It’s complicated to talk about work on this May 1st, when less than a year ago, in Monopoli on a construction site, Vito Germano and Cosimo Lomele lost their lives, overwhelmed by a rocky ridge while they were at work.
In the same year 2023, another 76 workers died at work in Puglia. In the province of Bari there were 34 victims in total. A trail of blood that is not justified only by the lack of application of safety measures, but rather by the perverse system of subcontracting.
We no longer think about the quality of the companies but about the maximum reduction in supply, made possible because the work shifts to smaller companies, which use low-wage workers, even illegally, who are not trained in safety. A chain of profit and exploitation that seems never-ending, leading to accidents, quickly dismissed as misfortunes.
You don’t die alone at work.
In the last ten years, half a million young people have fled our countries in search of fortune, often abroad, and a million do not study or work.
In the more industrialized areas of the region, work appears antithetical to the environment and health. An often irreconcilable conflict. Just as the plague of gangmastering and the exploitation of foreign labor appears irremediable and, in our cherry orchards and vineyards, that of women.
No less worrying are the ISTAT data relating to the work of monopolists. They tell us that only 23% of the resident population is employed. These are 11 thousand workers out of a population of 48,260 people. Of these, almost half work in the tourism sector. That is to say a sector where, given the seasonality of businesses, there is a very high rate of precariousness with part-time jobs, often poorly paid and in any case linked to the tourist season.
Faced with this tangled situation, as city councilors we do not want to talk about surrender. We believe that in our area there are companies that have understood that a new way of doing business, pursuing environmental and social sustainability, restores competitiveness. And they are the companies that are most likely to survive in the future.
In agriculture, for example, there is an agriculture of exploitation but there is also a virtuous agriculture carried out above all by young people, who, thanks to their studies, combine quality and inclusion.
It certainly involves undergoing difficult steps that involve costs and radical changes, not only in structures and production cycles, but above all in mental structures and thought cycles, but it’s worth it.
We believe a change of pace is possible as well as necessary. Let’s simply start by thinking that work is not a job, nor a salary.
But much more.
It is the condition for feeling like people with a responsible and active role in the context we live in.
Without work, we cannot feel free or fulfilled.
The founding fathers and mothers had understood this well: “Italy is a Republic founded on work”.
Without work there can be no democracy.
Angelo Papio
Maria Angela Mastronardi
Silvia Contento
