VIEWPOINTS | The family and the right to work

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BY OSCAR CRUZ
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THE UNIVERSAL and well-known Social Doctrine of the Church has the following signal pronouncement that acquires big relevance and importance – during these times in particular that overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have not become less in number even but listening or reading the news of the days:  “Work is a foundation for the formation of family life – something that is natural right and something as well that man is called to.  It ensures a means of subsistence and serves as a guarantee for raising his children.”

Some points are in order:

1. To live and to continue living, man has to work.  

When there is no work, the same simply begs, steals and/or even engages in any suspect money-making ventures – at the cost of social order and peace, not to mention his personal liability before the moral doctrine and sphere of civil legislation. This particular phenomenon alone proves the necessity of work.  So goes the well-known saying that someone able but does not want to work, let him not also eat.

2. When alone, man needs to work in order to survive.  

When he gets married, he has to work even more to support his spouse.  This makes the right to get married somehow dependent on the right to work as well as in actually having work.  Otherwise, his right to get married rests questionable.  In other words, how can man – on whose shoulders principally rests the mandate to work – even think of getting married when he cannot even support himself by not working at all.

3. When man does not only get married but also has a family to support, the more his right to work and his actual tenure of work become not simply reasonable but in fact necessary. 

In this case, he has nothing less than himself but also his spouse and his children as well, to provide for.  The truth is that when a family man does not work, he becomes accountable not only to himself but to others as well, specially so to his wife and children who are precisely dependent on him for their well-being.

4. Raising children begins with begetting them.

But thereafter raising them is a rather long and demanding process especially on the part of the “head” of the family.  And children not only need food and clothing but also formation and education.  All these require funding which work provides – work that is ordinarily expected from the father.  It is not only questionable but also demeaning when the wife goes to work but the husband goes here and there, anywhere precisely because work he does not.

5. In these times, it is not a rarity that both spouses work to support themselves together with their family.

But it is not yet acceptable when only the wife works and the husband does not.  The “Right to Work” becomes more relevant and even imperative to the man who authored a family.  In this case, the said right becomes an “Obligation to Work”.

So it is that work of one kind or another must be available –preferably in one’s own country that makes the OFW an argument against honest, real, and true Independence./PN

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THE UNIVERSAL and well-known Social Doctrine of the Church has the following signal pronouncement that acquires big relevance and importance – during these times in particular that overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have not become less in number even but listening or reading the news of the days:  “Work is a foundation for the formation of family life – something that is natural right and something as well that man is called to.  It ensures a means of subsistence and serves as a guarantee for raising his children.”

Some points are in order:

1. To live and to continue living, man has to work.  

When there is no work, the same simply begs, steals and/or even engages in any suspect money-making ventures – at the cost of social order and peace, not to mention his personal liability before the moral doctrine and sphere of civil legislation. This particular phenomenon alone proves the necessity of work.  So goes the well-known saying that someone able but does not want to work, let him not also eat.

2. When alone, man needs to work in order to survive.  

When he gets married, he has to work even more to support his spouse.  This makes the right to get married somehow dependent on the right to work as well as in actually having work.  Otherwise, his right to get married rests questionable.  In other words, how can man – on whose shoulders principally rests the mandate to work – even think of getting married when he cannot even support himself by not working at all.

3. When man does not only get married but also has a family to support, the more his right to work and his actual tenure of work become not simply reasonable but in fact necessary. 

In this case, he has nothing less than himself but also his spouse and his children as well, to provide for.  The truth is that when a family man does not work, he becomes accountable not only to himself but to others as well, specially so to his wife and children who are precisely dependent on him for their well-being.

4. Raising children begins with begetting them.

But thereafter raising them is a rather long and demanding process especially on the part of the “head” of the family.  And children not only need food and clothing but also formation and education.  All these require funding which work provides – work that is ordinarily expected from the father.  It is not only questionable but also demeaning when the wife goes to work but the husband goes here and there, anywhere precisely because work he does not.

5. In these times, it is not a rarity that both spouses work to support themselves together with their family.

But it is not yet acceptable when only the wife works and the husband does not.  The “Right to Work” becomes more relevant and even imperative to the man who authored a family.  In this case, the said right becomes an “Obligation to Work”.

So it is that work of one kind or another must be available –preferably in one’s own country that makes the OFW an argument against honest, real, and true Independence./PN

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