A-Infos (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
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en