Loro Piana enslaved its workers, it's not gangmastering but just capitalism...

They exploited their workers savagely. They made them work far beyond their normal hours. Even at night. Even on holidays. They paid them very little. Not even the minimum wage! The workers were almost all Chinese. Many of them were illegal immigrants and couldn't rebel. They found themselves in a classic slavery situation. All of this occurred, in Italy, through subcontracting , and then the subcontracting of the subcontracting. In the end, a cashmere product would cost the company a hundred euros and then be resold for 3,000 euros. The ultimate beneficiary of this system was none other than Loro Piana , a large textile company in Vercelli, which for several years has been in the hands of Europe's largest billionaire, Bernard Arnault, who has entrusted its leadership to his son Antoine.

I'm transcribing a few lines from an interview Antoine gave some time ago, about his work and his relationship with his father. Antoine Arnault said: " My relationship with my father? One of mutual trust and respect. He instilled in me very strong values: the work ethic, the sense of duty, the meaning of money. My sister, my three brothers, and I grew up with these principles. Proud of our father. We want him to be equally proud of us, of our work." I don't know if Bernard is proud of his son's work today. Maybe he is. Because, after all, selling a product for three thousand euros that, thanks to the enslavement of workers, was made for just one hundred euros is quite a coup for a capitalist. Perhaps it reflects the values Bernard instilled. The judges reconstructed the exploitation in detail. But they didn't find a crime. Also because they established that Loro Piana could have been unaware of what was being done in the contract and subcontract. This time, the " could not have been unaware " argument didn't work.

The order in which the judges imposed a period of controlled administration on Loro Piana—that is, an administrator appointed by the magistrates to try to prevent the excessive power of the gangmasters—writes : "The mechanism, aimed at reducing costs and maximizing profits (with rapid productivity increases) through the evasion of criminal and labor laws, has been perpetuated over time in a structural manner and negligently fueled by Loro Piana Spa, which failed to verify the actual entrepreneurial capacity of the contractors and subcontractors to whom it entrusted production, and over the years has failed to carry out effective inspections or audits to verify the actual operation of the production chain and the actual working conditions." It's called: " The mechanism aimed at reducing costs and maximizing profits." Twelve words summarize the entire analysis that Karl Marx dedicated thousands of pages to. And that formula also explains the soul of Trumpism. Reform twentieth-century capitalism, freeing it from the shackles of liberalism and reducing it to its essential nature: the exploitation of labor. Which no one dares consider a crime.

FROM

Piero Sansonetti