A film by Prano Bailey-Bond
Based on a letter by an Italian worker
My name is Paolo, thank you for your time and attention.
I’m not an entrepreneur, I work for a construction company that has been in the business for 25 years. It is a good company and has always amazed me by the way it treats its employees like family members.
The business is now in crisis, the owners walk around with long faces, gloomy, as if each time they see you they want to beg forgiveness.
Because they can no longer pay us. They have bled themselves dry repaying debts all round, but the crisis is deep and it hurts. It hurts to know that accounts “receivable” are over €800,000 but no-one knows when they will be received. It hurts to know that when money does come in it will be snatched away in a flash by the bank. It hurts to see all the bureaucracy whose sole purpose seems to be to deliver the deathblow. It hurts to see politicians who, having been in government for 30 years, still go on TV with recipes, or mumbo-jumbo solutions to the problem.
Through the sadness when I go home in the evening I try to put on a good face, but the misery shows… and it deepens when you see that your children see it too.
When the day comes that we can smile again we’ll look back on this phase of our lives, and maybe it will have made us stronger… because we will know that we pulled ourselves out of it by ourselves and not thanks to the bragging of self-styled miracle workers.
Best wishes to all.
