The divine mission on the second floor: when the owner becomes a benefactor of misery

There is a magical moment in the psychology of unearned power: the moment a person forgets how he laid the first stones of his own house and decides to put on the robe of a messenger from on high.

In many Albanian offices and businesses today, we do not simply have business leaders. We have self-proclaimed prophets of survival. He is the owner who, drinking his morning coffee and looking out of the second-floor window at the walls of his warehouse, is convinced that he did not build the business with sweat, with loans or with luck, but that God gave it to him. And together with the business, according to this divine narrative, he was also given a high mission: to feed Albanian families by throwing them a morsel at the end of the month.

Let me be completely clear about this modern mythology.

When an entrepreneur convinces himself that the wage he pays is heavenly alms and not a legal and human obligation, he has destroyed every chance of having a healthy economy.

The logic of this divine mission is simple, but destructive. If the business is a gift from heaven, then the rules of the market do not apply to it. If the owner is merely an instrument of a higher will to keep people alive, then every request for a pay rise, for better conditions or for respect of working hours is not seen as a legitimate right. It is seen as a sin. It is seen as ingratitude towards the one who has taken on the sacred burden of giving you bread.

And so the work relationship is turned upside down. It is no longer an honest exchange between two free parties, where labour meets capital. It becomes a performance of feudal charity.

The owner is no longer an employer; he is a benefactor. The employee is no longer a professional who creates value; he is the silent beggar who must give thanks every evening for the fact that he still exists. And when the moment of accountability comes, when someone asks why profits grow while wages stay where they are, the answer comes in the same tone of a weary messiah: "I am keeping you in bread in this hard country."

But let us speak openly. God has never come down to earth to sign full-time work contracts without pay for overtime. Heaven has not appointed any oligarch or small trader to be the guardian of the fate of Albanians.

Businesses are built by the system, by the customer who pays, by the infrastructure of this country and, above all, by the tired hands of the people who wake at dawn to keep that warehouse or that shop open. The morsel at the end of the month is not granted by anyone. It is earned with every litre of sweat, every second of concentration and every piece of the health of the one who works.

This idea of the owner as saviour is the most perfect mask for hiding a lack of vision. It is easier to tell yourself that you are a benefactor carrying an incapable people on your back than to accept the bitter truth: that your business would not survive a single day without the tireless work of those you treat as inferior.

Our people do not need anyone's alms. They do not ask for the owner's favour, nor for the kindness of those who hand out a little money to get through the month. They ask for justice. They ask for a system where work is valued for what it is, where the contract is respected and where human dignity is not subject to the little theocracies of private offices.

The day this false mission ends will be the day our economy can finally breathe. Because as long as we believe that we are granted the mercy of someone else to live on our own land, we will go on being strangers in our own country, waiting in line for a morsel that in fact we produced ourselves, with our own hands.