Rome (NEV), June 28, 2020 – The ‘Churches Action for Labour and Life’ (CALL) network held its last assembly in April 2018 when it inaugurated a new line of reflection and proposal compared to that on which it started in 2010, in the field of KEK: digitization.
Since then the coordination group, which includes Antonella Visintin – coordinator of the Globalization and Environment Commission (GLAM) of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI), met regularly, despite the network coordinator concluded his own mandate and has not yet been replaced. In the framework of the preparation of next assembly in 2021 and an intermediate meeting in autumn 2020, he wanted to express his own evaluation, through the document “Digitization and future of work and social relations: social and climate-friendly choices must be timely”, referring to the scenarios produced by COVID-19.
“The statement we have prepared – underlines Visintin – highlights a substantial homogeneity of strategies for protection from the virus also in churches, and the differential attention towards people with respect to goods. Production has been safeguarded (and has already put in place strategies of resilience) while minors, elderly and fragile subjects have been penalized as a consequence of the sharp contraction of ‘non-essential’ welfare, e.g. health care”.
On the issue of labor law, CALL expressed concern about the many derogations that were made during the pandemic: “In many situations, labor rights have been derogated in the name of the emergency and the discharge of public services on families, on the one hand, has demonstrated rigidity and inadequacies and, on the other hand, revealed how widely homes are inappropriate places of work and learning and how precarious and problematic the relationships between cohabitants are”.
In this context, CALL reflected on the issue of digitization that “has proved to be a resource, even for churches, and towards which confidence has increased despite wide margins of familiarization and adaptation to different needs are still in existence”.
Visentin conludes, “like the social strategies of reaction to the virus, digitization is not neutral and for this reason CALL hopes that the actions of support to the economy, also at European level, will be based on social and environmental sustainability. CALL seeks to understand how spaced and digitized work can be a good solution in respect of life times”.
, June 28, 2020 - The 'Churches Action for Labour and Life' (CALL) network held its last assembly in April 2018 when it inaugurated){kind=link}