He says of himself: before being a citizen I am a worker. A clear
declaration of class consciousness that Raffaele Cataldi, a worker atIlva in Taranto who has been on redundancy since 2018, proudly claims.
And that suddenly erases the debates disconnected from reality of those
who continue to maintain that workers no longer exist and that Italy
should live off culture and tourism - as if these were not sectors
dedicated to the most greedy of exploitation, as the recent dispute of
the workers of the Feltrinelli bookstores teaches. Raffaele has been
busy for some time on a tour of presentations of his book, published by
Edizioni Alegre at the end of January, which is entitled "Malesangue".
And wherever he goes the interest around his words is notable. Not so
much because it tells the story of the former largest steel mill in
Europe or the 14 ministerial decrees with which the state authorized the
factory to continue producing in the presence of pollution certified by
the same institutional bodies, but rather for the point of view. In the
history of Taranto and more generally of Italian industrial plants, the
workers' voice is aphonic or at most filtered by newspapers and unions.
It is never authentic, dirty and protagonist; instead it is exploited,
smoothed and marginalized. So much so that in Italian publishing the
books written by workers can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Malesangue, on the other hand, puts the workers' perspective at the
center of the story. It does so starting from the notes that Raffaele
himself kept since he was hired at Ilva in 1997, and the book maintains
the journalistic style, reporting episodes and anecdotes that explain
the world of work in Italy more than many analyses and many propagandas.
How do you hire a person? Most of the time through a recommendation, but
it is not good to say so, and in fact the public debate has completely
expunged this fact, which many of us continue to have to deal with.
Raffaele says that the application "had been submitted by my
sister-in-law Tina, who worked in the administrative offices, according
to the consolidated method by which one entered Ilva more through
applications forwarded through one's relatives than through a
competition". Even today it is still like this, at least in large
industries, only that relatives have been replaced by unions, which have
now become parallel employment agencies. It is precisely with the
confederate unions that Raffaele immediately began to have problems:
they, the unions, "were increasingly pro-employer"; he, on the other
hand, has "always fought for safety at work and I have never
compromised, in fact I have never moved up a level". This leads to real
isolation for workers considered inconvenient: "abandoned by the unions
and hated by the bosses, for years we ended up becoming exiles inside
the factory". Raffaele's, therefore, is not only a worker's
autobiography but is the story of many colleagues fighting like him. A
fight that for Raffaele also passes through ultra militancy in the
stadiums and then leads him in 2012 to found the committee Cittadini e
Lavoratori Liberi e Pensanti, which proposes a form of working class
environmentalism. From this experience the Uno Maggio tarantino was
born, the concert that unites music with the fight - after each
performance there is the intervention of territorial committees,
activists and associations - and which has grown more and more over the
years. By now the Taranto event has surpassed in participation even the
traditional concert in Rome, the one organized by the confederals and
sponsored among others by Eni and Intesa San Paolo, while the concert in
Puglia is based on self-organization and the absence of sponsors that is
compensated by donations from individuals. The strength of Malesangue is
also in the restitution of the bitter blood of those who worked and got
sick because of that hard and suffocating job where, as Raffaele himself
says, "working in Ilva meant finding yourself playing Russian roulette
every day", where "the stake was your life". A workplace where
hierarchies dominate and where new arrivals, like recruits in the
barracks, are assigned the most infamous tasks. The pages in which
Raffaele describes the daily life of the factory, explaining the
integrated cycle of the steelworks and the individual tasks he was
assigned to, are the best, together with the last touching chapter, on
the loneliness of the worker, compared to that of the doorman, with the
awareness that "to not only make malesangue you have to act
collectively, finding together the courage to turn your back on steel".
This claim has never been given the right importance, which in my
opinion is simply revolutionary: in Taranto the committee formed largely
by workers is asking for the closure of the factory where they work or
have worked.
When people hear Raffaele say this at presentations, the reaction is
always a bit surprised. But as the history of polluting sites teaches
us, for remediation to be truly carried out, the sources of
contamination must first be closed. For Raffaele, in fact, "remediation
must be carried out by workers who worked in the industrial plants that
polluted the territories: our bodies are already contaminated and we
want to sacrifice ourselves for the new generations". Well, on this
point one can disagree, because environmental struggles cannot be a
vocation to martyrdom. To interrupt the narrative of sacrifice, we
should first stop sacrificing the territories, says journalist Serena
Tarabini. In this sense, Taranto is at the same time the emblem of
exploitation and of a model of protest to aim for. In a city where the
industrial perimeter is two and a half times larger than the municipal
one, where in addition to the former Ilva (now Acciaierie d'Italia ready
to be sold to the Azerbaijani company Baku Steel) there is also an Eni
refinery and the enormous presence of the navy, where the only related
companies that have sprung up are those that do industrial cleaning
(i.e. the most exhausting and polluting work), where environmental
impact assessments are done (when they are done) without considering the
illnesses and deaths of workers, where industry continues only thanks to
bank loans and state subsidies, here there are workers who speak out,
occupy public spaces, organize together with environmental associations,
travel around Italy to create solidarity even if they don't know when
and if they will be able to return to work. Just as is happening with
the GKN dispute in Campi Bisenzio, with logistics workers in Emilia
Romagna, with the textile factories in Prato and many other experiences
scattered around Italy, workers are starting to mobilize again. It's up
to us to do the same, together.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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