This final section collects documents, fragments and insights that connect the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time. The last two decades have been marked by a new cycle of automation and other technological changes in the ways people work, heal, live and protest. Without pretenses of being exaustive, materials are organized following the four red threads introduced in the previous sections: techniques of exploitation; health and environmental conditions; gendered discrimination; and forms of rebellion.
*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:
*the work environment yesterday*
*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
As the grandaughters of that 15 year old girl, we do not know different working conditions than those we inherited as normal. Do we even know how to ask the questions that would be needed to fight off contemporary forms of technical violence, alghorhythmic expolitation and demand a change not in terms of conditions of employment, but of our way of (re)producing life?
>Diseases are one of the most faithful mirrors of the way man enters into a relationship with nature, of which he is a part, through work, technology and culture, i.e. through changing social relations and historically progressive scientific acquisitions.
- Berlinguer, introduction to the conference "La medicina e la società contemporanea", Instituto Gramsci, 1967
The Covid-19 pandemic brought back at the centre of attention the relationship between medical-scientific knowledge and political strategies in the field of healthcare, the very same relationship that has been the core issue in the historical struggles around healthcare that we have been encountering in the archives centred on 1960s and 1970s' experiences in Italy.
During the pandemic, the dynamics of decision-making regarding the management of the health crisis were characterised by many difficulties that brought to the surface some key aspects of the relationship between the governed and the governors, the so called ‘experts’ and those who are not; in other words, the crucial and essential nodes of democratic order.
On this terrain, all the critical signs characterising the current processes of depoliticisation that the neoliberalist governance has generated during last decades have become apparent.
Let’s be clear: the contribution of experts is relevant in order to make decisions in the most informed way possible, all the more so in situations of health emergencies; however, the massive recourse to them runs the risk of taking the place of the responsibility of politics and institutions, the risk of presenting solutions as unquestionable, just because they are ‘technically’ founded, without a common discussion on what is needed and which are priorities.
During the pandemic, this exclusion defined at least two different models of care, of taking care of the emergency. On the one side, the care proposed by governments, that has been often rhetorical and sectorial. Let’s think for instance on all dispensable bodies who were put in charge of the growing necessities of care, without receiving back any increase in wage, or at least an increase of the safety conditions in which they worked. On the other side, we have the model of care promoted by solidarity and mutual aid collectives, neighbourhoods and groups, whose aim was to redistribute the resources needed to face the emergency as much as possible, while at the same time denouncing the extremely dire conditions in which public services versed, due to decades of strategic disinvestment.
>Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers they’re calling – often unsuccessfully. As reported in SFGate this week, Sanas hopes its technology can provide a shortcut. Using data about the sounds of different accents and how they correspond to each other, Sanas’s AI engine can transform a speaker’s accent into what passes for another one – and right now, the focus is on making non-Americans sound like white Americans.
[...]
Narayana said he had heard the criticism, but he argued that Sanas approaches the world as it is. “Yes, this is wrong, and we should not have existed at all. But a lot of things exist in the world – like why does makeup exist? Why can’t people accept the way they are? Is it wrong, the way the world is? Absolutely. But do we then let agents suffer? I built this technology for the agents, because I don’t want him or her to go through what I went through.” The comparison to makeup is unsettling. If society – or say, an employer – pressures certain people to wear makeup, is it a real choice? And though Sanas frames its technology as opt-in, it’s not hard to envision a future in which this kind of algorithmic “makeup” becomes more widely available – and even mandatory.
From: Wilfred Chan, [The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/23/voice-accent-technology-call-center-white-american), *The Guardian*, 24th August 2022
