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title="We are still not robots"
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## The 4th Factor: the Mental Load

*The Work Environment* first produced at FIAT and *Against Noxiousness* of Porto Marghera agreed in identifying one mid-term tendency crucially relevant in our present times: mental noxiousness. 

In the language of *The Work Environment*, this was the idea that while the first 3 factors of noxiousness were going to be mitigated by tendencies within capitalism itself, the 4th factor pertaining to mental wellbeing was going to get worse:

![](static/images/mentale_ieri.png)
*the work environment yesterday*
![](static/images/mentale_oggi.png)
*the work environment today*


While in *Against Noxiousness* we can read:

>In the new factory, coupled with a modest reduction in toxicities and thus in occupational diseases traditionally understood, there will be a strong increase in mental health disorders

“Against Noxiousness” (Comitato Politico, 28 February 1971).


We know today that, far from diminishing or disappearing, the first three factors of hazards have been delocalized in regions of the word where laws around health, workers' safety and environmental pollution are lax, non-existent or avoidable through corruption. However, the emphasis on the mental factors impacting our lives at work intercepted precisely what the workers of Lebole experienced with the introduction of MTM methods, the process of "modernization" of the assembly line and management  - soon renamed the "scientific organization of exploitation" - with the current working conditions under the algorithmic management regime.

As one textile worker interviewed by Luigi Firrao put it, 

> Today a girl enters the factory at the age of 14-15. The working conditions she finds are the first and the only ones she knows: she accepts them as normal. She doesn't think it can be any different. She asks the trade unionists to get her more 

money, she may go so far as to ask to work less quickly, but not a change in the way of working.

from a letter of Adele L., fashion industry worker from Como

![](bib:e610c577-e6a6-4a11-9e45-dbec435f011b)

![](static/images/how_it_was.png)