On April 24th Massa Carrara the quarry workers, but also many citizens, took to the streets to express their indignation against the words of an entrepreneur from the marble, Alberto Franchi, captured off-air from last Monday’s episode of Report, 22 April. “Here they get hurt because they are morons”, said Franchi CEO Umberto Marmi, speaking of the quarrymen.
“An offense to an entire community”, he tells us Rossano Rossigeneral secretary of CGIL Tuscany, reached by phone while taking part in the Carrara procession last Wednesday, 24 April. The voice reaches us accompanied by a sea of whistles and choirs, all around. “A beautiful response from the people, peaceful, I would underline, because no one here accepted the provocation. Very civil, because we don’t fall into the trap of responding to the individual subject.”
The issue is much bigger than that, Rossano Rossi explains to us. That sentence is just a thermometer that signals at what point the situation is, what the degree of impunity of a certain way of doing business is, what the detachment is from a reality which, precisely in Tuscany, less than three months ago, experienced a massacre at work which cost the lives of 5 workers, buried by collapse of the Esselunga construction site. In a country that has seen another 5 workers die on the tracks in the last year Brandizzo and 7 other workers lost their lives in the explosion of the Enel power plant Suviana. Not to mention the three deaths a day at work which for years now have barely made it to the news pages or news reports. Not to mention the impressive data on the percentages of accidents that occur in the marble quarries of Carrara compared to the total number of accidents in the whole of Tuscany.
“Unacceptable phrases – comments the secretary of the regional CGIL –, unfortunately nothing new under the sun. I don’t want to focus on the individual though. The real problem is the development model, the production model, carried out by many entrepreneurs. The stone sector is also a very dangerous sector, where major operations and interventions could be carried out on safety, on the redistribution of wealth in the territory and on environmental sustainability. The reality is that many entrepreneurs have a predatory attitude.” Profit is the only reason and the guiding star of their doing business.
“The truth is that this enormous problem should be addressed in two ways. At a regulatory level, there should be more controls and fewer cascade procurements. At a political level, the recomposition of the world of work would be urgent and necessary: as long as work is poor and precarious work, we will find ourselves faced with the any job, the ideal substrate for accidents. Entrepreneurs will always be able to say: ‘if you don’t like it, there’s a queue of people outside who are ready to replace you under the same conditions’”.
So what is the answer? “We want a decent wage, rather than the Jobs Act which establishes that you can be fired with three benches. Here is the coherence of referendum launched by the CGIL with the mobilization for health and safety: abolishing it, the Jobs Act, is the real political choice and this is a question of political choices and political will”.
The question to answer, following the thread of Rossano Rossi’s reasoning, is precisely this: “How does a worker defend his condition and claim his rights and protections if he can be fired without having done absolutely anything wrongat the discretion of the master?”.
“When I worked, the subcontracts that we see everywhere every day – and we also saw on the construction site of the Florence massacre – weren’t there. I am proud to have worked in the factory and I remember well then one of the most important moments of the day was the shift change. There were deliveries, the colleague was warned, I who worked with the forklift warned him, ‘be careful, it works badly here, be careful it doesn’t brake well’. Today, with all these contracting companies, workers no longer know each other. Many foreign workers often don’t even speak the language well and are left without the proper training. How do you – asks Rossano Rossi – replicate that model?”.
“But the CGIL will not give up. We we are here and will always be there, let’s carry on the political battlealongside all workers.”
