“I don’t know if we will be believed, but we have known workers who wanted to work, who thought only of working. We have known workers who, already in the morning, only thought of working. They got up early in the morning and sang only thinking that they would be going to work. Working was their joy and the deep root of their being. And their reason for being. Work enjoyed an incredible honor, the most beautiful of all honors.”
 
“Those workers were not servants. They worked. With absolute honor, as befits honor. It was necessary that each pole of the chair was well made. It was very clear. It was the most important thing. You didn’t have to do well for your boss’s salary or clients. It had to be well done in itself, in its own being. Any part of the chair, even if not seen, was made as perfectly as the one seen. It was the very principle of cathedrals. Everything was an event: something sacred.”
 
A year full of challenges has begun and these words by Charles Péguy in his work “Money” bring to the table, and with great acuity, the subject of work. There are many reflections, controversies, and discussions that start from there, especially with the impact of the pandemic: the lack of qualified people in jobs of the present and the future; the abyss of connectivity and technological skills between countries with more vulnerable populations, as well as the exclusion of older adults; the growing number of unemployed and those in the informal economy worldwide; the impact of migratory phenomena and new forms of modern slavery; people who get comfortable with state subsidies and lose the desire to work, and employers who complain about collaborators who do not work with the conscience expressed by Péguy above.
 
Work has many dimensions to be addressed: it is certainly a right of every human being, it can also be reduced to having to do it only for an inevitable consideration to survive, and therefore a duty. But beyond the aspects mentioned above, the category that includes more factors is when we see it as a human need. An example of this is so many older adults who cannot continue working and it seems that their creativity, their ability to influence reality, and, unfortunately in many cases, their will to live have been extinguished.
 
Even in the deepest crises, how different is the posture of the person who comes home with bread received from a charity, state program, or social project, compared to when you bring sustenance home as a product of your effort and your work. At work, the person puts dignity as a human being at stake.
 
Our future, that of our country and the entire world is at stake if we live work as “the most beautiful of all honors”. Are we willing to live it like this?