of sin” in their pursuit of profit at the cost of humanity:

…when economic profit is established as the sole criterion of success. A business becomes dehumanised and turns into a structure of sin that generates exclusion. Business leaders are called to overturn this technocratic mentality through ethical investment that gives priority to the dignity of work and environmental sustainability.

Recognizing that financial success must be measured in terms of the common good. In this regard, trade unions and workers associations find an important area for growth and development by becoming more directly involved in ensuring that workers conditions are dignified.

The initiatives which emerge from that tradition, including associations, trade unions, cooperatives, and welfare associations, have contributed decisively to improving labour legislation, protecting the most vulnerable, and promoting more human conditions.

Their specific mission is to be instruments of solidarity and cohesion, channels of cooperation between workers and businesses. From this perspective, Trade unions are indispensable institutions when they defend those who have no voice and resist the commodification of labour to maintain this moral authority.

But he also rebuked unions who compromise with power and capital and their race and culture war on human rights and value:

However, the trade union movement must keep its gaze fixed on the existential peripheries, welcoming and reaching out to precarious workers and those excluded from the formal systems while taking into account the profound transformations affecting the work community.

The challenges posed by artificial intelligence and unregulated automation can put countless jobs at risk and become a real threat to proper integral human development. Technology must always be subject to ethics.

The speech is also a direct rebuke to the US and the usually Israel-aligned AI ‘broligarchy’ that is constantly eroding our rights and freedoms to increase their own power and wealth and defend colonisation and imperialism. Tragically for the world, most governments are actively collaborating with those malignant powers.