Strong businesses that care about workers as well as profits are essential for a thriving democracy, Pope Francis has told steel workers in Genoa.
Speaking at a struggling factory on Saturday, the Pope said it was from the Genoa port that his father and grandparents had emigrated to Argentina.
He said the “world of work was a priority for the Pope” and lamented that a modern “illness” of the economy was the “progressive transformation of entrepreneurs into speculators”.
The speculator, similar to Jesus’s money-changers, “does not love his company does not love his workers, but sees the company and the workers only as means to a profit”, the Pope said. “When work is weakened, it’s democracy that enters into crisis,” he added.
