“I would like to address my sincere apologies to the marble workers and citizens regarding my words which have been misunderstood as obviously inappropriate. My anger in defining certain behaviors that can sometimes cause even very serious accidents is precisely because, like everyone, I think these accidents should be avoided and prevented”.
Start like this Alberto Franchi’s letter of apologypresident and CEO of Franchi Umberto Marmi spa, a Carrara company with a turnover of 76 million euros, which ended up in the eye of the storm after the outburst – broadcast by Report on Sunday evening’s episode on Rai3 – in which he placed the responsibility for the numerous accidents in the district’s extraction quarries on the workers.
“Here the quarrymen get hurt because they are morons. The accidents that have occurred in the last ten years, I’m sorry to say, but unfortunately they are the fault of the worker. What are you doing, hitting him? If you don’t have to go through here and you go under me there and fall, whose fault is it, mine or yours?”, Franchi explained to the correspondent of Reports.
Words that had provoked the disdain of local institutions and trade unions that they proclaimed for tomorrow – April 24 – a whole day of strike in the Apuan-Versilia district complete with a protest procession in Carrara, from the company headquarters to the provincial headquarters of the industrialists. However, without having any negative impact on a financial level given the listing on the stock exchange: yesterday, in fact, at the reopening of Piazza Affari the Franchi Umberto marmi spa stock recorded growthalso maintained today, with a growth in the morning of +6% in the last five days.
“It pains me to see that my words were perceived as an attempt to shift the responsibility onto the employees,” explains Franchi in the letter in an attempt to ward off the accusations on a topic, that of safety at work, at the center of attention after the numerous cases of white deaths recorded in Tuscany. “I firmly believe that every company must provide its employees with all the tools and resources necessary to guarantee a safe working environmentand the entire marble sector has always invested in continuous training in the field of safety, making all the equipment necessary to prevent accidents available to the work environment. Ours is a delicate job and requires responsibility on the part of all workers, respect for the processes so that the resources can operate in an appropriate manner for the workplace, always paying the utmost attention to the safety of each operator”.
For this reason, the CEO of the Carrarino company concludes: “Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience or misunderstanding that my words may have caused.”
An intervention that comes a few hours after the chorus of criticism and the distancing of Confindustria Toscana Nord which however does not definitively end the controversy. “Faced with the arrogance, which is a disgrace, of an entrepreneur who invoices tens of millions of euros thanks to the work of his workers and insults them, even blaming them for accidents, politics must also mobilize,” explains the deputy and dem regional secretary, Emiliano Fossiannouncing the adhesion of the Tuscan Democratic Party to the trade union demonstration scheduled for tomorrow in Carrara.
Tags: Accidents prevented words inappropriate
