+++ title="Work Health Environment" has_items=["item3.md", "item4.md"] +++ # Struggles at the intersections of Work, Health and Environment ![](static/images/modernissimo.png) For context, it should be mentioned that in Italy in the ‘60s, the national average was of one death in the workplace per hour, and one accident per minute (by comparison, today we have 3 deaths per day and 800.000 accidents per year). So in the ‘60s, as the country is undergoing massive industrialization, the death toll for the workers was extremely heavy, the idea of a “class war” in this case really drives the point home here. And these were only numbers linked to direct deaths at work, without taking into consideration the indirect effects of environmental degradation and chronic conditions that begun to flare up at the time. To address this scenario, political movements begun to focus on the key term *nocività* – translatable as 'noxiousness' in English. This choice of term is crucial: the struggles for health begun as the political questioning of its opposite – which these movements identified not in sickness nor in fitness, or the capacity to optimally perform work. Noxiousness instead is the property of damaging a living process and to provoke pathologies, both to a singular organism and to an entire ecosystem. A noxious process or substance can have temporary or permanent damaging effects on health; it can move fast or become chronic; it can cause death or “merely” negatively impact the capacity of living beings to reproduce and thrive. So by focusing on noxiousness - which is produced and not a condition of the individual body, as sickness is - these movements open up the problem of health in a strategic way. They linked the wellbeing of workers, who were exposed to toxicity at work, with that of their living conditions in their neighbourhoods which were destitute and polluted, and with the conditions of domestic labour, and with the impact of capitalist production over the broader environment. # Noxiousness at Work and from Work L’Ambiente di Lavoro (The Work Environment) is the title a trade union pamphlet first put out in 1967. This was a risk analysis tool produced by the union FIOM_CGIL (one of the major Italian workers union, the most left leaning one and associated with the Communist Party). This booklet was the first attempt by the union to produce a coherent political line vis-à-vis health and safety hazards at work and to change the prevalent mentality of workers which would typically just demand that more toxic jobs to be remunerated with some extra money. It also inaugurated the idea of ‘non delegation’ that is, that on matters concerning health, the workers impacted should always be the ones to decide, without any intermediary. The Work Environment was a tool for organizers and workers together to begin to research and understand the risks to which their jobs would expose them. The booklet focuses on NOXIOUSNESS which it breaks down into 4 groups of factors: 1) Environmental conditions: noise, temperature, light, ventilation, humidity… 2) Production-specific elements, such as: gas, dust, smoke, fumes, exposure to chemicals… 3) Physical factors: exertion, muscular fatigue, lack of sufficient rest and sleep, excessive rhythms, etc… 4) Mental load: identifying on the one end of the spectrum boredom and monotony and at the other end stress, anxiety, overstimulation and humiliation. These four noxiousness factors made discussing health conditions easier. The classification it proposed was of immediate understandability because it was based on the experience of workers. We explored more in detail the technique used to first produce this pamphlet **here**.