WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIA - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #462 - ENVIRONMENT AGAINST WORK? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Environment vs. work, work vs. health - it is a long-standing issue that

drags on and seems even more tangled because of an increasingly
precarious and fragmented labor market. Work and production take
precedence over the environment and human health. By virtue of this
primacy, over the years we have seen environmental disasters and deaths
from diseases contracted in workplaces. The blackmail of "work or
environment and health" has worked perfectly and continues to be one of
the decisive factors when choosing between jobs and the protection of
people and land. The infamous slogan adopted by the workers of Gela in
2002 captures all the drama and contradictions of a distorted system:
"Better to die of cancer than of hunger." How it ended in Gela is well
known: no more jobs; the petrochemical plant left behind a trail of
deaths and malformations and a definitively damaged, disfigured territory.

But rather than talking about work in general, we must talk about work
within the capitalist system - that is, exploited work, work directed
toward profit at any cost and above everything else. The list of
catastrophes caused by the capitalist production system is endless. To
mention only those that have had a devastating impact on the
environment, it is enough to evoke Gela, Priolo, Milazzo, Taranto,
Marghera, not to mention the many rivers and seas polluted by industrial
production. And yet, despite everything, the slogan of the Gela workers
still weighs like a boulder. How to get out of this deadlock? Is it
possible to produce in ways that do not pollute, do not destroy the
environment, and are not harmful to workers? The complexity and
problematic nature of the issue are shown by two experiences from recent
years involving different but converging industrial realities: one
highly polluting, the other emblematic of a capitalism now more
interested in speculation than production. We are talking about Ilva in
Taranto and Gkn in Campi Bisenzio, whose events are fairly well known.
In both cases, groups of workers have promoted alternative plans to
preserve employment and move toward sustainable production.

In Taranto, on May 1, 2018, the Piano Taranto was presented, drafted by
the association Cittadini e lavoratori liberi e pensanti together with
other groups, associations, and grassroots unions. The plan aims to free
Taranto from the monoculture of steel and its harmfulness and to steer
the city's economy toward land reclamation, circular economy, and
renewable energy. To do this, close collaboration is imagined among
local authorities, government, unions, entrepreneurs, workers, and
citizens, who could use existing regulations and benefit from European
and national funds.

In 2022 the Collettivo di fabbrica of Gkn in Florence, together with
professors and researchers from the Institute of Economics of the
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, developed the "Multilevel
Plan for Job Stability and Reindustrialization of the ex-GKN production
site." Without going into the details, the most "radical" proposal
envisages "a shift toward a new production segment aimed at generating
clean energy. In this context, the construction of electrolyzers for
hydrogen generation and/or components for photovoltaic plants is
proposed, integrating the plant's production with the strategies set out
in the PNRR." All within a vision of different public mobility and
environmental sustainability in the Tuscany region. To achieve this, a
strong public intervention is hoped for, with an active role for the
state, "a new form of control and management of the factory that values
workers' knowledge; the creation of a factory-university relationship
capable of networking various local actors for the country's
technological modernization, developing new forms of collaboration and
training."

Beyond the commitment invested in imagining and drafting these plans and
the difficulty of acting even in an emergency, their interest lies
entirely in the will of groups of workers who act autonomously to find
practical solutions to their problems. However, apart from the fact that
so far neither plan has found practical implementation, it must be noted
that both proposals show a general framework and vision that do not
stray far from the capitalist way of conceiving economic and production
activity. The same language and economicist criteria mark both
documents; no truly alternative perspective to the dominant capitalist
model emerges, except in some details.

So back to the initial question: is it possible to escape the dilemma of
work vs. environment/health and find forms of labor activity that
respect people and places? Certainly yes - but it requires adopting a
completely alternative perspective to the current system. The ongoing
climate and environmental crisis suggests radical choices, a real
paradigm shift that entails different social relations, work no longer
exploited and waged, a substantial reduction and redefinition of the
production of goods - no longer for consumption but aimed at collective
well-being. Nothing new and nothing easy. But who benefits from finding
solutions compatible with the reality imposed on us today?

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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