Pope Francis launches a harsh message against "slave labor"

" dignity is too often trampled by the slave labor". He writes it Papa Francesco in a letter published in the newspaper The print in which it responds to Maurice Maggiani, writer, who had raised the issue of Pakistani workers enslaved by a cooperative that worked for Grafica Veneta, whose top management ended up in the news on charges of labor exploitation.

In responding to the writer, Pope Francis writes: "You are not asking an idle question, because the dignity of people is at stake, that dignity that today is too often and easily trampled on with 'slave labor', in complicit and deafening silence of many. Even literature, the bread of souls, an expression that elevates the human spirit is wounded by the voracity of an exploitation that acts in the shadows, erasing faces and names. Well, I believe that publishing beautiful and uplifting writings by creating injustices is in itself unfair. And for a Christian any form of exploitation is a sin ”.

Pope Francis explains that the solution to stem the exploitation of labor is to denounce. “Now, I wonder, what can I do, what can we do? Renouncing beauty would be an unjust retreat, an omission of good, the pen, however, or the computer keyboard, offer us another possibility: to denounce, to write even uncomfortable things to shake from indifference for stimulate consciences, disturbing them so that they do not allow themselves to be anesthetized by 'I don't care, it's none of my business, what can I do if the world is like this?'. To give a voice to those who have no voice and to raise their voice in favor of those who are silenced ”.

The Pontiff then clarifies: “But denouncing is not enough. We are also called to the courage to give up. Not to literature and culture, but to habits and advantages which, today where everything is connected, we discover, due to the perverse mechanisms of exploitation, damage the dignity of our brothers and sisters ”.