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

 On 2 September, in a still semi-closed Turin, a protest was held in

Piazza XVIII Dicembre called by the grassroots trade union sectors and
political and social groups after the Brandizzo massacre, where five
workers from Sigifer, a company that had contracted maintenance on
behalf of RFI were killed by a train while working at night. ---- Below
is the flyer we distributed in the square: ---- "The last to fall were 5
workers employed in the maintenance of the railway line between Turin
and Milan. Hit by a train that had not received a stop sign, they had no
escape.
It's 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 lack of investments in safety.
In the railways this is a fact closely linked to the sharp reduction of
personnel, the outsourcing of maintenance work, and 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 we work without real protections, when we 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 enrich themselves with the work of others
and those who have to risk their lives to live.

Every day three people die at work: 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 while going to the
factory, to the office, to make a delivery. A job market that forces us
to travel ever longer, to accept a job even thirty or forty kilometers
away, causes people to die even while going to or returning from places
of paid servitude. Cuts to public transport expose those who have to
move to greater risks, and are the result of the same profit logic that
leads companies to reduce spending on safety.

People also die from work due to occupational diseases, perhaps after a
few years of retirement. Chronic poisonings from toxic substances,
exposure to oncogenic agents, exhaustion. Or maybe you are luckier: you
don't die but you carry 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 regulations affected eight
workers. Seven of them perished, most after an agony of weeks. A
sensational case, which occurred sixteen years ago now. Since then the
situation has worsened, despite the crocodile tears of institutions,
Confindustria and confederal unions. Over the last ten years the number
of deaths and injuries at work has steadily increased. Slave
exploitation in agriculture has killed laborers crammed into
maintenance-free vans used to take them to the countryside, while others
have died by collapsing under the scorching sun. People die in industry,
in maintenance, on construction sites, in fields, in the holds of ships,
in roadworks.

Even the new "professions" of the "gig economy" kill: the list of
riders, delivery boys on bikes or scooters, who die or get injured while
carrying food for some large platform is growing. The state of the
roads, the poor maintenance of vehicles, the climatic conditions, the
frenetic pace of piece work and the related ideology that glorifies the
performativity and self-exploitation that companies would like workers
to introject, are the main causes.

The precariousness and the increase in blackmail in front of the boss
force us to accept working conditions that until a few years ago would
have been rejected.

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

Everywhere investments are being made 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 on 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 was used for treatment and not for war.

The bosses are fighting a war that as exploited people 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 control of our destiny with direct action,
pickets, blockades. Not only. We need to build non-state political
spaces, multiplying self-management experiences, building social
networks that know how to jam the machine and make strikes and
territorial struggles effective. Thus we will be able to free ourselves
and live a life in which we no longer die in the name of some master's
profit.
A world without exploited or exploiters, without servants or masters, a
world of free and equal is possible. It's up to us to build it."

Turin Anarchist Federation
Corso Palermo 46 - for info: fai_torino@autistici.org

https://www.anarresinfo.org/brandizzo-incidente-sul-lavoro-no-guerra-di-classe/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca