ACADEMY PLENARY STARTS TODAY

VATICAN CITY, FEB 3, 1999 (VIS) - The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences opened its fifth plenary session today in the Vatican on the theme "Towards Reducing Unemployment." Participants include 24 members of the academy, four members of the Council of the Foundation for the Development of Social Sciences and eight expert professors.

Today's meeting began at 9 a.m. with an address by academy President Edmund Malinvaud of France and an introduction by academician Margaret Archer of the University of Warwick on "Unemployment: Social Needs and Economic Tendencies. Scenarios for their Ethical Reconciliation."

Some of the other topics to be discussed in the four-day meeting, which includes an audience with the Holy Father, are: "The Universal Basic Income: its contribution to reducing unemployment and relationship to Social Teaching on the 'family wage'"; "Ways and Means of Integrating the Young and Unskilled into Work"; "The Changing Meaning and Value of Work in a Globalized Information Society"; "The Changing Meaning of Work (secularized versus Humanistic) and Its Implications for the 'new' Society" and "The Spiritualist of Work in the Asian Context."

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