Unemployment--Moral Evil?

When the Fives-Lille-Cail Co. near Lille, France, found its metal business falling short of expectations, it sent out immediate-dismissal notices to 527 employees. The men asked for time to find new jobs and went into an abortive sit-down strike, but the management was unmoved. Last week came helping hands from two Roman Catholic churchmen. Achille Cardinal Lienart, Bishop of Lille, and Emile Maurice Guerry, Archbishop of Cambrai, issued a joint statement about the responsibilities of managers toward the managed:

"The first duty of everyone is to become acutely conscious of the seriousness of the moral evil that unemployment constitutes for workers' homes. Moral evil, we say, and not a simple economic fact as alleged by certain economists' theories, which would not hesitate to propose it as a useful and even charitable solution in certain circumstances to facilitate recovery . . .

"A moral evil because it strikes, through its burden of suffering, human beings in their flesh and heart . . . bringing insecurity, anguish for the next day, and often misery . . .

"A moral evil because it violates the pattern of God, who wants man to work and be able to find, in the fruits of his labor, for himself and those dear to him, the means of living a human life. In a human economy, in a juster and better organized society, there must no longer be room for unemployment . . .

"In a period of.economic difficulties, firing is too easy a solution ... If sacrifices are necessary, it is not the workers' wages which must be sacrificed first: it is the profits."

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