Filippo was twenty years old. He came from Coazze, a small town in the Piedmont province, where he lived with his family. Honest people. People who earn their living with the sweat of work. He was a “crane acrobat”. That is what they call them, those who, like him and his father, raise, no one knows how those steel monsters forty meters high, which save man’s fatigue but do not save him from death. And in fact Filippo died, on a cursed Italian Saturday. And Roberto and Marco died with him, who were 52 and 50 years old and came from the province of Milan. Good people, too, who for a meager salary spend hours and hours hanging in the air, building or renovating buildings. They crashed on the asphalt together with their crane, these three poor acrobats of a circus who should guarantee your life, and instead takes it away from you. They plunged into the abyss on a morning as cold as ice, with the last look at that sky so blue that it takes your breath away in Turin.
They “fell on the job,” according to our crude newspeak. Because work has now ceased to be the most advanced frontier of rights, where the individual is transformed into a citizen. It has become a war outpost, where people fight every day for subsistence and often for survival. And once again, as had already happened for the Cinema Statuto and for ThyssenKrupp, the battle hits this city, which has always been the cradle of work and now becomes its coffin. The last image portrays them together, happy, on top of the beast they thought they had taught and that instead of a little later he would betray them. Roberto and Marco smile in the background. Filippo, in the foreground, does ok with his thumb and with the bold expression of his youth.
“It’s all right up here, we’ll finish early and go home”: a selfie from the paradise of normality. That the next day, in our hands and especially in those of family members and friends devastated by pain, it becomes a postcard from the hell of modernity. The modernity of exploited and poorly paid work. The modernity of unstable and insecure work. The modernity of undeclared and precarious work. The modernity of work debased and betrayed. Everyone talks about it when the caskets pass by. Everyone cries rivers of true, plausible, false tears. Then the massacre begins again, always equal to itself. Only the faces, the places, the contexts change.
The deaths at work are a wound that bleeds every day. «Lacerating and intolerable», the President of the Republic Mattarella defined it in one of his last “useless sermons” last month, which unfortunately no one listens to. This year the blood shed will equal and probably will exceed that of 2020. At that time, the victims were 1,280. There are three deaths a day, one every 8 hours. If we also consider non-fatal injuries, we rise to 448,000, one every 50 seconds. They are concentrated mainly in the construction sector, and in the higher age groups, between 55 and 59 years. But fatal accidents of the over 60s are increasingly frequent: workers who started working very young, but often in the black and with discontinuous careers, and therefore have to continue to struggle to reach the contribution seniority that will entitle them to a pension. You climb it on a ladder, a beam, a scaffolding, at the age of 65 and having already struggled for about forty. For whole days. Maybe even without harnesses and helmets. As happened to Filippo, Roberto and Marco. And then let’s see. The good Cesare Damiano has made a proposal for the budget law: at least for construction workers we lower the minimum contribution age from 36 to 30 years. Forget it.
Macabre accounting has been getting worse for years, months, weeks. Accomplices are the tenders to the maximum reduction, the subcontracts and now also the construction sites that pop up everywhere from evening to morning, in the metropolitan Far West encouraged by bonuses and super bonuses for building renovations. The Draghi government has passed a decree that just disrupts the petrified forest of our safety regulations. More powers to inspectorates, more sanctions to companies, obligation of the Risk Assessment Document. Small steps forward, but insufficient to impact bureaucratic obstacles. Confidence in strengthening controls appears excessive: INL inspectors are a few hundred, and the expected recruitment of another 1,024 staff is still to come, while ASL inspectors have been cut from 7 to 2,000 in the last ten years, and today they manage to control 2-3 per cent of companies on average. The emphasis on the tightening of sanction mechanisms appears misplaced: it makes little sense to limit ourselves to reducing the threshold of non-compliant workers from 20 to 10 percent, above which to trigger the suspension of production, especially since the irregularity criteria are referred to a subsequent decree of the Ministry of Labor which was never passed. Also in this case it is not a question of evoking forms of justicialist pan-criminalism: but as the crime of “road homicide” was introduced in the Codes, perhaps the crime of “homicide at work” could be introduced.
They still call them “white dead”. But they are not white, because both those who die and those who often bear the responsibility of that death have a name and a surname. The three acrobats of Turin had a name and a surname. Luana had a name, eaten by a tampered warper in Prato. It had a name Luisa, shredded by a textile machine in the Paduan area. He had a name Michele, who died crushed by the oven of his pizzeria in the Milanese area. He had a name Furio, overwhelmed by the load of his truck in Cesano Maderno. Giuseppe had a name, battered by his tractor in Lunigiana. They had a name Himal, Yaya, Mustapha and all the other migrants who arrived in Italy to look for a future and returned to Gambia, Senegal or Sri Lanka in a wooden box. And then all the others, men and women, young and old, black and white. Poor souls who now populate what in the newspapers, for too long, we have called with little and resigned imagination the “Spoon River of work”.
Beyond the juridical aspect, this tragedy presents us with a broader and deeper ethical issue. The constant challenges of change force us to imagine the “work to come”. In the face of the rampant rise of Surveillance Capitalism, we are deliberately discussing new digital rights. Faced with the “Great Reset” imposed by the pandemic, we are rightly reasoning about the new rules of smart-working. Faced with the excessive power of the algorithm economy, we reasonably await the new European directives. All right. But perhaps we have lost and continue to lose sight of the social butchery that is consumed around the “work that exists”. Security, as we have just seen in Turin, is naturally the first of the counters on which that butcher shop is practiced. But there are many others. Work is no longer a deposit of dignity and civilization. Labor is a devalued commodity. It is pure “commodity”, expendable with an individual certification via Teams (as happened at Yazaki) or with a collective communication on Zoom (as happened at Better.Com). Work is perishable matter. If employment that grows is only one for a fixed term, the web of rights and welfare fades, gets worn out, tears apart. And not only the pact between generations is broken, but also the one with the institutions. The Censis Report writes: “The impact that job insecurity exerts on individual life paths affects the climate of trust towards the State: 58 percent of the Italian population tends not to trust the government, and among young people the percentage rises to 66 percent “.
If the relocations continue unabated, despite the long-awaited granting of social security contributions and the much-requested reform of civil justice, social fractures and tensions are brewing, burning and exploding. And the virus of mistrust spreads beyond the 422 people fired at the Gkn of Campi Bisenzio, or at those of Whirlpool, Electrolux, Ariston, Bekaert. It really looks like the “conspiracy against work” and the “downside game of the market” that Censis still talks about: a mix of “poor employment and unemployment that counts among its components a high number of graduates”. It is the other side of the “Country of the Year” just celebrated by the Economist. An Italy that, despite its resilience and its excellence, allows itself the most serious of waste: that of its Human Capital. That disappears. And that, too often, dies. On his Instagram page, Filippo had written this: “Things with a price bow to those with a value”. He was worth it. But despite this it paid the highest price. It’s up to all of us to make sure that never happens again.