Is work an essential element of being human and, if so, is it inhumane to prohibit asylum seekers from working? Last week, Father Sean Healy and Sister Brigid Reynolds of the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) presented a paper on work at the Vatican.
The conference explored the meaning of work and was organised and sponsored by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and five universities in Italy, Belgium, Spain and the US.
CORI has been one of the social partners in the Republic since 1996 and contributed to the negotiation of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, and its predecessor, Partnership 2000. It represents more than 135 religious congregations with 12,000 members in 1,400 communities throughout Ireland.
In their paper, Fr Healy and Sr Reynolds show that, in religious traditions, work is assessed positively and negatively.
"It is seen as creative, as a service to community and as a divine vocation. Yet it is also negatively evaluated as a punishment for sin."
This ambivalence is also reflected outside of the religious mindset. Work is regarded as important for a person's "self-concept, sense of fulfilment and integration with society". But equally it is "tolerated as a means to an end: many people work not so much for the sake of the work itself but for the rewards that work brings".
The authors distil the reflections of people on work through the ages to four key aspects.
First, they see work as facilitating personal development and the development of the world. Second, work is needed to provide goods and services. Third, it is a central ingredient of social interaction and, fourth, it involves struggle and toil.
In an insight that surely has implications for any country forbidding asylum-seekers the right to work, they say work is "an essential ingredient in the development of the person". Not only is it "central to our existence" but through work we "realise our humanity". Work plays "a major role in forming who we are".
It is not merely a matter of production or a means of subsistence. Rather, work helps us to discover our gifts and talents and contributes to our development as human beings.
The writers quote Pope John Paul II, who said that through work a person "achieves fulfilment as a human being and, indeed, in a sense, becomes more a human being".
If the Pope and CORI are right, depriving asylum-seekers of the right to work is to deprive them of human fulfilment, personal development and the fuller realisation of their humanity.
Our work contributes to community. As the current Pope's encyclical Laborem Exercens puts it, work can "increase the common good" and "add to the heritage of the whole human family, of all people living in the world". Again, while the authors do not extrapolate, to force asylum-seekers into dependency by refusing them the right to work seems a violation of their dignity.
Recently, IBEC called for the right to work for asylum-seekers after six months of applying for asylum. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has also called for this.
In a statement last June, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform said the Government "now has in place a comprehensive asylum strategy, which is aimed at greatly increasing processing capacity to deliver more speedy decisions in relation to applications for refugee status leading to:
the completion to finality of the processing of all new asylum applications within a six-month period; and
the processing of the asylum applications currently on hand as soon as possible, and dealing with the increased numbers of repatriations which are expected to arise in respect of persons who do not qualify for refugee status".
However, there are asylum seekers who have been waiting for their cases to be dealt with since July 1999. During that time, they have been refused permission to work.
Not only does it "not make sense" in IBEC's words; from what Fr Healy and Sr Reynolds said at the Vatican, we can conclude it is also immoral and a violation of their human dignity.
jmarms@irish-times.ie
