chapter 13 Italy: The Revolution in Logistics

Anna Curcio

‘A Week of Passion’

Monday, 20 January 2014, it’s early in the morning. A white van is parked outside the main gate of the warehouses of Granarolo – the dairy farming plant in Bologna – which for the last months has been the epicentre of a hard struggle for labour rights. It is the same van which had been parked outside the ikea storage in Piacenza to support ikea workers on strike. After six intense months of picket-lines and blockades the ikea workers won. Since then, the white van has become a sort of talisman for the Granarolo and Cogefrin warehouse workers. It all began with workers opposing a 35 percent pay cut and speaking out publicly in protest. 51 workers were then fired because in early May they had gone on strike for better wages and labour conditions. All of them had been employed by Sgb, Service Group Bologna, a consortium of cooperatives. Sgb manages sub-contracted labourers in Granarolo and Cogefrin warehouses. The latter deals with plastics imports and exports between the Middle East and Europe. From 20–5 January 2014 Granarolo and Cogefrin warehouse workers organ- ised several on-off blockades together with students, precarious workers and social movement activists who joined the picket-lines. They demanded the reinstatement of the fired workers. The police used violence to interrupt the blockades three times. The first time was on the first evening on Monday, 20 January. The blockade had lasted an entire day, but at the end of the day the police managed to clear off the picket-line despite nearly two hours of res- istance. On Thursday 23 January police violently broke up a blockade which had been going on for at least five hours to ensure the transit of goods. Their methods were less ‘conventional’ than usual. Pepper spray might not be officially allowed in Italy, yet the police made use of it; they broke the hands of some workers trying to resist the clearance, and resorted to the entire repertoire of riot police brutality including violent charges and batons.1 Two

1 See the video testimony of a worker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgZvDeG12q4.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004291478_014 260 curcio workers were hospitalised, five others ended up in police custody, with two of them getting arrested without any evidence.The day after, on Friday, 24 January, police intervened the third and last time. In heavy rain, hundreds of workers, students, precarious workers and activists decided to block the plant entrance to the bitter end as a sort of revenge for the violence and the arrests of the previous day. This time, the police dragged people away – one by one – from the picket line.2 Then on 25 January a demonstration held outside the court demanded the immediate release of the two workers who had been arrested the previous day. This demonstration, and the important intervention of the lawyer, forced the release of the workers. According to one worker this was a ‘week of passion’; this subsequently became the apt title of a video of the conflict posted on YouTube.3 These very intense days of struggles split the city of Bologna into opposing sides: force against force. On the one hand, Sgb with its Granarolo and Cogefrin warehouses received the support of local and national political institutions, and the main trade union organisations. These then launched a coordinated attack against the workers on strike via political, media and judicial channels. On the other hand, workers could count on support from social centres, political collectives, students, precarious workers and workers from other industries, including public employees of the local administrations, and even from some novelists who made their support for the strike public. Everybody on both sides knew that the dispute was crucial. The stakes were high because the co-op system which manages subcontracted work in the industry represents the dominant paradigm for the overall organisation of precarious work in Italy at present. Thus, the city of Bologna split along a class line. When we look at this ‘week of passion’, we can easily see that it was the peak of an extraordinary five-year long cycle of struggle within the logistics industry. On this basis, the present chapter analyses the forces and the actors involved in this cycle of struggle, the labour organisation, the social composition of the struggles, and the emergence of an autonomous political subjectivity able to relate with ‘its’ trade union in a pragmatic manner that we could define as ‘the workers’ use of the union’. To conclude, this chapter will try to highlight the political lessons emerging from the struggles.

2 See the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr_J7iS_reo&feature=share. 3 See the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soKaGUdDY08.