A-Infos (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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