+++
title="Fainting & injections"
has_items=["item3.md", "item4.md"]
+++

# Fainting & Injections: Struggles at the intersections of Work, Health and Environment

![](static/images/lebole_manif.jpg)
![](static/images/Lebole_ammalate.jpg)


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.   

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. 



![](static/images/rubini_martinelli_salute_1.png)
![](static/images/rubini_martinelli_salute_2.png)
![](static/images/rubini_martinelli_salute_3.jpg)

![](static/images/travascio_salute_1.png)

![](static/images/travascio_salute_3.jpg)

![](static/images/travascio_salute_4.png)

![](static/images/travascio_salute_5.png)

![](static/images/travascio_salute_6.png)

## Healthcare struggles in '60s and '70s Italy 

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,
 
> 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.
>

[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/)
 
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). 

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.

![](static/images/1morto.jpg)


## Noxiousness at Work and from Work

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.

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. 

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. 

## The Work Environment

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). 

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. 

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:

1)	Environmental conditions: noise, temperature, light, ventilation, humidity…
2)	Production-specific elements, such as: gas, dust, smoke, fumes, exposure to chemicals…
3)	Physical factors: exertion, muscular fatigue, lack of sufficient rest and sleep, excessive rhythms, etc…
4)	Mental load: identifying on the one end of the spectrum boredom and monotony and at the other end stress, anxiety, overstimulation and humiliation. 

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.

## Against Noxiousness

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. 

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: 

>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. 

And the document coontinues with the following analysis and demands:

>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…

!(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)[].

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. 

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.

## 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)