!publish!

content/factor/radiogabinetto.md

@@ -3,21 +3,22 @@ title="Radio Gabinetto"
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+# Factor 4: Finding one's voice
+
+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. 
 
 
+# The story from which we start: Radio Gabinetto
 
 ![](static/images/radio_gabinetto.jpg)
 
-# Radio Gabinetto
 
 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*).
 
 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.
 
-In this section, we will explore some of the many inventive and original techniques of organizing that accompanied the rise of healthcare struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. 
 
-
-## Instructions to the doppelganger
+# 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:
 
@@ -51,11 +52,12 @@ L’Ambiente di lavoro was since then translated by unions in 7 different countr
 
 Here, we have translated in English the instructions to the doppelganger contributed by Cesare Cosi.
 
-## 150 hours
+# 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. 
 
 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. 
+
 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)