In 1958, Porto Marghera was a large industrial zone:
7 million square metres in size,
17 kilometres of navigable canals,
24 kilometres of waterfront
32 kilometres of roads,
117 kilometres of railways,
200.000 Ampères of electrical power.
More than 300 billion Lire of private investment,
180 million Lire of annual sales volume,
25,000 workers.
When you had your interview
– because everybody had to go through an interview –
you also had an interview with the company doctor.
When they called the worker in,
in front of the table there was a chair
and on the chair there was a sack.
And the doctor told him to move the sack and have a seat.
The lucky young man whose turn it was
took the 50 kilo sack and tried to lift it.
And if he could lift it he was destined to work on the waterfront.
That was where the cargo ships were unloaded.
So that was a hidden test to test the ability to work
which led to this person to getting burned out very quickly.
The workers of "San Marco" where the furnaces were
were physically ugly and different from all of us.
They were marked by the fatigue and the heat
because they worked on the furnaces and management generously
granted them a litre of milk a day and some lemons
to recover from the terrible heat they were exposed to.
These figures in their black, dirty and torn clothes
looked like mulattoes, they were striking.
They dressed like they
were out of some classical retreat from Siberia.
They covered their ears and legs with pieces of cloth.
We saw these figures walking the factory,
they looked like lepers.
Somebody said: that one is from "San Marco".
There was also talk in the canteen,
In the company canteen
you met those dusty and stinking figures.
We young ones couldn't believe it.
We absolutely didn't want to end up like them.
Porto Marghera produces:
synthetics and artificial fibres, oils and vegetable fats,
second smelts of iron and non-iron metals.
There is glass production and processing,
cold-rolling and cable production,
production and distillation of petroleum and carbon derivatives
production and transformation of non-iron metals,
processing of non-metal minerals, smeltering, steel-making, rolling.
Sava is here to stay!
I lost my father on December 31, 1955, and on February 18,1956,
I started working at Sava, where he had worked.
I had just arrived in that mechanical workshop
when I had to change in a dressing-room
where there were hundreds of people.
Entering a dressing-room at that age with all those dirty men
who were there to change all naked, and then
30 or 40 people at a time went in the showers,
You can imagine the impression!
And then to work in a mechanical workshop which was a communist stronghold!
I did come from a left-wing family
my father even was a ‘milk and water’ communist
but I was a member of the Catholic Youth.
I wore their badge because I was proud of it.
They made fun of me and said I was wearing a "bug".
It's true that in practice everyone was hired through the parish priest,
and for those comrades,
part of their dignity was not to give grief to the parish priest
who had been decisive
in getting them their jobs.
The workers were working, but they hadn't received any wages for six months.
So the night before we had a meeting
and we agreed that next morning the workers of Breda
would go out and distribute leaflets
explaining the situation to all the passing motorists.
And we told them: If you need help, sound the sirens.
And we’ll come out of our factories as well.
In fact, at around 10 a.m. we heard the sirens sound.
I was the first to leave the factory,
I was just going to eat something ...
And at Breda there was a lot of smoke,
because they had fired tear gas grenades.
But since the wind was on our side the smoke went against the police.
We kicked the grenades back with our feet
and then threw rocks as well.
They had machine guns and we had only rocks.
And even today, if you look at the walls of Breda
you can still see all the bullet holes.
Suddenly I saw someone who looked like a plainclothes policeman.
There were 300 cops and one in plain clothes.
In a herring bone tweed coat but with a helmet on his head.
He had a gun and fired in the air.
And then they all started to shoot.
Some shot into the air, but others fired at us.
I think he was the one who shot me.
I thought I was hit in the leg
and afterwards it turned out that I had 7 stomach wounds.
Anyway ...
... someone had a head wound, many had wounded legs,
another one had been hit in the lung shot by a ricochet ...
But it seems that the prefect ordered them to retreat,
and they didn't enter into the factory, into Breda.
And that is why Breda is still there today.
Work at Breda has always been precarious
because they had to wait for the shipowner to order the ship.
If a shipowner ordered a ship there was work, otherwise there wasn't.
After graduating from Istituto Berna I successfully applied for a job at Breda.
I had a probation period but that was only formal
because people who were "sponsored" by the Istituto Berna always got hired right away.
I was hired on a month-by-month basis.
In a situation where there is less work
whether in March, April or even in late February – so they are telling us –
where they couldn't get any new contracts
they are planning to close down the shipyard of Porto Marghera.
That's what the company thinks.
There is not much work and that also affects all the outsourced jobs,
So SAM says: We are closing the shipyard.
If jobs are to be cut because there is no work
who will leave the shipyard first?
The foreign company who brought 200 people here?
Or the company which exists here, in Italy
and pays taxes and all the rest, here in Italy?
So, do they have to go first?
No, we have to go and they are staying!
Listen, I think in the present situation in the shipyard
it makes no difference where the companies are from.
Here we have a problem that is profoundly illegal.
They want to close the shipyard for one reason only:
They want to get rid of the union.
If they get rid of the union their problems go away.
They're doing exactly what many other companies operating here have done.
At home they used to say that the factory gives you security,
that you had a secure job. So I wrote some applications
from what is now ENEL to the shipyards,
basically I wrote to the shipbuilding industry in general
but always to factories because they were doing well
because they offered security.
So I wrote at least four applications, if I remember correctly,
and the first who replied were Monteponi Montevecchio
where I went to work and stayed for 32 years.
I came to the factory in late 1956 when I wasn't even 19 years old.
"Monteponi Montevecchio", what did that mean?
I thought it was just the name of a place in Sardinia
where they dug up minerals.
Then I realised that they belonged to the Montecatini group.
That company processed the whole production cyle of zinc
and other by-products.
But the biggest part of production was zinc.
Like most of you, I graduated from Pacinotti.
I chose chemistry in school because there was the petrochemical plant,
because there was the industrial zone.
I believed, or rather I hoped to have a long professional future.
I'm not saying I was convinced to stay in the petrochemical sector forever
but I believed that a big company like ENI
was not going to abandon chemicals within the next ten years.
Today very few workers are employed in the petrochemical plant.
The company has kept some workers in the existing production,
we’ve achieved that at least. But many have gone abroad
and decided to change their lives completely.
That is something we shouldn't underestimate:
People are scared of being unemployed.
We are not giving up!
Work! Work! Work!
Were are here to ask for the solidarity of the citizens.
We demand from the local government
a political plan for the Porto Marghera area.
I was kind of "destined" to start working in the petrochemical plant in Porto Marghera,
As it happened, in the late 50s some people from my family
worked in this murderous zone
which is known today as the Marghera petrochemical centre.
Like me they had graduated in chemistry.
My entry into the world of the factory is closely connected to my schooling.
Today this is different, but back then
you went to the technical-industrial school Istituto Pacinotti in Mestre
where sirens marked the beginning of the lessons.
And students were tested and evaluated
with a view to a future job before they had even graduated.
In November 1960, that is after my graduation,
I started to work in what would become the Petrochemical Plant.
November is a dreary and foggy month anyway,
the smokestacks from the factories mixed with the fog from the lagoon.
And in this dark world I started to move
trying to understand what had happened in my life
because it really was a traumatic experience
like only the loss of my father who died when I was six
in a boat accident.
That may have been the deepest trauma in my life.
The atmosphere inside the factory was one of "obeying and struggling".
There were of lot of fascists, ex-military,
who had the command structure of the factory in their hands.
Their self-discipline, their organisational capacity
was needed to make such a monster work
to keep such a plant running around the clock.
After two months I had already got used to it.
In the beginning I did some small jobs, which was okay
because winter had begun and I was in a warm cosy place.
But then they reallocated the workers
and after two months I found myself working shifts
in a department I’d call infamous. It was new and
called "FAR", which meant "red mud".
It was in its test phase
so the facilities didn't work properly,
all the time there were gas leaks,
sulfur anhydride, sulfuric acid, stuff like that.
Right in my first week of shift work
there was a gas leak during the night, of sulfuric acid.
It choked you and kept you from breathing, from working.
For years, the city has been divided over the future of the chemical industry,
environmental conflicts systematically exacerbate.
You see the usual faces
voice their slogans and electoral manipulations,
but they still have no real political project.
To defend our jobs
and to obtain better living conditions
we have been fighting since 1960 at Breda, at Vetrococche,
at Azotati, at Ilva, at Montevecchio, at INA Montecatini
and in many other factories.
The hierarchy was so extreme
that it turned the blue collar workers into real objects.
While the white collar employees seemed almost human.
We received a wage
and the white collar employees received a monthly salary.
If one of them was sick he still received his salary.
That was the difference.
There were first class and second class employees.
Why does a white collar employee have 30 days of vacation
and I have only 15?
It's not only a question of money.
If you have 30 days I must have 30 days as well.
Why do I have to work 10 hours and you have to work 8?
If you work 8 hours, so will I.
Why do you get 100 per cent health insurance cover and I get 60?
For the blue collar workers there were no collective contracts.
Their pay was based on the personal preference of the shift manager,
the department manager or the board.
For example, if two people did the same work
they would give a raise of 5 to one and a raise of 10 to the other.
Simply based on personal preference!
Let's not forget that in the 50s and 60s
the piece-rate component of the wage often reached 50 or 60 per cent.
So you really had to work like a slave.
Bosses, bourgeois, you only have a few months left.
Back home hoarse and with dirty hands
from the rocks we picked up by the rail tracks
One more time after so long
I felt armed and not defenseless
against our enemies of old.
In their faces you saw
the sneers and the coldness
of those who’ve beaten you up so many times
"Fascist pig, come on and get me"
An unknown rage and strength.
August 1, Mestre, 1968.
Our factory was not competitive any more
and that's why they closed down Sava Alluminio.
We have struggled so many times
not to rescue Sava Alluminio as such
but for these workers to still have work
and for a conversion of production over time
to higher value processing further up the aluminum production chain
based on new technologies.
That's exactly what happened in those crucial years around 1968
with the big student movements
the big demonstrations all around the world.
At the same time, for us,
the company wanted to restructure our factory.
In the last months it's true we haven't managed
to find a general answer to the attacks by the bosses
Then again the bosses weren't very successful either.
It's true that in Porto Marghera until now
the bosses haven't been successful.
Although we haven't been very successful
at organising a collective workers' response,
where the factories have mobilised the bosses did not succeed.
I was a mechanic back then, for example,
in a special department which produced solvents
like tetrachloroethane, trichloroethylene ...
In this process,
I was in charge of machine maintenance.
I worked as a technician doing applied research
in the CV6 department which became sadly famous,
one of the most sadly famous ones of the entire industrial zone, the CV6,
we made PVC,
so-called emulsion polymerisation.
It was one of the many obsolete and ramshackle patents
which Monsanto had sold to its owners, the Edison group,
and which required a large input of human labour.
That meant that everyone, workers and technicians were being butchered
in those facilities where vinyl chloride gas,
already known to be carcinogenic,
was manufactured more or less freely,
because the compressed gas was liquified
and flowed through leaky valves,
through an entire series
of rather improperly built facilities.
Bruno Massa introduced me to his "friends from Padua",
that was in 1965-66,
he introduced me to Guido Bianchini, Toni Negri, Luciano Ferrari Bravo.
I already knew their faces
because they distributed leaflets outside the factory gates.
I had seen them but hadn't contacted them
because they had been described as agents provocateurs.
I met Massimo Cacciari and other very young people
who were following the ongoing industrial transformation
from the outside, but very attentively
and starting to elaborate some political proposals.
It was the first time that I really heard of it
and that I understood what a picket meant,
what it meant to make demands,
what alternatives there might be to piecework,
what a vocation might be,
what professional skills might be.
I had heard of all those things
but neither the party nor the union
could explain these things to you.
In 1968, in the petrochemical plant
we demanded that the production bonus
be raised by the same amount for everybody, for the skilled and the unskilled.
We managed to raise a demand,
which was then officially raised by the union,
that one part of this production bonus
would be based on percentage criteria
but one part would be the same for everybody.
That was 5,000 Lire more for everybody.
If you looked at the growth of production
compared to purchasing power, then those 5,000 Lire
were ridiculous.
But in spite of that ridiculous sum
that expression of egalitarianism, those 5,000 Lire for all
led to a growth of consciousness
and to a bitter confrontation
to the point where the institutions asked themselves:
Why the hell are the bosses so stubborn because of 5,000 Lire
which in this context is a ridicilous amount?
There got mad about the egalitarianism.
That was political!
Occupying a train station and stopping the trains
was about as much as the authories would allow.
The parties must help us, the institutions. We are the people!
I know that my job is tied to a certain skill.
Rather than talk about jobs, which seems to me a bit ...
But for me my job is central, it's indispensable!
I talk about rights, I talk about dignity!
Good morning everybody. We are workers from the petrochemical plant.
Dignity, in my opinion, comes before work.
On the contrary, it comes from work.
Without work, you have no dignity, you don't even have rights.
You end up a drifter.
That is an attack on my dignity,
because if I have no money at the end of the month
that means I have no dignity any more.
I go on working but if it keeps going downhill
then my dignity becomes less.
Nobody has a magic wand,
nobody wants to take the responsibility to decide.
For years we have been organising things to defend ourselves.
When will we make a new proposal to enlarge our rights?
Defending my rights just so I don't lose them ...
I'm really getting sick of that.
February 18 is a very important date for us.
This afternoon, in Rome, they are discussing our future
and that also means the future of this city, the economy of this city.
I've met a lot of workers who were leftists
with class consciousness
who knew that something had to be done.
Still, in that factory,
at least half of us were still doing well economically.
But we always had a "bad" relationship with management
because that management was paternalistic.
For example they gave you a Christmas package,
for Epiphany they handed out gifts to those with children,
in the summer, they sent the children of the less wealthy to the mountains for a month,
in other months, there were trips to the sea.
All a very paternalistic aspect of a family enterprise,
with all these advantages. But there were those who realised that,
and didn't accept paternalism any more.
Because paternalism meant compromise
with the head office, with management,
because they showed you: if you behave yourself
you'll get security for your child, they'll send you to the mountains or to the sea,
if your children want to study, they’ll give them a scholarship.
But they destroyed anything that might have been a social fabric
or might have grown into one.
So when we became aware
the unions showed up and the first factory councils were born.
Ours was one of the first and everything was organised through assemblies.
This was different from traditional union politics
because the factory councils were workers' councils.
Anyone could be elected.
You just needed a minimum number of votes
from the workers in your department and you became
a representative of the part of the factory where you worked
and where you were a reference for the other workers.
That was an important development.
The bosses employ a number of workers
in order to make the productive assets run at full capacity,
and outsource all the additional and complementary tasks
in the cycle to subcontractors and external enterprises.
The workers fight for the abolition of outsourcing
and for the direct hiring of those working for subcontractors.
The workers of the ‘external’ enterprises were seen as different.
The didn't even have the right to use the company parking lot.
And if someone is seen as something else, a foreign body,
and then, together with others,
becomes aware of his dignity,
then the union, the CGIL, must change its relationship.
In the evening we went to the pubs
Where those from the external enterprises went to eat
to talk to them, to explain that it wasn't only about work,
that in these chemical sectors there was also sickness
and that they therefore should use masks and gloves,
protective gear,
because they were humans, too! But we had to fight on two fronts.
One of course was the "caporalato". Because the subcontractors
were not hired through local job ads
but got their workers in various regions of Italy.
There were those who made them come.
There were those who found workers for the local employer
who needed them, and took a percentage for that.
If you convinced the workers to join the union
and to get together with others then that wasn't possible any more.
And those intermediaries would lose their commission.
You know how many of our comrades have been threatened?
We had to come as a group if we wanted to talk to them.
They threatened to beat us up!
The union threw us out immediately
after the struggles of 1968.
So then the group "Potere Operaio" was born with its own office,
with its own organisational capacity and communication structures.
And obviously also the bosses responded immediately.
I for example was removed from the CV6 production department
and banished to a kind of disciplinary department,
namely to the factory infirmary.
And so the debate about health and safety, or "noxiousness" began.
"Noxiousness" is a strange term
and it took the union many years to really understand all its aspects.
Because noxiousness is considered like some kind of currency.
Actually, they spoke of the monetisation of health.
According to a kind of risk index
compensation was added to the monthly wage.
That was one of the shadiest things around.
People got paid some Lire for their health.
And on that question
our criticism of the union was very harsh.
In our department we process chlorine.
Recently we have learned that it is carcinogenic.
We have talked about it a lot, we have discussed, debated,
We were shocked.
Now cold winds blow through the windows of our department.
Vinyl chloride spares no one.
Never has death been so present.
We feel nothing but death today.
We really started to become protagonists.
We became conscious of what we produced,
we became aware of how people died in the factories.
We became aware that we mustn't let people die
in the factories and thereabouts. The debate about food ...
Next to my factory there was a nitrate factory
which made fungicides, insecticides and pesticides.
And all that went in your food.
And in the factory we went on struggling for years
for those values we had learned.
The Russians already knew in the 1930s that this gas was carcinogenic.
It's a fact that just like I knew this,
everyone knew: the executives, the managers, the technicians,
only the workers didn't! Some workers who worked on the autoclaves,
those are the containers in which polymerisation takes place,
went in and out of those containers to clean them etc.
always leaving residues in the environment.
We worked among deadly poisons, terrible, carcinogenic substances.
Don't pretend today, you stealers of lives, that you hadn't been sure,
there hadn't been laws,
don't say you didn't know.
You have murdered and you are murdering still, quiet and undisturbed.
There are no elements of a crime.
My dead comrades never existed, they have vanished in nothingness.
My dead worker comrades cannot tolerate this shame.
We cannot stand this insult.
No boss, no court will shut us up
in such a big and shameful silence.
No, that's Venetian imperialism.
But for us from the valleys of the Piave, the Adige, the Brenta,
the Po valley, the Po delta, Porto Marghera was a dangerous place.
May 1976, nine p.m., a terrible heat, an orange sky.
The earth was trembling. No one from the valleys
thinks of an earthquake in Friuli.
Everyone thinks: Marghera has exploded!
The trial has begun, and public opinion is against us.
We have to go back to our political work.
The strategy is this:
Approach the population with the instruments we have.
Leaflets, petitions, discussions with people,
make them understand that in the chemical industry
there aren't only tubes, columns and chimneys,
but also workers made of flesh and blood, with their thoughts, with their lives.
We set up a committee, one of the political committees back then,
and we based it here in the Dorsoduro quarter.
It was a neighbourhood committee.
We had made a lot of connections to what was going on in Venice.
Where the sportsfield is now, that used to be an empty lot
and with the help of the dock workers who came with their machines
we occupied the lot and marked it with red flags.
With the comrades from the docks, their machines, we levelled the field
and created the sportsfield.
We created a place thinking along these lines:
We cannot stay in the factory, we must go out.
Otherwise social reality will only be determined by politicians.
We came into this quarter
and created the embryo of today's social centres.
We won a lot of sympathy in this quarter.
We went out into the streets with a bullhorn shouting:
"Women, put the cooking pots away! Come down and talk to us!"
Things like that, you see, often very funny ...
I had spent part of my youth in this quarter as well.
I knew everyone. We rang the doorbells,
we went from door to door together with other comrades,
to explain the realities in society, the problems concerning rent.
In 1978 the government started curbing rents,
we occupied a big building in the quarter,
and held it for a long time.
till public structures were created.
So that's how we worked and went ahead.
"When the chimneys in Venice contest the glory of the sky
from the domes and the huts
and the screaming of the sirens breaks the silence of the lagoon,
then socialism will have truly begun." F. Ciancani, "The new century", 1914.
The survey of the contaminated sites in Porto Marghera
shows an impressive situation:
an area of millions of square metres
between the lagoon and the canals is covered by industrial waste.
The following substances were found in the soil samples:
radioactive residues of phosphorus cement from nitrate production,
fluorine cement from fluorine production,
bauxite derivatives from aluminium production,
pyrite ashes from sulphuric acid production,
chlorinated hydrocarbons, dioxins, mercury silts,
all covered by soot from the fumes of petrochemical production.
Porto Marghera has been born, has grown,
and now, frankly speaking, it is dying.
It is dying, but what will come after it?
I'm not worried by the fear that there is no chemical industry any more,
but by not knowing what will come after it.
The other day in Porto Marghera
The workers went on strike
The same ones who three months earlier
had demanded better wages
This time they demanded peace
just as powerfully as yesterday,
because for everyone peace means:
"No to war and no to the boss."
The boss who has sacked people
is the same who sends them to die,
is the same who kills in Texas,
in Rhodesia, in Congo and in Vietnam.
The comrades who went on strike
said that this brutal war
must be the last war
to destroy all the bosses.
Our special appreciation goes to Gabriele Bortolozzo who with his complaint made the process concerning the dead in the petrochemical plant possible. He did not live to see the opening of the process in 1998; he died in a traffic accident in 1995).
The Film is dedicated to Augusto Finzi (1941-2004).