The Masters of Work offer "an authentic and passionate testimony, putting their memory at the service of the future to be entrusted to our young people, who must be trusted, widely and concretely. The Republic needs your passion. I wish the Masters of Work who have been pouring their commitment into volunteering for years and the new Masters, who will soon contribute with renewed energy and creativity, to continue. Thank you for what you do". The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, said this at the ceremony for the awarding of the Stars of Merit for Work for the year 2026, at the Quirinale.
"A cohesive society is a society that gives shape and substance to its own security. Cohesion promotes participation, leads to perceiving the common good as one's own. It helps the economy and the institutions", added the head of state.
"Without wanting to pay attention to the apocalyptic scenarios of machine revolt described in many novels and films", he added, we must not consider wages a cost of competitiveness, addressing "those who do not consider dialogue and the social dialectics characteristic of relationships in the world of work to be a constructive element".
For Mattarella "there is a consideration that appears unavoidable. Power is organized in shared and democratic institutions to ensure the well-being of the entire society. This is why work is a vehicle of democracy, it contributes to the quality of cohesion of a civil society. Work, its culture, its ethics - and you are a clear demonstration of this - generates ideas, plurality, spreads well-being, builds relationships, therefore community".
Europe is therefore "called to defend the values of its civilization and to support its social model: it can only do so through innovations - and by governing them - opposing attitudes according to which an appropriate wage dynamic, rather than representing the equivalent of the dignity of the worker, is a cost to be reduced to achieve competitiveness, while, on the contrary, investments aimed at replacing the workforce, regardless of their effectiveness, are welcome. This must be stated without any indifference towards the necessary increase in the productivity of companies".
"Creativity, ingenuity, an organization that respects human values, are inalienable characteristics of work as an expression and realization of freedom. This has been the commitment of workers' organizations in past centuries. We want machines to provide more efficiency and precision, we want them to increase our capabilities, safety in the workplace and reduce fatigue and needs. Machines at the service of people and not vice versa. We do not intend that they can develop - even through a perverse use of logarithms - new, insidious forms of enslavement", he then observed, reiterating that "increasingly complex technologies, up to the latest generations of artificial intelligence, must be made allies of human well-being and civilization. We must not fear them, nor look at them with suspicion or hostility, with a late neo-Luddite return".
"The indispensable condition - he clarified - is that the governance of transformations, the responsibility for strategic choices, the rules of their social impact are always in the hands of women and men, of their communities. It is a responsibility of which the European Union appears aware if it is true that it intends to promote an effort for digital platforms and forms of artificial intelligence on a continental basis, starting from doubling, by 2030, the number of specialists dedicated to ICT (information, communication, technology)".
"Artificial intelligence is playing a preponderant part" in the world of work, having a profound impact on the structure of society, on the times and spaces in everyone's life. The introduction of humanoid robots - in the order of tens of thousands in the coming years - questions the relationship between person and work. We would like to avoid that, in a few decades, this ceremony could be replaced by a competition for the most diligent humanoid", continued the President of the Republic. "It should be noted that it depends on us, it depends on humanity. Dealing with problems that were futuristic, and today are reality, means equipping ourselves with a mature reflection that clearly states that what we do not intend to give up is the centrality of the person".
"Your testimony, individual and collective, is linked to the meaning of work, to the civil ethics that nourish the life of society, to the primacy of the person. A primacy that must be reaffirmed in the whirlwind transformations that risk encouraging hegemonic claims of technocracies that use the same techno-sciences to obtain a power based not on democracy but on economic profit", he concluded by repeating the concept that "work, a symbolic place of the dignity of the person, where everyone affirms their talent, their professionalism, no one can be subjugated and everyone, with their own abilities, contributes to the common good of their family and their community".
