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title="Fainting & injections"
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has_items=["riformismosindacato.md", "salutelavorosfru.md", "donatatravascio.md", "rubinimartinelli.md"]
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# Noxiousness
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This section collects documents, fragments and insights on the rising levels of toxicity brought about during the fast paced industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s and of the struggles to defend workers' health and environmental conditions.
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# The story from which we start: Fainting & injections
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In the mid-1960s, as MTM was rolled out across the entire production line, the health of the Leboline (informal name used by and for the workers at Lebole) begun to take a toll. Faintings, including mass fainting episodes, nervous breakdowns, digestive problems and depression begun to spread. One of the workers reported how she couldn’t stop thinking about the same movements that she had to repeat all day long even when she was at home or in her sleep. Another one decided to end her own lifeand walk under a train during a break. In an attempt to limit the absences claimed for illness, the company doctors would frequently prescribe injections, typically containing bromine, calcium and magnesium, with a sedative and tonic effects.
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As workers’ struggles and unionization efforts grew stronger and stronger across the country, the Leboline also begun to organize against the conditions of exploitation that impacted their lives.
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# Healthcare struggles in '60s and '70s Italy
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Italy was the second country in Western capitalist Europe (after the UK, 1948) to achieve the right to a public healthcare system in 1978. To these days, the Italian national healthcare system remains an odd story of success despite many counter-reforms. As Chiara Giorgi noted,
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> According to the 2017 OECD data, life expectancy at birth in Italy is 83.1 years, compared to the 80.9 years of the European Union average: but the total health expenditure per inhabitant is 2,483 euros, against 2,884 of the average EU (a 15% gap). It is a paradox worth probing that the European country with the longest life expectancy has achieved this result with reduced spending.
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>
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[Chiara Giorgi, Rediscovering the roots of public health services. Lessons from Italy, OpenDemocracy, 24 March 2020](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/rediscovering-roots-public-health-services-lessons-italy/)
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However, in the ‘60s, the national health conditions were dire. Italy had an average was of one death in the workplace per hour and one accident per minute (source: http://salus.adapt.it/infortuni-e-morti-sul-lavoro-i-dati-dal-1951-al-1970/. By comparison, today there are 3 deaths per day and 800.000 accidents per year).
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So in the ‘60s, as the country was undergoing massive industrialization, the idea of a “class war” was really a reality that workers could witness every day. And these were only numbers linked to direct deaths at work, without taking into consideration the indirect effects of environmental degradation and chronic conditions that begun to flare up at the time.
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# Noxiousness at Work and from Work
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To address this scenario, political movements begun to focus on the key term *nocività* – translatable as 'noxiousness' in English. This choice of term is crucial: the struggles for health begun as the political questioning of its opposite – which these movements identified not in sickness nor in fitness, or the capacity to optimally perform work.
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Noxiousness instead is the property of damaging a living process and to provoke pathologies, both to a singular organism and to an entire ecosystem. A noxious process or substance can have temporary or permanent damaging effects on health; it can move fast or become chronic; it can cause death or “merely” negatively impact the capacity of living beings to reproduce and thrive.
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So by focusing on noxiousness - which is produced and not a condition of the individual body, as sickness is - these movements open up the problem of health in a strategic way. They linked the wellbeing of workers, who were exposed to toxicity at work, with that of their living conditions in their neighbourhoods which were destitute and polluted, and with the conditions of domestic labour, and with the impact of capitalist production over the broader environment.
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# The Work Environment
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L’Ambiente di Lavoro (The Work Environment) is the title a trade union pamphlet first put out in 1967. This was a risk analysis tool produced by the union FIOM_CGIL (one of the major Italian workers union, the most left leaning one and associated with the Communist Party).
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This booklet was the first attempt by the union to produce a coherent political line vis-à-vis health and safety hazards at work and to change the prevalent mentality of workers which would typically just demand that more toxic jobs to be remunerated with some extra money. It also inaugurated the idea of ‘non delegation’ that is, that on matters concerning health, the workers impacted should always be the ones to decide, without any intermediary.
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The Work Environment was a tool for organizers and workers together to begin to research and understand the risks to which their jobs would expose them. The booklet focuses on noxiousness which it breaks down into 4 groups of factors:
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1) ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS: noise, temperature, light, ventilation, humidity…
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2) PRODUCTION-SPECIFIC ELEMENTS: gas, dust, smoke, fumes, exposure to chemicals…
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3) PHYSICAL FACTORS: exertion, muscular fatigue, lack of sufficient rest and sleep, excessive rhythms, etc…
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4) MENTAL LOAD: identifying on the one end of the spectrum boredom and monotony and at the other end stress, anxiety, overstimulation on the other, as well as the psychological violence linked to managerial practices of humiliation.
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*L’Ambiente di lavoro* was since then translated by unions in 7 different countries and it also became the basis for hundreds of workers enquiries across Italy.
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# Against Noxiousness
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Another key document to understand the intertwining of the politics for work, health and environment of the itme was *Against Noxiousness*, a political communiqué written in 1971 by the group Comitato Politico degli Operai di Porto Marghera, a political collective where renown autonomist thinkers such as Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Toni Negri begun their militancy. The activities of this group and the context of Porto Marghera, which is the site of a petrol-chemical plant near Venice, have been the focus of some recent research by Lorenzo Feltrin and Devi Sacchetto, which maked some of this history available in the English language.
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What makes *Against Noxiousness* a generative document for our contemproary reflections is how it performed another key intervention in the politics of translation around health, positing that healthy conditions can never be the by-product of inherently toxic and unjust capitalist relations of production. The paper opens with the following sentences:
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>It is necessary to immediately distinguish between a form of noxiousness as it is traditionally understood, linked to the working environment (toxic substances, fumes, dust, noise, etc.) from the one more widely linked to the capitalist organisation of work.
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And the document coontinues with the following analysis and demands:
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>To correctly pose the theme of noxiousness today […] ultimately means to pose the question of power in its articulation. The only non-rhetorical way of posing and solving this problem is to place it on the organizational ground. In fact, we say that noxiousness must be opposed as it is noxiousness "of work": and therefore [we demand] a reduction in working hours for everyone and not just for "toxic" departments, an increase in wages, regulatory equality, free transport…
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!(Comitato Politico degli Operai di Porto Marghera, 28 February 1971. The paper was first presented at the Congress of the Workers of Veneto, Cinema Marconi, Mestre. My translation)[].
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So, in this document we can see the leap from the problem of noxiousness at work to the one of the noxiousness of work under capitalism. Thus the group pushed for a radical strategy of refusal of labour, as under capitalism, work is destined to remain inherently toxic. In their reflections, the Porto Marghera group also rejected capitalist technologies as harmful to health and reclaimed the right to collectively determine not only the conditions under which one gets to work, but crucially also the very goals of production, which should be justified by its benefits to society (and not profit) and conducted so as to not harm the environment.
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The group were in this sense also critical of the trade unions and the communist party's efforts to promote the public health system and the participation of workers’ council in determining health and safety conditions, as they saw these measures as too easily coopeted into weak reformism.
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