Turin – The message of the bishop of Turin for May 1st: “Do not close factories for profit reasons”
Monsignor Roberto Repole, archbishop of Turin and bishop of Susa, in his message for Labor Day on May 1st, faced the painful closure of the Stellantis plant in Mirafiori and criticizes the logic that favors the exaggerated accumulation of profits to the detriment of people.
Repole points out that, while it is understandable to close for business survival, it is not acceptable to do so to maximize profits. The Archbishop of Turin recalls the importance of workers for the economy and the territory, highlighting the link between company success and employee well-being.
This is Monsignor Repole’s message
“Dear ones, after a winter marked by the painful closure of various factories in the Turin area and in the Susa Valley, I would like to take the opportunity of Labor Day and the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker for a reflection on the difficult profession of entrepreneurs in our time of great economic competition, which challenges companies and forces them to make continuous changes to maintain competitiveness and ensure their survival.
The fate of workers and their families in this delicate season also depends on the success of entrepreneurs: for this reason the Church gratefully supports and also prays for all those who embrace business activity by investing resources and spending their intelligence, their courage and imagination.
The adventure of companies, including that of multinational industries based in Turin, is also the adventure of a territory, which offers companies the most important resource: workers. Today it must be forcefully said that workers cannot be separated from the interests of companies: they are the men and women who, with their commitment, with their lives, with the lives of their families, make wealth and existence itself possible. of companies.
I want to express great gratitude to the entrepreneurs who fight to keep their companies alive.
I would also like to point out that the total number of workers in a territory represents the market to which companies turn their products and services: if this market maintains its spending and consumption capacity, the companies themselves will benefit. Unfortunately in the Turin area it has happened and continues to happen to many people that they lose their jobs in companies that are no longer able to remain on the market and go bankrupt.
What should never happen to workers and employees is losing their jobs in companies that enjoy good health and are producing wealth and profit, yet are not satisfied: these companies, often driven by an exasperated logic of seeking ever greater profits , they cut jobs or move them elsewhere.
This is, sadly, a dynamic present in the international market, sometimes driven by the valuation of stocks on the stock exchange and sometimes also by the search for rewards for top managers, which often leads even healthy companies, with good profits, to close factories.
If the choice to abandon our territory can be understood when it is necessary for the survival of the company, it does not seem to me to be acceptable when it responds to the logic of multiplying profits in an exaggerated way: I believe that there are limits to the accumulation of wealth, beyond for whom it is not legitimate to sacrifice people’s lives. Well, I would like us to reflect on all this together and very concretely – entrepreneurs, workers and their representatives, the political class – to contribute to the growth of our beloved territory.
As Bishop, I read the present in the light of the Gospel which asks us to put the good of man, who is a child of God, at the center of all our choices, including economic choices.
Behind the extreme dynamics of the markets I seem to read a poor vision of the human person, sacrificed to the logic of money. It is a vision that will never fill our hearts, not even that of those who move the economic levers and who will one day wonder what use he has made of it. All of us, each of us in his role, will ask ourselves one day if we have borne good fruit.”
