To the editor:

It was both heartbreaking and infuriating to read that after the workers at Stella D’oro won a well deserved victory against Brynwood Partners, the owners of Stella D’oro, the company has decided to close the plant down and lay off hundreds of workers.

This is an outrage and every New Yorker should be up in arms. These workers fought for months and months to protect their livelihoods against a corporation that wanted to slash salaries and benefits for maximum profits for themselves. This is a clear illustration of what Eli Siegel, educator, economist, and founder of the philosophy aesthetic realism showed — that an economy based on contempt for people does not and cannot work. He defined contempt, “as the addition to the self through the lessening of something else.” It is only contempt for the reality of a person that can have a company close its doors because the people who do the work want to be treated with the fairness and dignity they deserve.

America is suffering because we have an economy where the wealth that is produced by the labor of others goes to people who did not earn it. The time is now for all of us, from the President on down, to ask this vital question once asked by Eli Siegel, “What does a person deserve by being alive?”

It is not a theoretical question — it is a question that, if thought about and honestly answered, can lay the foundation not only for an economy, but for a kind world.

MATTHEW D'AMICO