Employment problems challenge the responsibility of the State, whose duty it is to promote active employment policies, that is, policies that will encourage the creation of employment opportunities within the national territory, providing the production sector with incentives to this end. The duty of the State does not consist so much in directly guaranteeing the right to work of every citizen, making the whole of economic life very rigid and restricting individual free initiative, as much as in the duty to “sustain business activities by creating conditions which will ensure job opportunities, by stimulating those activities where they are lacking or by supporting them in moments of crisis”.630John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 48: AAS 83 (1991), 853.
Given the quickly developing global dimensions of economic-financial relationships and of the labour market, there is a need to promote an effective international cooperation among States by means of treaties, agreements and common plans of action that safeguard the right to work, even in the most critical phases of the economic cycle, at the national and international levels. It is necessary to be aware of the fact that human work is a right upon which the promotion of social justice and civil peace directly depend. Important tasks in this regard fall to international organizations and to labour unions. Joining forces in the most suitable ways, they must strive first of all to create “an ever more tightly knit fabric of juridical norms that protect the work of men, women and youth, ensuring its proper remuneration”.631Paul VI, Address to the International Labour Organization (10 June 1969), 21: AAS 61 (1969), 500; cf. John Paul II, Address to the International Labour Organization (15 June 1982), 13: AAS 74 (1982), 1004-1005.
To promote the right to work it is important today, as in the days of Rerum Novarum, that there be “an open process by which society organize[s] itself”.632John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 16: AAS 83 (1991), 813. Meaningful testimonies and examples of self-organization can be found in the numerous initiatives, business and social, characterized by forms of participation, cooperation and self-management that manifest the joining of energies in solidarity. These are offered to the market as a multifaceted sector of work activity whose mark of distinction is the special attention given to the relational components of the goods produced and of the services rendered in many areas: instruction, health care, basic social services and culture. The initiatives of this so-called “third sector” represent an ever more important opportunity for the development of labour and the economy.