WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY TURIN MILAN News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Anarres: BRAND. WORK ACCIDENT? NO, CLASS WAR! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The last to fall were 5 workers employed in the maintenance of the

railway line between Turin and Milan. Overwhelmed by a train that hadn't
received any stop signals, they had no escape. ---- It is not an
accident. An accident is something imponderable, impossible to prevent,
while the continuous growth of deaths at work goes hand in hand with
cuts and lost investments in safety. ---- In the railways this is a fact
closely linked to the sharp reduction in personnel, the outsourcing of
maintenance work, investments in high-speed lines to the detriment of
ordinary roads. Where high-speed trains pass, there is a mechanism that
blocks everything when there is an obstacle on the tracks.
It is easy and absolute to talk about human error. But human errors also
multiply when you work without real protection, when you don't invest in
safety systems because rail transport for commuters and poor travelers
is an unprofitable business.
The five workers who died in Brandizzo are the latest victims of the
class war between those who get rich with the work of others and those
who have to risk their lives to live. They are cheap arms, which can be
easily replaced.
Three people die on the job every day.
1090 in 2022 (+21% compared to 2021), 559 in the first 7 months of 2023
(+4.4% compared to 2022).
Added to these are the many who lost their lives on their way to the
factory, to the office, to make a delivery. Because a labor market that
forces you to travel longer and longer, to accept a job even thirty or
forty kilometers away, causes you to die even while going to or
returning from places of wage servitude. The cuts to public transport
lead to greater risks for all those who have to move, and are the result
of the same logic of profit that leads companies to reduce spending on
safety.

People also die of work due to occupational diseases, perhaps after a
few years of retirement. Chronic poisoning by toxic substances, exposure
to oncogenic agents, exhaustion. Or maybe you're luckier: you don't die
but you take some more or less debilitating pathology to the grave.

On 6 December 2007 at ThyssenKrupp in Corso Regina, a fire triggered by
the company's failure to comply with safety standards involved eight
workers. Seven of them perished, most after an agony of weeks. A
striking case, which now took place sixteen years ago. Since then the
situation has worsened, despite the crocodile tears of the institutions,
Confindustria and confederal trade unions. Over the past ten years, the
number of deaths and injuries at work has steadily increased. The
conditions of semi-slave exploitation in the agricultural sector have
led to the massacres of laborers crammed into unmaintained vans used to
take them to the countryside. Others die by collapsing under the
scorching sun. We die among machines in industry, in maintenance, on
construction sites, we die of fatigue in the fields.

Even the new "professions" of the "gig economy" are killing: the list of
riders is getting longer, the delivery men on bikes or mopeds who die or
are injured while carrying food on behalf of some large platform. The
state of the roads, the poor maintenance of the vehicles, the climatic
conditions, the frenetic rhythms of the piecework, and the connected
ideology that glorifies the performativity and self-exploitation that
companies would like workers to introject, are the main causes.

Precariousness and the increase in the possibility of being blackmailed
in front of the boss force us to accept working conditions that we would
have rejected until a few years ago.

It is like this all over the world. The globalization of poverty affects
every corner of the planet. Everywhere the bosses get rich on the life
and death of the exploited. Our response, as workers, unemployed,
precarious workers, can only be on the internationalist and class level.

Everywhere people are investing in armaments and military spending, to
defend and extend the imperial interests of states and masters. Try to
imagine if a small part of the 104 million euros that the government
squanders every day in military spending were used to make our country's
railway network safer. Try to imagine how much better our lives would be
if all that money went for treatment and not for war.

The bosses are fighting a war that as exploited we must recognize as
such. And fight it. The confederal trade unions and the institutions
limit themselves to a few sentences of circumstance. We are not
surprised: their role is that of guardians of the established order.

It is up to us to take the reins of our destiny into our own hands and,
with direct action, strikes, pickets, blockades, building non-state
political spaces, multiplying the experiences of self-management,
building social networks that know how to jam the machine and make
strikes effective and territorial struggles. we will be able to free
ourselves and live a life in which we no longer die in the name of the
profit of some master.

A world without exploited or exploiters, without slaves or masters, a
world of free and equal is possible.
It's up to us to build it.

https://www.anarresinfo.org/brandizzo-incidente-sul-lavoro-no-guerra-di-classe/
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