Francis answers the workers of steel industry Ilva: he quotes the first article of the Italian Constitution: “We can say that depriving people of work or exploiting them with unworthy or badly paid jobs is unconstitutional”.
Those who lay-off and relocate to make more profit are not good businesspersons, they are not entrepreneurs, they are speculators. Francis said in his first meeting of his visit to Genoa, inside a pavilion of the steel industry. Ilva’s employees are now 1550 - just a few years ago they were more than three thousand - and about 400 are in “cassa integrazione”, an all-Italian term describing the condition of workers who are forced home from work and receive a small wage refund. The challenge that the steel industry faces today is to keep and win new market shares, while making steel production compatible with the environment, on which it seems they are getting results as the closure of some of its critical areas has resulted in a more sustainable production on the environmental side. However, investments are required to complete its remediation.
Ferdinando Garrè, entrepreneur of the Naval Repair District, has asked Pope Francis for a word of comfort and encouragement “in the face of the obstacles we entrepreneurs have to deal with every day”
“It’s my first time in Genoa. Being so close to the harbor reminds me of where my dad came from and this gives a great deal of emotion, thanks to your welcome. I knew the questions before, I wanted to think over them well so to give a good answer because today’s work is at risk. Today is a world where work is not considered with the dignity it has and which it gives. I will make a premise: the world of work is a human priority! It is therefore a Christian priority, it is ours. It is also the Pope’s priority because it is the first command that God has given to Adam, “go and work the earth, dominate it”. There has always been a friendship between the Church and the world of work, starting with Jesus; where there is a worker there is the interest and the love of the Church. From this question emerges the typical virtues of the entrepreneur. Creativity, love for one’s own business, passion and pride for the one’s own work done with the hands and the intelligence and that of his workers. There is no good economy without a good entrepreneur, without the ability to create work. In his words, one can feel the esteem he has for the city, for its economy, for the quality of the people, his workers and for the environment, the sea. It is important to recognize the virtues of all workers. Their need is the need to do the job well because the job must be done well. There is a general perception that workers work well just because they are paid: this is a serious lack of respect in workers and labor because it denies the dignity of work that begins exactly with working well for dignity, for pride. Real entrepreneurs - I will try to profile them – know their workers because they work beside them, they work with them. Do not forget that entrepreneurs must be first of all workers! If they do not have this experience of dignity, they will not be good businessperson. They share the workers’ hard work, they share the joys of work, of solving problems together, and create something together. When they have to lay off someone, it is always a painful choice and they would rather not do it. No good entrepreneur likes to lay off their people! Those who think they are solving their company’s problems by firing people are not good businesspersons, they are traders. Today they are selling their people; tomorrow they will be selling their own dignity. It is an ongoing suffering, and sometimes, good ideas come out from this suffering in order to avoid dismissal. I remember almost a year ago, during a Mass at Santa Marta, a man who was weeping approached me: “I came to ask for grace, I can’t go any further, and I have to file for bankruptcy. That would mean dismissing about sixty workers, and I do not want to that, because I feel like as if i was firing my own self! “And that man was crying, he was a good businessman. He praised and prayed for his people, because they were his people! “Its my family”. One of the illness of the economy is the progressive transformation of entrepreneurs into speculators. Entrepreneurs must never be confused with speculators, they are two different types. The speculator is a figure similar to what Jesus in the Gospel calls mercenary, in opposition to the good shepherd. They see companies and workers only as means to profit, they use companies and workers to make profit, they do not love them. They don’t consider laying-off, shutting down, relocating the company a problem, because speculators use, exploit, eat people and means for their own profit.
When good entrepreneurs inhabit the economy then businesses are friendly to the people. When the economy is in the hands of speculators, everything is ruined. It becomes a faceless, abstract economy. Behind the decisions of speculators, there are not people, so they don’t see people when they are laying off. When the economy loses contact with the faces of the people, it becomes faceless and therefore ruthless. We must fear speculators, not entrepreneurs. But paradoxically sometimes the political system seems to encourage those who speculate on the work, and not those who invest and believe in the work. By creating bureaucracy and controls on speculators penalizing who is not one. It is known that regulations and laws designed for dishonest people end up penalizing the honest ones and today there are many real honest entrepreneurs who love their workers and their business, who are working to carry on their business. And they are the ones most penalized from these policies that actually favor speculators. But despite everything, honest entrepreneurs keep going forward. I like to quote a beautiful statement by Luigi Einaudi, economist and President of the Italian Republic: “Thousands, millions of people work, produce and save despite everything we can come up with to molest them, jam them, and discourage them. It is a natural vocation that drives them; not just the thirst for money. The pleasure, the pride of seeing your company thrive, gain credit and customer trust, expand their plants, embellish their headquarters, are as a powerful drive to progress as it is profit. If that were not the case, we could not explain why there are entrepreneurs who spend all their energy on their own company and invest all their capitals to often gain much less than if they had used them in more safe and comfortable ways.” You are a representative of these entrepreneurs. But beware, all you entrepreneurs and employees, be careful of the speculators and of the rules and laws that end up favoring speculators and not the real entrepreneurs and leave people without work.”
Micaela, a trade union representative, spoke of the new technological frontier and of the fear that instead of creating new employment, it will contribute to creating precariousness and social discomfort: “Today, she said, the real revolution would be to transform the word “work “into a concrete form of social redemption”
You have ended your sentence with” social redemption “, I’m thinking of “social blackmail”. I will tell you about a real thing that happened in Italy a year ago. There were some unemployed people queuing for a job, an interesting office job. The girl who told me about it was an educated woman who spoke some foreign languages, an important skill for that place. They told her, “Yes, but it will be 10, 11 hours a day.” She immediately said yes, she needed a job. “As a start, it will be 800 euros a month.” And she said, “Only 800 euro for 11 hours?” And the speculator: “Miss, look at that queue, if you do not like it then leave.” This is not redemption, but blackmail! Then another person told me he had a job but only from September to June. They would lay him off in June to hire him back in September. (So to avoid paying further takes), Undeclared work. Dialogue in workplaces is no less important than that in parishes or in solemn conventions. The places of the Church are the places of life. Someone may say: why is this priest coming here to tell us these things, why doesn’t he do it in the parish! No, we are all the people of God. In the Bible and the Gospel readings, many of the meetings between God and men have happened while people are at work. The first disciples of Jesus were fishermen and received His call while working by the lake. Lack of work is far more than lacking a source of income. Work is also this, but it is much more, through work we become more human, our humanity flourishes. The Church’s social doctrine has always seen work as a participation to creation, which continues through the hands, mind and heart of the workers. On Earth, there are few joys greater than those experienced through work. As there are fewer sorrows than when work crushes, humiliates and kills. The world of work and humankind go hand in hand. Through work, men and women are anointed with dignity. The whole social pact is built around the world of work. When there is little or no work, or it is poorly performed, then democracy starts falling into decline, the whole social pact starts falling into decline. This is the meaning of the first article of the Italian Constitution: Italy is a Republic based on work. We can say then, taking work away from people or exploiting people with unworthy or badly paid jobs is unconstitutional, according to this article! If Italy were not founded on work, the Italian Republic would not be a democracy because the place of work has always been occupied by privileges, caste and annuity. One needs to look at technological transformations and not give into the ideology that imagines a world where maybe half or two-thirds of the workers will work, while the others will be maintained by a welfare check. It must be clear that the social goal is not an income for everyone, but a job for everyone. Because without a job for everyone there will be no dignity for everyone. Today’s work and that of tomorrow will be different; it might be very different, let’s think about the industrial revolution. There is going to be a revolution, but it will have to be work and not retirement! Not retired people but work! One ought to retire at the right age; it is an act of justice yet against the dignity of the people to retire them at the age of 35-40 with a state check. And take care of yourself! Do you have food? Yes. Do you have dignity? No, because I do not have a job. Without work you can survive, but to live one needs to work and the choice is between surviving and living. We need work for everyone, for young people. Do you know the percentage of young people aged 25 and younger who are unemployed in Italy? I will not tell you, go look for the statistics. This is a mortgage on the future, because these young people are growing up without dignity because they are not anointed with work that gives them dignity. It’s the core ... A monthly welfare check that keeps you and your family going does not solve the problem. The problem is solved with work for everyone.”
Sergio, a worker on a training course promoted by a religious association, asked how to witness the Gospel in a working environment where “competition, career, and economic aspects” often prevail.
“Work values are changing very fast, and many of the major enterprise and high finance are not in line with the human dimension and therefore with Christian humanism. The emphasis on competition, is not only an anthropological mistake, but also an economic mistake because it forgets that an enterprise entails mutual cooperation. When competition between workers is systematic, perhaps there will be some advantage in the short term, but it will end up undermining the fabric that is the soul of every organization. Therefore, when the crisis strikes, the company brakes apart and implodes, because there is no rope that holds it together. This competitive culture is a mistake, it is a vision that needs to be changed if we want the enterprise, the workers and the economy’s best. Another value, that is actually a disvalue, is meritocracy, which today is so praised and fascinates a lot. Beyond the good faith of many who invoke it, meritocracy is becoming an ethical legitimacy of inequality. Through meritocracy, new capitalism gives a moral dress to inequality by interpreting people’s talents not as a gift but as a merit, determining therefore a system of cumulative advantages and disadvantages. The poor is considered undeserving, and therefore guilty. And if poverty is the poor’s own fault, then the rich are exonerated from doing something about it. This is the old logic used by Job’s friends who wanted to convince him that he was to blame for his misfortune, but this is not the logic of the Gospel and of life. Meritocracy in the Gospel is found in the figure of the older brother of the prodigal son who despises his younger brother and thinks he must remain a failure. The father, however, thinks that no son deserves the acorns of the pigs. “
Finally, Vittoria, unemployed, explained to the Pope that the unemployed feel the institutions “not only distant but actually more interested in passive welfarism rather than creating favorable conditions for work ... Where can we find the strength to never give up?”.
“Like those who lose their job and cannot find another one and feel as if they were losing their dignity. Like when someone is forced into accepting bad jobs or jobs that do wrong. Like those bad jobs in the illegal trafficking of weapons, pornography, gambling and all those companies that do not respect workers and the environment, like those who are paid a lot because their job takes away their whole life. A paradox of our society is the presence of a number of people who would like to work and cannot, and others who would want to work less, but can’t because they have been bought by businesses. Work becomes a brother when there is holiday and free time next to it. Without this, it becomes slave labor, even if it is a super-paid job. In families where there are unemployed people, it is never really Sunday, because work on Monday is missing. To celebrate the holidays it is necessary to be able to celebrate work. They go hand in hand, marking each other’s time. Consumerism is an idol of our time, consumption is the center of our society and therefore it is pleasure. Today, there are the new temples open 24/7, which promise salvation, centers of pure consumption and pure pleasure. Work is fatigue and sweat, and when a hedonist society sees and wants only consumption, failing to understand the value of fatigue and sweat, it also fails to understand the value of work. All idolatries are experiences of pure consumption. If we do not regain a culture that values fatigue and sweat, we will not find a new relationship with the work and we will continue desiring the consumption of pure pleasure. Work is the center of every social pact and not just the mean to consumption. Between work and consumption, there are many beautiful and important things: freedom, honor, dignity, rights for all. If we sell work over to consumption, we will soon sell out also these.
Many of the most beautiful prayers of our parents and grandparents were prayers on labor recited before, after, and during work. Work is present every day in the Eucharist, whose gifts are fruit of the land and of man’s work. The fields, the sea, the factories, have always been altars from which beautiful and pure prayers have been raised to God who welcomed and collected them. Prayers that were recited through the hands, sweat, and fatigue of those working who did not know how to pray with the mouth. God has always welcomed all of these prayers and continues to welcome them today. This is why I would like to conclude with a prayer to Holy Spirit: “May you send us a ray of light, may you come father of the poor and of the workers”
