U.S. Capitol workers are marking the occasion of Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, D.C., by going on strike.

The federal contract workers asked the pope last week for a meeting. “By walking off their jobs to ‘Fight for $15 and a Union,’ the workers will be calling on Congress and the President to put the pope’s words into action,” a press release on the strike says. Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is scheduled to speak to the workers at an interfaith service Tuesday morning.

The question of who gets to meet with Pope Francis on his trip to Cuba and the United States has been a controversial one. He met with Raul and Fidel Castro but did not plan an “official meeting” with Cuban dissidents — and regime authorities barred dissidents who were invited to meet the pope from making the meeting. Meanwhile, Vatican officials have pushed back against President Obama’s apparent decision to exclude conservative Catholics from meeting the pope at the White House.

The workers’ decision to strike in conjunction with Francis’s visit underscores the degree to which the pope has come to be perceived as a left-wing force in American politics. And Representative Paul Gosar (R., Ariz.), a devout Roman Catholic, announced last week that he would boycott Francis’s address to Congress. “When the pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one,” Gosar wrote.

#share#There’s one thing on which the pope, the striking federal contractors, and conservatives might agree: “The U.S. Government is America’s leading low-wage job creator,” as the strikers put it in their announcement.

Francis is expected to focus on climate change, “the excesses of capitalism,” and immigration, while downplaying the issue of abortion during his meeting with President Obama. He did, however, throw an elbow at the Castros during his trip to Havana. “Whoever wishes to be great must serve others, not be served by others,” he said. “Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.”

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.