PROMOTION. - An Italianized English word, frequently used to mean the advancement of workers both in the technical-professional sense (the ladder of classifications from common laborer to skilled and specialized worker), and in the economic-social sense of pay, that is, of well-being and of position in society from the standpoint of culture and responsibility (foreman, department head, factory head); as well as of access to the professions as well.
Promotion responds to criteria of justice and charity, by which the elevation of the working classes must be favored by the other classes, and to criteria of general interest, because the continuous contribution of new elements is an indispensable condition for the continuity of the ruling classes, which wear out more rapidly and manage with greater difficulty to replenish themselves on their own. It is most useful, moreover, for establishing or preserving mutual understanding among the classes.
A collective promotion is also considered, concerning the entire working class, in order to obtain more humane living and working conditions, and easier access to culture, to material goods, to the spiritual elevation of the workers, and to their gradual integration into the very life of the firms as participants and co-responsible parties.
This aspiration, in fact, of the working class to develop the capacity of each worker, according to the possibility and the nature of the firm, to insert the workers gradually into the life of the firm, is an almost universal aspiration among workers. "The time has come," says Pius XII, "to abandon empty phrases and to think of a new ordering of the productive forces... that opens to the working classes the way to acquire honestly their share of responsibility in the conduct of the national economy" (Discorso alle A.C.L.I., 11 March 1945, in Discorsi e radionessaggi di S. S. Pio XII, VII Milan 1946, p. 9).