diff --git a/content/factor/faintinginjections.md b/content/factor/faintinginjections.md index 393422a..6e52a90 100644 --- a/content/factor/faintinginjections.md +++ b/content/factor/faintinginjections.md @@ -6,17 +6,19 @@ has_items=[] # Factor 2: Noxiousness -This section collects 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. +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. -# # The story from which we start: Fainting & injections for Lebole workers +# The story from which we start: Fainting & injections + ![](static/images/lebole_manif.jpg) -![](static/images/Lebole_ammalate.jpg) - In the mid-1960s, as MTM was rolled out across the entire production line, the health of the Leboline (informal name used by and for the workers at Lebole) begun to take a toll. Faintings, including mass fainting episodes, nervous breakdowns, digestive problems and depression begun to spread. One of the workers reported how she couldn’t stop thinking about the same movements that she had to repeat all day long even when she was at home or in her sleep. Another one decided to end her own lifeand walk under a train during a break. In an attempt to limit the absences claimed for illness, the company doctors would frequently prescribe injections, typically containing bromine, calcium and magnesium, with a sedative and tonic effects. +![](static/images/Lebole_ammalate.jpg) + + 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. @@ -35,7 +37,7 @@ As workers’ struggles and unionization efforts grew stronger and stronger acro ![](static/images/travascio_salute_6.png) -## Healthcare struggles in '60s and '70s Italy +# Healthcare struggles in '60s and '70s Italy Italy was the second country in Western capitalist Europe (after the UK, 1948) to achieve the right to a public healthcare system in 1978. To these days, the Italian national healthcare system remains an odd story of success despite many counter-reforms. As Chiara Giorgi noted, @@ -51,7 +53,7 @@ So in the ‘60s, as the country was undergoing massive industrialization, the i ![](static/images/1morto.jpg) -## Noxiousness at Work and from Work +# Noxiousness at Work and from Work To address this scenario, political movements begun to focus on the key term *nocività* – translatable as 'noxiousness' in English. This choice of term is crucial: the struggles for health begun as the political questioning of its opposite – which these movements identified not in sickness nor in fitness, or the capacity to optimally perform work. @@ -59,7 +61,7 @@ Noxiousness instead is the property of damaging a living process and to provoke So by focusing on noxiousness - which is produced and not a condition of the individual body, as sickness is - these movements open up the problem of health in a strategic way. They linked the wellbeing of workers, who were exposed to toxicity at work, with that of their living conditions in their neighbourhoods which were destitute and polluted, and with the conditions of domestic labour, and with the impact of capitalist production over the broader environment. -## The Work Environment +# The Work Environment L’Ambiente di Lavoro (The Work Environment) is the title a trade union pamphlet first put out in 1967. This was a risk analysis tool produced by the union FIOM_CGIL (one of the major Italian workers union, the most left leaning one and associated with the Communist Party). @@ -74,7 +76,7 @@ The Work Environment was a tool for organizers and workers together to begin to These four noxiousness factors made discussing health conditions easier. The classification it proposed was of immediate understandability because it was based on the experience of workers. -## Against Noxiousness +# Against Noxiousness Another key document to understand the intertwining of the politics for work, health and environment of the itme was *Against Noxiousness*, a political communiqué written in 1971 by the group Comitato Politico degli Operai di Porto Marghera, a political collective where renown autonomist thinkers such as Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Toni Negri begun their militancy. The activities of this group and the context of Porto Marghera, which is the site of a petrol-chemical plant near Venice, have been the focus of some recent research by Lorenzo Feltrin and Devi Sacchetto, which maked some of this history available in the English language.