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title="Radio Gabinetto"
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has_items=["doppelgangercosi.md", "esperienzaop.md", "donatatravascio.md", "rubinimartinelli.md"]
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# Finding one's voice
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This section collects documents, fragments and insights on the many inventive and original techniques of organizing that accompanied the rise of healthcare struggles in the 1960s and 1970s.
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# The story from which we start: Radio Gabinetto
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Between 1960 and 1970, the workers of the textile factory Lebole (in arezzo, Italy) met in the toilets of their plant to share problems, organize assemblies and strikes, and to compose political pop songs to be sung at the assembly line and at demonstrations. This conspiracy space and time was nicknamed Radio Gabinetto (*Radio Toilet*).
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The practice of contrafacta, widespread in the European poetic tradition, is at the origin of many popular songs and struggles still known today. The technique consists in changing the lyrics of old songs while leaving the melodies unchanged. Friedrich Gennrich writes that "In the history of the song, counterfeiting is a phenomenon almost as old as the song itself" (1965). In the toilets of the Lebole, the workers use and experiment for the first time this technique on a repertoire of pop hits of the moment: the songs that circulate in the Italian song festivals such as Sanremo and Canzonissima. In this particular use of the cotrafacta technique the workers found a way to break the silences that traversed them and make their struggles known, while also strenghtening their cohesion the same time.
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# Instructions to the doppelganger
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As we introduced in the section on Noxiousness, *The Work Environment* (L'Ambiente di Lavoro, 1967) 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: environmental conditions; exposure to toxic substances, physical fatigue and psychological demands.
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These four noxiousness factors made discussing health conditions easier. The classification it proposed was of immediate understandability because it was based on the experience of workers. And this was because the method upon which it was based was one of political translation itself.
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The person coordinating the efforts behind *The Work Environment* was a doctor based in Turin, a former partisan named Ivar Oddone, who wanted to better understand what is going on at FIAT cars, the major factory in town, what is making the workers unwell or subject to accidents. But as an external person he is not allowed in, and when he tried to talk to the workers at the factory gates, they speak two different languages…In the words of Gianni Marchetto, one of the workers we interviewed, “Oddone was not able to make himself understood, and in turn he wouldn’t understand us workers much either…”. He didn’t know anything about the production process, the names of the tools and of the operations. Likewise we had no clue about the technical language used by him as a doctor, even if he was well-meaning…”
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Oddone’s solution was to propose to a group of fifteen workers an experiment with what became known as “the technique of instructions to the doppelganger” – where he would ask the worker:
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“Give me all the information that would allow me to replace you without anyone noticing”
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How does your day start? What do you have for breakfast, do you have breakfast, how do you get to work, are you late or on time? Etc…
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Whenever the storytelling would deviate from describing the minutiae of everyday life, the narrator would be interrupted and asked to go back to giving instructions “as one would when teaching another how to drive”.
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In a way not too far off from the consciousness’ raising techniques that the feminist movement was experimenting with during the same years. the instructions to the doppelganger technique allowed workers to account for their quotidian experience, which in the dialogues was mapped through 4 key relationships:
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- with the machine and the job description proper
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- with the managers and the bosses
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- with colleagues and other peers
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- with political organizations (such as the party or the union)
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Finally, a key aspect of the instructions to the doppelganger was that they were held as group interviews, where collective patterns of noxiousness would become noticeable and become the bases for political struggles and demands.
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The instructions to the doppleganger of four FIAT workers were later published in Ivar Oddone, Alessandra Re, Gianni Briante (eds.) *Esperienza operaia, coscienza di classe e psicologia del lavoro*, Turin: Einaudi, 1977.
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# 150 hours
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Ivar Oddone was able to experiment with the technique of the Instructions to the doppelganger together with a group of FIAT workers thanks to a specific pedagogical institution newly introduced at the time: the so-called *150 hours*, which we believe are worth describing here to grasp the inventivness and the concreteness of demands that came out of the political movements of the '60s and '70s.
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In 1973, when the Italian trade union of metalworkers managed to secure an unprecedented mechanism for the right to study as part of their renewed national contract. Nicknamed “the 150 hours”, this new contractual institution guaranteed employees a maximum number of hours of paid leave (that had to be matched by an equal amount of hours freely committed by the worker, so that courses had a minimal total duration of 300 hours) to be used for projects and activities concerning their personal training. This new pedagogical right was conceived in a very different manner than the life-long learning that is predominant today, which frames learning as a continuous re-adaptation of the worker to the needs - real or presumed - of the labour market.
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For the 150 hours courses, the management and planning of activities was under the full control of the trade unions, public and local authorities, ministries, schools and universities. Soon after their introduction in 1973, the “150 hours for the right to study” were extended to a large number of professional categories and exploded to become a transversal social phenomenon. The majority of courses that were intially activated were geared to help workers complete their primary education. However, many experimental initiatives were also explored, and some developed novel pedagogical approaches and subject areas, such as the Instruction to the doppelganger method Ivar Oddone used during his course at the newly created Faculty of Occupational Medicine of Turin. In many of these 150 hours courses, technical and scientific know-hows would be intertwined with biographical and creative methods, since the intention was to learn useful skills for everyday life. For example, the teaching of arithmetic and accounting could start with learning how to correctly read one's pay slips, graphs and percentages, piecework and taxation mechanisms.
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The 150 hours were also a powerful context for feminist organizng, and some of them eventually led to the creation of more permanent Women' Universities. For more information of the feminist use of the 150 hours, see the [Università delle Donne di Milano website](http://www.universitadelledonne.it/le_150_ore.htm)
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