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With thanks to Ivana Peluzzi and Gabriella Salvietti
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@ -10,4 +10,3 @@ As online distractions increasingly colonize our time, why has productivity beco
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Book:
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@ -4,7 +4,6 @@ has_sections = ["americandepartment.md", "faintinginjections.md", "whoarethesewo
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aliases = ["/zine"]
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# Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work
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Maddening Rhythms is the name we gave to the experimental publication you are holding between your hands or reading on your screen. It is a growing, mutating zine that accompanies our research exploring the links between healthcare, environmental and work-related struggles from an Italian standpoint. The title we chose for this zine is our English translation of the one of a newspaper article - RITMI DA PAZZIA - which denounced how in the factory workers are subjected to a constant accelleration in the name of profit. These rhythms are maddening in the sense that were making people furious and push them to organize for change, while at the same time they also provoked many to experience negative mental health conditions. As we shall see, burnouts, depression and psychosis were widespread experiences linked with chain work. The story of Lebole workers' and their resistance to the MTM method became for us a red thread to be able to navigate the intricacies of these epochal changes in governance, technologies and methods of exploitation, as well as changes in the subjects, places, and modes of doing politics.
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The zine comes complete with its own library of resources, some of which are documents taken from the Luigi Firrao archive at Fondazione ISEC, which we are making available here for the first time in digital form. In its digital version, Maddening Rhythms runs on Sandpoints, a still-in-development digital platform for collective writing, learning, and experimental publishing. This free software tool allows readers to easily copy onto a USB drive a single folder that contains the whole website, alongside a PDF library of all included references, and to read it offline in a browser or move it to another server. Furthermore, in situations that call for paper, it is possible to automatically export the publication into a PDF that is ready for on-demand print. The use of Sandpoints is a small step in embedding our work in a more susteinable technopolitical infrastructure, specifically relevant here perhaps, as we are critically discussing the evolution of exploitation via technologically-driven processes.
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The zine comes complete with its own library of resources, some of which are documents taken from the Luigi Firrao archive at Fondazione ISEC, which we are making available here for the first time in digital form. In its digital version, Maddening Rhythms runs on Sandpoints, a still-in-development digital platform for collective writing, learning, and experimental publishing. This free software tool allows readers to easily copy onto a USB drive a single folder that contains the whole website, alongside a PDF library of all included references, and to read it offline in a browser or move it to another server. Furthermore, in situations that call for paper, it is possible to automatically export the publication into a PDF that is ready for on-demand print. The use of Sandpoints is a small step in embedding our work in a more susteinable technopolitical infrastructure, specifically relevant here perhaps, as we are critically discussing the evolution of exploitation via technologically-driven processes.
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# Structure of the zine
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Maddening Rhythms is organized in 5 sections, each centering on one aspect of the experience of the Lebole workers and using it to introduce a broader reflection on their struggles at the intersection of health, environment and refusal of work and gender stereotypes.
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[**The American department**](https://maddeningrhythms.sandpoints.org/factor/americandepartment/) collects documents on the history of managerial techniques known as 'scientific management' and the circumstances that lead to the introduction of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) in Italy.
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 collects documents on the history of managerial techniques known as 'scientific management' and the circumstances that lead to the introduction of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) in Italy.
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[**Fainting & injections**](https://maddeningrhythms.sandpoints.org/factor/faintinginjections/) gathers fragments 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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 gathers fragments 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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[**Who are these women?**](https://maddeningrhythms.sandpoints.org/factor/whoarethesewomen/) offers insights that highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation.
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 offers insights that highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation.
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[**Radio Gabinetto**](https://maddeningrhythms.sandpoints.org/factor/radiogabinetto/) focuses 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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[**Still, we are not robots**](https://maddeningrhythms.sandpoints.org/factor/stillnotrobots/) concludes by connecting the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time.
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 focuses 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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 concludes by connecting the past stories gathered in these pages with the present time.
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We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of the struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s can be a useful exercise in our present days, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 syndemic, an event with a death poll that could have been, in large part, preventable. Connecting with the struggles that first obtained a public healthcare system might help us sharpen our demands for the future.
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# The story from which we start: Lebole, c. 1964
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In 1964, the all-female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole in Arezzo, Tuscany, were among the first ones in Italy to experience the transformation of their workflow according to the teachings of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement), a new methodology for analysing and organizing chainwork imported from the USA. In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of whom were accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks, to a fully scripted repetitive performance with maddening rhythms. With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements were measured and minutiously analysed by a team of experts, who then "choreographed" the execution of each motion in a new, time-saving manner. In short, the workers were expected to behave like ROBOTS.
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In 1964, the all-female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole in Arezzo, Tuscany, were among the first ones in Italy to experience the transformation of their workflow according to the teachings of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement), a new methodology for analysing and organizing chainwork imported from the USA. In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of whom were accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks, to a fully scripted repetitive performance with maddening rhythms. With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements were measured and minutiously analysed by a team of experts, who then "choreographed" the execution of each motion in a new, time-saving manner. In short, the workers were expected to behave like ROBOTS.
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The impact of the new MTM method on the health conditions of the Leboline (this was the nickname of the workers) was enourmous. Many experienced faintings, nervous breakdowns and other symptoms of exhaustion, conditions which the factory doctors tried to cure with cycles of "vitamin" injections. One of these women also chose to take her own life, many were forced to take frequest sick leaves.
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At the beginning of the 1960s, as political organizing was forbidden during working hours, the Leboline begun their political organizing as they could, invented a number of cunning ways to coordinate amongst themselves, in via endless word of mouth outside the factory gates, on the bus to work, and during the very few moments of rest. Crucially, important messages were communicated in a relay during bathroom visits, a practice named "Radio Gabinetto" (Radio Toilet). They also revamped the use of the contrafacta technique, modifying the lyrics of traditional but also popular hit songs of the time to convey their political messages while singing at work and at the rallies.
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At the beginning of the 1960s, as political organizing was forbidden during working hours, the Leboline begun their political organizing as they could, invented a number of cunning ways to coordinate amongst themselves, in via endless word of mouth outside the factory gates, on the bus to work, and during the very few moments of rest. Crucially, important messages were communicated in a relay during bathroom visits, a practice named "Radio Gabinetto" (Radio Toilet). They also revamped the use of the contrafacta technique, modifying the lyrics of traditional but also popular hit songs of the time to convey their political messages while singing at work and at the rallies.
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By developing in their own form of musical production, Lebole's workers intervened into the maddening rhythms that marked their experience in the factory, to compose other, more poetic, playful, counter-hegemonic rhythms and political horizons, as well as to "compose" themselves as an iconic posse within the political struggles that marked the Italian "long 1968".
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Finding their own voice and fighting for keeping it was more than a metaphor for the Leboline: with bitter irony, amongst the many health-related struggles these women carried on, one was against the indiscriminate use of formaldehyde, a compound used to augment the firmness of clothes, but which has a harmfull impact on the troath and vocal chords.
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# Fondo Luigi Firrao at Fondazione ISEC
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We first encountered the story of the Lebole workers and the impact that MTM had on their lives and health conditions during our research residency at the archive of Fondazione ISEC in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan. Their story was "told" to by Luigi Firrao, who followed it meticulously for a number of years. Firrao had a number of interviews with the Leboline, where he chatted with them about their experiences, as well as recording the powerful lyrics of their political choruses. He then wrote several newspaper articles denouncing the hidden violence of the new management techniques which were silently creeping in Italian factories since the early 1960s. Firrao also left us an exceptional collection of newspaper cut-outs, articles, and reportages on the theme of MTM and its impact on the life of the workers.
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In 1969, after publicly taking position in favor of the student movement, he was expelled from the party and joined the "Manifesto" movement with his wife. From the years 1968-69 until his death, together with Giulia, he dealt with the capitalist organization of labor, interviewing numerous male and female workers. Firrao then organized a series of lectures on the subject at the University of Rome.
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The text above is a modified translation of [*Luigi Firrao, un uomo dai molti talenti nelle carte del suo archivio*](https://archivio.fondazioneisec.it/percorsi/luigi-firrao-un-uomo-poliedrico-nelle-carte-del-suo-archivio), by Alberto De Cristofaro.
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The text above is a modified translation of [_Luigi Firrao, un uomo dai molti talenti nelle carte del suo archivio_](https://archivio.fondazioneisec.it/percorsi/luigi-firrao-un-uomo-poliedrico-nelle-carte-del-suo-archivio), by Alberto De Cristofaro.
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# Who we are
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# [Printable PDF VERSION here](/print/publication/)
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(best in Chrome)
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has_docs=["tutelasalute.md", "riformismosindacato.md", "salutelavorosfru.md", "omicidibianchi.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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[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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# 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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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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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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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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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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_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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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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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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> 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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> 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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- from: *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. Our translation*.
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- from: _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. Our 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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See also:
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# Against healhtcare reformism
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In the context of such debates on noxiousness, a poignant critique was developed amongst political collectives of medical students close to the positions of autonomous Marxism, who identified a fundamental weakness in the way the principal trade unions were using the new knowledges around noxious working environements coming from wokers' enquiries to implement a reformist policy of compromise. As summarised in one pamphlet, the fear was that trade unions would end up being complicit in a " possible capitalist use of prevention" wihtout being able "to even immagine the probable functionality of 'healthcare riformism' for the current phase of capitalist development as a control operation, of maintenace, of improvement, of recuperation of workforce' productivity - so that the 'right to health and safety' would just be an indispensible precondition for the 'right to be expolited'.
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Another point of ccontention was the political horizon that wanted to push for the direct workers' control over the acceptable risk levels in any given productive process. This proposal, critics argued, lacked intellectual honesty, insofar as it was the totality of the current "mode of production" the factor responsible for the noxious technological and industrial developments of those years. Thus, "the best prevention is class struggle" they argue, of the kind that aims at removing the root causes behind the capitalist organization of exploitation.
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Another point of contention was the political horizon that wanted to push for the direct workers' control over the acceptable risk levels in any given productive process. This proposal, critics argued, lacked intellectual honesty, insofar as it was the totality of the current "mode of production" the factor responsible for the noxious technological and industrial developments of those years. Thus, "the best prevention is class struggle" they argue, of the kind that aims at removing the root causes behind the capitalist organization of exploitation.
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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*).
|
||||
|
||||
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_).
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# Contrafacta
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
...
|
||||
|
||||
....
|
||||
|
||||
...
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
....
|
||||
|
||||
....
|
||||
|
||||
....
|
||||
|
||||
...
|
||||
|
||||
...
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
# Instructions to the doppelganger
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
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…”
|
||||
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…”
|
||||
|
||||
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:
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -48,29 +55,27 @@ Whenever the storytelling would deviate from describing the minutiae of everyday
|
|||
|
||||
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:
|
||||
|
||||
- with the machine and the job description proper
|
||||
- with the managers and the bosses
|
||||
- with colleagues and other peers
|
||||
- with political organizations (such as the party or the union)
|
||||
- with the machine and the job description proper
|
||||
- with the managers and the bosses
|
||||
- with colleagues and other peers
|
||||
- with political organizations (such as the party or the union)
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# 150 hours
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
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.
|
||||
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.
|
||||
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.
|
||||
|
||||
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)
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
*Women University 150 hourse course in Milan*
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
_Women University 150 hourse course in Milan_
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -3,31 +3,31 @@ title="Still, we are not robots"
|
|||
has_docs=["cervelloelettronico.md", "piupostomacchine.md", "maggioranzadev.md", "counterproductive.md"]
|
||||
+++
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
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 pretense of being exaustive, we gathered materials that resonate with the four red threads introduced in the previous sections: techniques of exploitation; health and environmental conditions; gendered discrimination; and forms of resistance.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# The story from which we start: Still, we are not robots
|
||||
|
||||
*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.
|
||||
_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:
|
||||
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 yesterday_
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
*the work environment today*
|
||||
|
||||
_the work environment today_
|
||||
|
||||
While in *Against Noxiousness* we can read:
|
||||
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
|
||||
> 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.
|
||||
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,
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -39,47 +39,41 @@ 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?
|
||||
|
||||
# From maddening rhythms to creepy algorithms
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
> One of Amazon’s many revenue streams is a virtual labor marketplace called MTurk. It’s a platform for businesses to hire inexpensive, on-demand labor for simple ‘microtasks’ that resist automation for one reason or another. If a company needs data double-checked, images labeled, or surveys filled out, they can use the marketplace to offer per-task work to anyone willing to accept it. MTurk is short for Mechanical Turk, a reference to a famous hoax: an automaton which played chess but concealed a human making the moves.
|
||||
|
||||
>The name is thus tongue-in-cheek, and in a telling way; MTurk is a much-celebrated innovation that relies on human work taking place out of sight and out of mind. Businesses taking advantage of its extremely low costs are perhaps encouraged to forget or ignore the fact that humans are doing these rote tasks, often for pennies.
|
||||
> The name is thus tongue-in-cheek, and in a telling way; MTurk is a much-celebrated innovation that relies on human work taking place out of sight and out of mind. Businesses taking advantage of its extremely low costs are perhaps encouraged to forget or ignore the fact that humans are doing these rote tasks, often for pennies.
|
||||
|
||||
>Jeff Bezos has described the microtasks of MTurk workers as “artificial artificial intelligence;” the norm being imitated is therefore that of machinery: efficient, cheap, standing in reserve, silent and obedient. MTurk calls its job offerings “Human Intelligence Tasks” as additional indication that simple, repetitive tasks requiring human intelligence are unusual in today’s workflows.
|
||||
> Jeff Bezos has described the microtasks of MTurk workers as “artificial artificial intelligence;” the norm being imitated is therefore that of machinery: efficient, cheap, standing in reserve, silent and obedient. MTurk calls its job offerings “Human Intelligence Tasks” as additional indication that simple, repetitive tasks requiring human intelligence are unusual in today’s workflows.
|
||||
|
||||
- from: Daniel Affsprung, [The Past and Future of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence“, Cyborgology](https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2021/04/19/the-past-and-future-of-artificial-artificial-intelligence/ ), *The Society Pages*, April 19, 2021.
|
||||
- from: Daniel Affsprung, [The Past and Future of “Artificial Artificial Intelligence“, Cyborgology](https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2021/04/19/the-past-and-future-of-artificial-artificial-intelligence/), _The Society Pages_, April 19, 2021.
|
||||
|
||||
**Caging workers for their own good**
|
||||
|
||||
> A cage for workers on wheels. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. It’s not. In 2016, Amazon filed a patent for a device described as a “system and method for transporting personnel within an active workplace”. It is actually a cage large enough to fit a worker. It’s mounted on top of an automated trolley device. A robotic arm faces outwards.
|
||||
|
||||
>The worker cage was designed by Amazon’s robotic engineers. It was intended to protect workers in Amazon’s warehouses when they needed to venture into spaces where robot stock-pickers whizz around. Amazon’s worker cage was quietly patented and only came to global attention thanks to the diligent digging of two academics. When the workers’ cage started to appear in newspaper headlines, Amazon executives declared it a “bad idea”.
|
||||
> The worker cage was designed by Amazon’s robotic engineers. It was intended to protect workers in Amazon’s warehouses when they needed to venture into spaces where robot stock-pickers whizz around. Amazon’s worker cage was quietly patented and only came to global attention thanks to the diligent digging of two academics. When the workers’ cage started to appear in newspaper headlines, Amazon executives declared it a “bad idea”.
|
||||
|
||||
>Amazon may have dropped the plans, but that should not come as a surprise. The company doesn’t need a robotic cage for workers – it already has one of the most all-pervasive control systems in history. In its huge warehouses, workers carry hand-held computers that control their movements. A wristband patented by the company (but which is not yet in use) can direct the movement of workers’ hands using “haptic feedback”. Stock pickers in Amazon warehouses are watched by cameras, and workers have reportedly been reduced to urinating in bottles in order to hit their targets, and they are constantly reminded of their productivity rates. Investigations by journalists have also exposed a worryingly high level of ambulance call-outs to Amazon warehouses in the UK.
|
||||
> Amazon may have dropped the plans, but that should not come as a surprise. The company doesn’t need a robotic cage for workers – it already has one of the most all-pervasive control systems in history. In its huge warehouses, workers carry hand-held computers that control their movements. A wristband patented by the company (but which is not yet in use) can direct the movement of workers’ hands using “haptic feedback”. Stock pickers in Amazon warehouses are watched by cameras, and workers have reportedly been reduced to urinating in bottles in order to hit their targets, and they are constantly reminded of their productivity rates. Investigations by journalists have also exposed a worryingly high level of ambulance call-outs to Amazon warehouses in the UK.
|
||||
|
||||
- from: Andrè Spicer, [Amazon’s ‘worker cage’ has been dropped, but its staff are not free](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/amazon-worker-cage-staff), *The Guardian*, 14th September 2018.
|
||||
- from: Andrè Spicer, [Amazon’s ‘worker cage’ has been dropped, but its staff are not free](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/amazon-worker-cage-staff), _The Guardian_, 14th September 2018.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
*the Amazon cage drawing that accompanies the patent*
|
||||
_the Amazon cage drawing that accompanies the patent_
|
||||
|
||||
>Now a days, employee health and well-being is the most important consideration in the work place. Because it will affect the productivity of an individual employee and team contribution. Eventually, the automatic facial expression analysis using machine learning has become an interesting and active research area from past few decades.In this paper, Real time Employee Emotion Detection System (RtEED) has been proposed to automatically detect employee emotions in real time using machine learning. RtEED system helps the employer can check well-being of employees and identified emotion will be intimated to respective employee through messages. Thereby employees can make better decisions, they can improve their concentration level towards work and adopt to the healthier life style and much productive work styles. CMU Multi-PIE Face Data is used to train machine learning model. Each employee will be equipped with a webcam to capture facial expression of an employee in real time. The RtEED system designed to identify six emotions such as happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger through the captured image. Results demonstrate that expected objectives are achieved.
|
||||
> Now a days, employee health and well-being is the most important consideration in the work place. Because it will affect the productivity of an individual employee and team contribution. Eventually, the automatic facial expression analysis using machine learning has become an interesting and active research area from past few decades.In this paper, Real time Employee Emotion Detection System (RtEED) has been proposed to automatically detect employee emotions in real time using machine learning. RtEED system helps the employer can check well-being of employees and identified emotion will be intimated to respective employee through messages. Thereby employees can make better decisions, they can improve their concentration level towards work and adopt to the healthier life style and much productive work styles. CMU Multi-PIE Face Data is used to train machine learning model. Each employee will be equipped with a webcam to capture facial expression of an employee in real time. The RtEED system designed to identify six emotions such as happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger through the captured image. Results demonstrate that expected objectives are achieved.
|
||||
|
||||
- from: K. S. Chandraprabha, A. N. Shwetha, M. Kavitha and R. Sumathi, [Real time-Employee Emotion Detection system (RtEED) using Machine Learning](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9388510), 2021 Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV), 2021, pp. 759-763, doi: 10.1109/ICICV50876.2021.9388510.
|
||||
|
||||
# How are we? On the degradation of planetary health
|
||||
|
||||
> 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.
|
||||
|
||||
>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
|
||||
|
||||
- Berlinguer, introduction to the conference "La medicina e la società contemporanea", Instituto Gramsci, 1967
|
||||
|
||||
The aftermath of WWII saw a number of struggles for health to become recognised as a common good. Many people fought for health practices to be supported via the public sector, and for care to be made available universally and for free at the point of use (that is, paid for through general taxation). Some of these struggles were more successful, other were less so, but whenever change came about it was not a top-down decision, but a result of complex mobilizations that often created transversal connections between those affected, organizers and professionals.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -89,13 +83,13 @@ Italy in these decades was subjected to a fast industrialization that deeply alt
|
|||
|
||||
In the aftermath of the decade-long neoliberal crisis of care and the more recent pandemic, many political imaginaries related to the protection of collective health rely on mutual aid and solidarity networks. Many of the initiatives that want care to be more accessible and inclusive are set up as self-organzised practices. Many activists and organizers are loudly critical of public healthcare provisions which are perceived as negligent and over-bureaucratic at best, incompetent and punitive at worst.
|
||||
|
||||
Looking back at the Italian struggles for health of the 1960s and 1970s is a relevant tasks today as this history reminds us of a different possibility in orienting our political imaginaries. Rather than presenting autonomous and self-organzied practices as the opposite of languishing public infrastructures, they remind us that these very different alignment of forces is possible, as these struggles led to the creation of a public health care system in 1978.
|
||||
Looking back at the Italian struggles for health of the 1960s and 1970s is a relevant tasks today as this history reminds us of a different possibility in orienting our political imaginaries. Rather than presenting autonomous and self-organzied practices as the opposite of languishing public infrastructures, they remind us that these very different alignment of forces is possible, as these struggles led to the creation of a public health care system in 1978.
|
||||
|
||||
The pressure for creating such public health care system was born from an unprecedented alliance between left political forces, advanced experiences renewing medical practice, radical health activism, struggles by trade unions, workers’ groups, student and feminist movements. The 1978 reform was a universal, public, free health service, offering a wide range of provision outside the market, largely modelled on the British NHS and reflecting the definition of health spelt out by the WHO in 1946.
|
||||
|
||||
Abandoning the tradition of a corporatist health system with its limited coverage of separate professional groups, Italy’s reform introduced a public and universal health service, financed through general taxation, freely available to all.
|
||||
|
||||
The link between the self-organized struggles and the new public system becomes apparent in the way it was designed in its original conception (albeit soon corrupted by a series of reactionary modification to the law). In several areas – mental health, occupational health, women’s health, drug treatments - new knowledge on illness prevention, new practices of service delivery and innovative institutional arrangements emerged, with a strong emphasis on territorial services addressing together health and social needs. The movements' legacy was palpable in the integrated vision of health – physical and psychic, individual and collective, linked to the community and the territory – that emerged. The struggles were clear in their proposal: a new, less hierarchical type of doctor-patient relationship was needed; healthcare should be linked to territories and, as much as possible, conducted in participatory manner; preventive approaches, rather than curing, were central in this vision. This political strategy viewed health as combining a collective dimension and an individual condition; collective struggles were therefore needed to address the economic and social roots of disease and public health problems. This approach was paralleled by the feminist movement in addressing women’s health issues, including the important experiments in self-organized health clinics. As Giulio Maccacaro had argued in 1976, the strategy was a bottom-up “politicization of medicine”, challenging the way industrial capitalism was exploiting workers and undermining health and social conditions in the country.
|
||||
The link between the self-organized struggles and the new public system becomes apparent in the way it was designed in its original conception (albeit soon corrupted by a series of reactionary modification to the law). In several areas – mental health, occupational health, women’s health, drug treatments - new knowledge on illness prevention, new practices of service delivery and innovative institutional arrangements emerged, with a strong emphasis on territorial services addressing together health and social needs. The movements' legacy was palpable in the integrated vision of health – physical and psychic, individual and collective, linked to the community and the territory – that emerged. The struggles were clear in their proposal: a new, less hierarchical type of doctor-patient relationship was needed; healthcare should be linked to territories and, as much as possible, conducted in participatory manner; preventive approaches, rather than curing, were central in this vision. This political strategy viewed health as combining a collective dimension and an individual condition; collective struggles were therefore needed to address the economic and social roots of disease and public health problems. This approach was paralleled by the feminist movement in addressing women’s health issues, including the important experiments in self-organized health clinics. As Giulio Maccacaro had argued in 1976, the strategy was a bottom-up “politicization of medicine”, challenging the way industrial capitalism was exploiting workers and undermining health and social conditions in the country.
|
||||
|
||||
**Politicizing Expertise, Over and Over Again**
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -115,35 +109,33 @@ The terms of service, and the term service itself, while perfectly acceptable an
|
|||
|
||||
**Social Reproduction and Hyperemployment**
|
||||
|
||||
>The histories of machines, femininity, and waged labour have long been understood as deeply entangled and mutually constitutive. This merging of woman, machine, and work is taken in a new direction in the twenty-first century, with the advent of the “digital assistant”. These applications are knowledge navigators, available as part of various operating systems, which recognise natural speech, and use this ability to help answer user’s queries and to aid in organizational tasks, such as scheduling meetings or setting reminders. Perhaps the most famous of these is Apple’s Siri – now widely recognised as the voice of the iPhone – but there are several others, including GoogleNow and Microsoft’s Cortana, all of which perform similar functions with varying degrees of efficiency. The connections between these digital assistants and the conventions of low-status clerical work are obvious; Microsoft even went so far as to interview human PAs whilst developing Cortana, and a reviewer from Wired magazine declared that using Siri is: ‘kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me’ (Chen, 2011: n.p.). These apps represent, in many respects, the automation of what has been traditionally deemed to be women’s labour. [...] This brings us to the topic of ‘hyperemployment.’ What do we mean by this term? Hyperemployment is an idea, advanced by Ian Bogost, which links contemporary technological developments with a qualitative and quantitative change in personal workloads. His argument is that technology – far from acting in a labour-saving capacity – is in fact generative of ever more tasks and responsibilities.
|
||||
> The histories of machines, femininity, and waged labour have long been understood as deeply entangled and mutually constitutive. This merging of woman, machine, and work is taken in a new direction in the twenty-first century, with the advent of the “digital assistant”. These applications are knowledge navigators, available as part of various operating systems, which recognise natural speech, and use this ability to help answer user’s queries and to aid in organizational tasks, such as scheduling meetings or setting reminders. Perhaps the most famous of these is Apple’s Siri – now widely recognised as the voice of the iPhone – but there are several others, including GoogleNow and Microsoft’s Cortana, all of which perform similar functions with varying degrees of efficiency. The connections between these digital assistants and the conventions of low-status clerical work are obvious; Microsoft even went so far as to interview human PAs whilst developing Cortana, and a reviewer from Wired magazine declared that using Siri is: ‘kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me’ (Chen, 2011: n.p.). These apps represent, in many respects, the automation of what has been traditionally deemed to be women’s labour. [...] This brings us to the topic of ‘hyperemployment.’ What do we mean by this term? Hyperemployment is an idea, advanced by Ian Bogost, which links contemporary technological developments with a qualitative and quantitative change in personal workloads. His argument is that technology – far from acting in a labour-saving capacity – is in fact generative of ever more tasks and responsibilities.
|
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|
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from: Helen Hester, [Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment](https://salvage.zone/technically-female-women-machines-and-hyperemployment/), Salvage magazine, 2016.
|
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|
||||
**Female-sounding at least**
|
||||
|
||||
>Once you start listening you can’t stop hearing it. The voice – female, or female-sounding at least, pre-recorded ‘real’ voices or mechanised tones, or, often, a weird cut-up mixture of both, dominates the sonic landscape. From the supermarket checkout machines with their chaste motherish inquiries (‘have you swiped your Nectar card?’) to repeated assertions regarding the modes of securitised paranoia (‘in these times of heightened security’), the female voice operates as a central asset in the continued securitisation and control of contemporary space, cutting across what little is left of the public realm and providing the appearance and the illusion of efficiency, calm and reassurance in commercial environments.
|
||||
> Once you start listening you can’t stop hearing it. The voice – female, or female-sounding at least, pre-recorded ‘real’ voices or mechanised tones, or, often, a weird cut-up mixture of both, dominates the sonic landscape. From the supermarket checkout machines with their chaste motherish inquiries (‘have you swiped your Nectar card?’) to repeated assertions regarding the modes of securitised paranoia (‘in these times of heightened security’), the female voice operates as a central asset in the continued securitisation and control of contemporary space, cutting across what little is left of the public realm and providing the appearance and the illusion of efficiency, calm and reassurance in commercial environments.
|
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|
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- from: Nina Power, [Once You Start Listening You Can’t Stop Hearing It](https://ninapower.net/2017/12/07/once-you-start-listening-you-cant-stop-hearing-it/), *The Wire* n. 352, June 2013.
|
||||
- from: Nina Power, [Once You Start Listening You Can’t Stop Hearing It](https://ninapower.net/2017/12/07/once-you-start-listening-you-cant-stop-hearing-it/), _The Wire_ n. 352, June 2013.
|
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|
||||
**Make-up for the voice**
|
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|
||||
>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
|
||||
> 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
|
||||
|
||||
# In way of conclusions
|
||||
|
||||
Through the pages and the documents gathered in Maddening Rhythms we have unpacking the story of Lebole workers to disentangle some of the aspects that characterised their conditions of life, work and struggles. Our time spent in the archive we traced some of the debates , key terms and inventive organizational techniques that characterised the decades 1960s and 1970s, which as we saw marked the epochal passage to a new level of technologization of work. Our meandering through the many newspaper clips and typed manuscripts was simultaneously a quest to find tools for reading the present.
|
||||
|
||||
A present that we then begun to map through a number of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen workers employed in different occupational sectors, but who all share a significant relation with digital technologies as part of their job experience. We are extremely grateful to all of those who took the time to talk to us, sharing sometimes difficult stories about their work life and their relationships with co-workers, clients and (often alghoritmic) bosses. These conversations were points of entry in the simmering landscape of platform work and gig economy.
|
||||
A present that we then begun to map through a number of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen workers employed in different occupational sectors, but who all share a significant relation with digital technologies as part of their job experience. We are extremely grateful to all of those who took the time to talk to us, sharing sometimes difficult stories about their work life and their relationships with co-workers, clients and (often alghoritmic) bosses. These conversations were points of entry in the simmering landscape of platform work and gig economy.
|
||||
|
||||
In Italy (INAP) there are over 570,000 platform workers, 1.3% of the national population. They are riders, delivery workers, AI trainers, data compilers, content creators, sex workers and many more.
|
||||
50.7% of them ended up in this kind of work because they have no other alternatives. For 48% of them, platform work is their main source of income.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
What emerges from the juxtaposition between past and present stories describing the work environment and its impact on health?
|
||||
|
||||
First of all, we found many, at times surprising, lines of continuity. Not only the obsessive rhythms of work, but also a weariness of the effects of technology on psychic and physical health; an ever increasingly "scripted" job description, where not only tasks, but behaviours and movements are meticulously monitored; the quest for ways to expand workers struggles beyond the places of work, to include demands around environmental care and reorganization of social reproduction; a call to politicize the role of experts, perceived as distant and unaware of the actual experiences of workers. But we also found some fissures, marking stark lines of discontinuity. For example, the separation between bodies at work, and its consequences that the contemporary spatial and temporal organization of labour is having on a ever-weaker social solidarity. Isolation and solitude increased a lot in contemproary accounts (as one of our interviees, Cadmioboro, put it: "we are all alone").
|
||||
|
|
@ -155,10 +147,3 @@ However, a precise understanding (and, consequentially, a political awareness) o
|
|||
|
||||
Currently there are a number of fighting and resistance practices emerging within and beyond platforms, from strike actions to individual tricks adopted to slow down. Forms of self-management / ownership of the algorithm - as experimented with by the cooperative platforms movement - are also taking hold. There are those who, in continuity with the early days of industrial production, invoke forms of Luddite sabotage. Others identify in an universal unconditional basic income the only measure capable of restoring the power of the working class of rejecting working conditions that are dangerous and humiliating. Still others are engaged in new forms of unionization, such as recent attempts at Amazon, Apple and Deliveroo. Finally, there are those who see a need to deal with a more radical transformation of the digital infrastructure that regulates not only work, but ever more ubiquitously, most aspects of life. A need for a sustainable redesign of the tech sector, one that would include a consideration of its environmental impact as well as its psychological one. There all all kinds of experimentalisms agitating in the background of the platform sector, not simply reduceable to a clear antagonism, but embracing more oblique strategies of resistance and survival.
|
||||
Rather than speculating on the future directions these and other protests will contribute to shape here, we wish to conclude this work in progress sharing our conviction, which grew during these months of research, around the paramount importance to conitue keeping track, in this political conjuncture, of the mutual implications and reconfigurations of welfare and technology.
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
@ -3,19 +3,14 @@ title="Who are these women?"
|
|||
has_docs=["pillola.md", "7000donne.md", "quizamore.md"]
|
||||
+++
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# Patriarchy
|
||||
|
||||
This section collects documents, fragments and insights that highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# The story from which we start: Who are these women?
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
As the workers raised their voices denouncing the inhuman levels of exhaustion provoked by the new productivity levels required by MTM, the managers at Lebole attempted to downplay the health crisis on their hands (which would see between 17% and 24% of the workers on sick leave at the same time). Seeking to shift the blame onto other factors impacting the lives of their (nearly) all-female workforce of around 3000 women, they argued that nevrosis and hysterical reactions were not due to stress and excessive workloads, but by the fact that many workers were also mothers and spouses with domestic duties beyond their working hours at the factory.
|
||||
|
||||
This line of reasoning was not the only front on which the Leboline had to intervene in order to challange mysoginist and patriarchal assumptions around their role as women. Within the trade unions and the communist party too, they were admired for their fierceness and yet at the same time seen with suspicion, as an anomaly to be kept in check.
|
||||
|
|
@ -26,26 +21,21 @@ These exuberant groups of women and girls would appear fashionably dressed (many
|
|||
Against this limited vision, the mounting feminist movement was in the same years beginning to roar its discontent.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Many among Lebole workers went on to become expert trade unionists and party members often contributing to discussions around issues mainly impacting the lives of working class women. In the book *Quelle della Lebole. Frammenti di fabbrica tra interni e esterni*, for example, Patrizia Gabrielli highlights how the Leboline initiated important mobilizations demanding the city of Arezzo to provide kindergarten care for their children. But beyond the different topics thay tackled, there was something about the way in which Leboline practiced politics as a continuation of their private friendships that remains importantly gendered. The interstitial sociality that these women found at the factory was a source of political pleasure, breaking the solitudes of domestic lives. Birthday parties and gossips about relatioships intertwined with solidarity intiatives with other factories and the spontaneous strikes that punctuated these years.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Many among Lebole workers went on to become expert trade unionists and party members often contributing to discussions around issues mainly impacting the lives of working class women. In the book _Quelle della Lebole. Frammenti di fabbrica tra interni e esterni_, for example, Patrizia Gabrielli highlights how the Leboline initiated important mobilizations demanding the city of Arezzo to provide kindergarten care for their children. But beyond the different topics thay tackled, there was something about the way in which Leboline practiced politics as a continuation of their private friendships that remains importantly gendered. The interstitial sociality that these women found at the factory was a source of political pleasure, breaking the solitudes of domestic lives. Birthday parties and gossips about relatioships intertwined with solidarity intiatives with other factories and the spontaneous strikes that punctuated these years.
|
||||
|
||||
# The ecofeminist battles of Laura Conti
|
||||
|
||||
On 10th July 1976, there was an accident at the ICMESA plant in Meda, which is now remembered as the “Seveso tragedy”. The accident caused the emission and dispersion of a poisonous cloud of TCDD dioxin, one of the most dangerous synthetic chemicals, on the surrounding municipalities of Lower Brianza, in particular Seveso.
|
||||
Activist doctor Laura Conti goes to Seveso to follow the developments of the impacted population. In her work, she denounced the risks to the environment from accidents related to industrial activities and shaped the so-called 'Seveso Directive' (Directive 82/501/EEC), the European law for the prevention of such accidents that offers parameters for the control of the over 12 000 industrial establishments in the European Union where dangerous substances are used or stored in large quantities, mainly in the chemical and petrochemical industry.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Laura Conti, who was born in Udine in 1921 and died in Milan in 1993, was a member of the anti-fascist Resistance. She was detained in a camp in August 1944. Later freed, in 1949 she earned her medical degree. It is no accident that Ramazzini, a 17th-century physician regarded as the founder of occupational medicine, was the subject of her thesis in her second year of university, as Laura Conti’s militant practice focused on the protection of workers and the environment from the toxic logic of capital accumulation.
|
||||
She wrote 26 books, founded the environmentalist organization Legambiente and leading the environmentalist and feminist movements’ mobilizations for the closure of all nuclear plants in Italy following the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station in April 1986.
|
||||
|
||||
In Seveso, Laura Conti’s work focused, among other things, on helping pregnant women to obtain a secure abortion, as dioxin provokes malformations in the foetus. At the time, the interruption of pregnancy was still only a possibility in case of malformations. The Seveso tragedy and the work of Laura Conti helped shape a tough conversation about therapeutic abortion and, more generally, about the notion that interrupting one’s pregancy may be a woman's free decision to begin with. It took Italy two years, or 1978, to pass a legislation on the matter.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# Let's talk about women, by Franca Rame and Dario Fo (1977)
|
||||
|
||||
In 1977, Franca Rame and Dario Fo, a couple of Italian dramagurgs and actors, stage for the first time the play in five one-acts *Parliamo di donne* (Let's talk about women). The third act, entitled 'Il pupazzo giapponese' (The Japanese puppet, jokingly deals with the rhythms of chainwork in factories and the psychological impact that such exploitation causes on the workforce - especially on women workers. The latter are forced to constantly take tranquillisers to maintain a minimum of efficiency carrying out exasperating tasks and to withstand the management's abuse. In the plot, one of the female workers, by dint of tranquillisers, has reduced herself to a form of insanity, for which she is teased by her colleagues. Their joke is to make her believe that in Japanese factories, in order to allow the employees to vent their repressed anger, there is a puppet with a silhouette identical to that of the manager; and that this puppet can be attacked whenever the anger reaches the limit of endurance. Faced with the girl's amazement, her colleagues assure her that this system, already popular in Japan, will soon be made available in Italian factories as well. As chance would have it, the manager, while attempting to repair a faulty piece of machinery, is temporarely paralysed by an electric shock, and so he is placed in an armchair while waiting for the doctor to arrive. As the other workers leave, the girl, seeing the manager in this frozen condition, mistakes him for the famous Japanese puppet and takes out her restrained rage on him.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
In 1977, Franca Rame and Dario Fo, a couple of Italian dramagurgs and actors, stage for the first time the play in five one-acts _Parliamo di donne_ (Let's talk about women). The third act, entitled 'Il pupazzo giapponese' (The Japanese puppet, jokingly deals with the rhythms of chainwork in factories and the psychological impact that such exploitation causes on the workforce - especially on women workers. The latter are forced to constantly take tranquillisers to maintain a minimum of efficiency carrying out exasperating tasks and to withstand the management's abuse. In the plot, one of the female workers, by dint of tranquillisers, has reduced herself to a form of insanity, for which she is teased by her colleagues. Their joke is to make her believe that in Japanese factories, in order to allow the employees to vent their repressed anger, there is a puppet with a silhouette identical to that of the manager; and that this puppet can be attacked whenever the anger reaches the limit of endurance. Faced with the girl's amazement, her colleagues assure her that this system, already popular in Japan, will soon be made available in Italian factories as well. As chance would have it, the manager, while attempting to repair a faulty piece of machinery, is temporarely paralysed by an electric shock, and so he is placed in an armchair while waiting for the doctor to arrive. As the other workers leave, the girl, seeing the manager in this frozen condition, mistakes him for the famous Japanese puppet and takes out her restrained rage on him.
|
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