WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #17-25 - Exploited to death. PTCO/School-work alternation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Five students died in PCTO between January and March 2025: these are the

official data recently provided by INAIL. The acronym means "paths for
transversal skills and orientation", the pretentious definition with
which the school-work alternation has been renamed in recent years, the
activity that takes students from their desks to rent them to companies.
Five students dead in three months is enormous. But it is clear that, if
the world of work is made up of precariousness, exploitation, pursuit of
profit, lack of safety, so much so as to produce a massacre of 3 deaths
a day, even the students who are thrown into a similar situation are
exposed to risks that too often translate into tragedies.

Between 2017 and 2022, there were 21 deaths and hundreds of thousands of
injuries among students in alternation: considering that in 2020 and
part of 2021, due to covid, schools operated with distance learning and
internal and external activities were reduced or cancelled, the data is
even more frightening. But the silence that surrounds this situation is
also frightening. If the name of Lorenzo Parelli, who died in 2022
crushed by a 150-kilo steel beam during an internship in a factory, is
still familiar to us, the name of many other students is almost unknown
and the news doesn't mention them much, swallowing them up in the
sensational numbers of deaths at work, to the point that the data on
student deaths, when we go to read them broken down, leave us almost
incredulous. And yet it is so.

After the 21 deaths recorded by the Ministry of Education between 2017
and 2022, in 2023, after the protests following the death of Lorenzo
Parelli who called for the abolition of the PCTO, the government
responded by establishing the INAIL fund for the compensation of
students who died in alternation. Since then, deaths and injuries of
students in alternation have been recorded by INAIL. As many as 12
students died in 2023, 13 died in 2024, five in this glimpse of 2025.

The school-work alternation model dates back to 2003, but became
mandatory from the 2015-16 school year with Law 107, Renzi's "good
school". It was presented at the time as a form of "regularization" of
the practices of internships and traineeships that were already widely
used; in reality, as was immediately denounced by those who opposed that
reform, the good school anchored the school-work alternation in the
school system, established its obligation, defined a fixed number of
hours and a range of possible declinations, extended the corporate drift
of the public school, took away hours from training and study,
generalized the practice of lending students to the world of work,
exposing them, among other things, without protection to the jungle of
exploitation. The deaths and countless accidents demonstrate this. The
government was PD, the female ministers of education at the time, in
sequence, were Giannini and Fedeli, the latter coming from the CGIL
management ranks. Just to say how credible the operetta opposition to
the PCTO that we now hear coming from PD and CGIL can be.

The different number of hours of the school-work alternation also
already denoted the classist nature of this device: 90 hours in the last
three years of high school, 150 hours in technical schools, 210 in
professional schools. The reading is even banal: fewer hours taken away
from studying for those who will have social management roles, more
hours taken away from studying for those who will have to work,
especially for those who will do so in a less qualified way.

It goes without saying that the locations where the alternation takes
place are also very diversified, with different methods of operational
involvement of the students: professional studios, newspaper editorial
offices, administrative and logistics offices for high schools; directly
productive sectors, factories and catering for technicians and
professionals.

In 2017, Decree 195 defines a Regulation of the alternation and in 2018
the Guidelines for what is now called PCTO are published. The struggles
of students and school workers who asked for its abolition are crushed,
the forum of student associations, the concertative unions, those
sectors functional to the business world with which governments and
institutions interact are listened to; the objectives of Confindustria
and business associations are taken into account, as well as the
interests of local authorities, which have a monopoly on professional
training. In schools, a huge amount of bureaucratic work is created and
a huge waste of human and economic resources is created for the thousand
tasks connected to the management of the PCTO: drafting agreements with
companies, managing the number of hours for each student, reporting,
certification of skills and issuing of skill cards, safety training
initiatives. Because on paper, the safety issue receives attention. It
is a shame that for students, as for workers, training initiatives are
often exclusively a formal obligation to be fulfilled, a facade
operation that has little to do with real safety. It is a shame that,
once "trained" on paper, students are catapulted into a situation where
there is no safety, despite all the signatures and all the stamps placed
on the DVRs. The bloody trail of deaths and accidents in alternating
work speaks clearly.

But it does not stop there. For a couple of years the situation has
become even more difficult. The school-work alternation conceived for
the last three years of high school tends increasingly to involve the
previous years as well, extending to the two-year period, which
theoretically would be the period covered by compulsory schooling.

Last May 21, the Senate approved within the PNRR school decree for
2025-26 a change to the legislation that makes it possible, in technical
institutes, to bring forward by one year the school-work alternation
starting from the second grade, involving fifteen-year-old students.

Moreover, a similar provision is linked to others, already underway,
which tend to shorten both the school path   (from 5 to 4 years) and the
time dedicated to teaching, increasing the time spent in the company and
even entrusting companies with teaching hours in the subjects of focus
within the schools. The four-year gradation of high schools, whose
process is proceeding, and the institution of the four-year chain of
technical and professional institutes, already in force at an
experimental level, require bringing forward by one year the PCTO,
starting from the second grade, to ensure companies the infamous
three-year period of student resources. Furthermore, the
technical-professional sector, as we have already had the opportunity to
point out, sees a massive increase in the hours dedicated to
alternation. Not only that. The connected Lavoro 2024 has introduced the
dual apprenticeship contract, increasing the existing apprenticeship
system and allowing students who are still compulsory schooling and in
their studies to access the apprenticeship contract, effectively
becoming workers in all respects, even for a long period of time, moving
from the first level apprenticeship, which until now has been permitted
in the school curriculum and without pay, to the second and third level
apprenticeships, which until last year were closed to students, with the
possibility of maintaining the apprenticeship contract started at 15 for
the entire duration of the training, even at university or during a PhD,
with a salary that cannot exceed 10% of the minimum wage due.

The mechanism with which companies exploit student labor is deadly. It
is more than a process of corporatization, it is a real transfer of the
company into the education system and a direct absorption of students
into work. A disastrous mechanism that must be countered.

The fight against school-work alternation is not easy because it clashes
with a process in line with the times and market needs, disguised as
modernism against a school presented as old iron, beyond any rhetoric on
the need to return to traditional study.

There is a relentless campaign, which often also affects families and
students, which discredits study and learning in the face of alleged
experience in the field, leveraging the many things that go wrong at
school and that can understandably generate intolerance. There is a
dominant narrative that attributes youth unemployment to the mismatch
between scholastic preparation and the demands of the world of work: the
so-called "mismatch", a misalignment that some thoughtful intervention
tries to fill by throwing fifteen-year-olds into the world of work.
There is a distorted concept of what a school open to the territory
means and also of what is meant by the term territory, which does not
mean the network of corporate profits.

But in the face of many difficulties there is also the strength of
evidence. It is clear that the alleged experience in the field means
training for early exploitation. It is clear that, despite all the
defects of the school, youth unemployment does not depend on the
misalignment between scholastic preparation and the world of work, but
on specific political choices that impose poverty and precariousness.

It is clear that reducing the time dedicated to studying and developing
one's cognitive abilities in order to acquire the fragmented skills
required at a given time by a local company means learning some
operations and executive sequences that will be immediately outdated,
which means precariousness and unemployment. It is clear that throwing
students into a world of work governed by profit at all costs means
exposing them, in addition to exploitation, also to the risk of
accidents and death, which are the daily rule in the world of work. If
it were not clear, the trail of blood of students who died in
alternation reminds us of it. With the determination of this clarity, we
must forcefully oppose the violence of early exploitation represented by
the alternation between school and work, in whatever form it presents
itself, uniting the forces of workers and students to delegitimize it
and eliminate it from the school and training system.

Patrizia Nesti

https://umanitanova.org/sfruttati-da-morire-ptco-alternanza-scuola-lavoro/
_________________________________________
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