In the scope of work, we shouldn’t ignore nor stop talking about the enterprise, which is an essential social institution for a better-accomplished value of human work.

The existence of enterprises has to be founded on three pillars: the free initiative on the economy, the social nature of human work and the needs of society.

Leaning on those foundations, enterprises must be communities of solidarity and they have to be open to the common good. Enterprises must perform their economic activity with competence and efficiency. They have to take care of human rights in order to allow the development of their workers and of that of society.

According to the social doctrine, an enterprise needs to make a profit, but it also remarks that those should not be earned outside the real needs of society nor outside the respect to people’s dignity.

The goal of an enterprise is not to make a profit but the very existence of the enterprise as a community of people searching for their own self-fulfillment of their needs. Enterprises constitute a special group serving the whole society.

According to that, an enterprise has to take care of some duties (economical, ecological and social) to be a real institution serving the common good. Those duties correspond in the first place to the enterprise owners. The workers have to contribute to the good of the enterprise. At last, the state responsibilities force to it to make a proper legal framework, promoting the ability of free initiative and also protecting the workers’ rights whilst it redirects the enterprise activities to the real needs of society.

The economy has to be subordinate to people and not upside down, so the social doctrine emphasizes as a capital matter the participation of workers in the performance of the enterprise. An active participation of every member inside the enterprise is a basic index of the good performance of the enterprise because people need to feel that they are working on something of their own in order to fulfill both the human sense and the humanizer sense of work.

Although there are multiple forms of enterprise property, the social doctrine suggests that there are only desirables those forms of property enabling somehow the participation of all the members of the enterprise on the enterprise property.

We need to be aware of the lack of conscience on our society. Those elements are not too often taken on consideration when enterprises are created. Everything is oriented to an economy where only the profitability on the short term is searched, sometimes on the shortest term. The dignity of workers is continuously raped and production is not organized to respect workers right, so they can not develop their capabilities.

All those are blocking us to reach a true development. The current situation on many enterprises, eluding their social and ecological responsibilities, is demanding a deep review on how we understand the enterprise and its performance.

The searching for the goal of full access to work for everyone has to continue.