We Want Everything Page 2

  Before it had been the other way around. Labourers had to stay peasants, they had to stay tied to the land. The workers of the south had to all stay tied to the south. Because if they’d all gone to work in the north and in Europe before about 15 years ago there would have been a big mess up there. Because they weren’t ready with all the factories and everything up there then. I didn’t know about these things that had happened, before. I learned about them by talking to the comrades. After I’d given up on work, for good. After the trouble I started that day at Mirafiori.2

  At that time in the south the Communist Party’s slogan was: Land to whoever works. But what the hell did a labourer care about the land, about owning the land. They only thing he cared about was the money that he didn’t have: the security of having it guaranteed, all year round. In the end the Communist Party in the south changed its policies from the time of the land occupations. It retreated into the provincial towns, where there was nothing to do except run along behind dissatisfied tradesmen and office workers. Meanwhile the big struggles at Battipaglia3 and Reggio4 exploded, though the Communist Party thought those people were just a shitty underclass.

  Apart from anything else, it’s not as if the south in general had ever been poor. The landowners had always made plenty of money, and that continued after the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, except it was only the big landowners who kept making money, while anyone with less than five hectares was supposed to just disappear.

  Take, for example, the owners of the fertile land on the outskirts of Salerno on the Sele plain. There were pommaroli on the plain, people who plant tomatoes every season, with the whole family working. Little by little, as they made some money, the landowners turned all this work into an industry. Now they do it all, from field to can. And the labourers become workers, and with machines there are fewer people working but they’re producing more. And the other people from around there, well, they’re meant to just disappear.

  The rich landowners whose land was expropriated by the Cassa pocketed hundreds of millions of lire. It was in their interest, too, to see industry develop. With all those millions they built apartments in the cities, thousands of them. The people who came to work on the building sites weren’t from Salerno, most came from out of town: from the interior, from villages in the mountains, from the Apennines. They were all people who owned a house, a pig, some chickens, some vines, olives, oil, but who could no longer get by. They sold up, bought apartments in the city, got jobs in the factories. And so the unemployed in the cities stayed unemployed; in fact, there were more than before.

  It was especially the people from the interior and the villages in the Apennines who had to go up north. The Cassa did nothing for them, it was as if they were supposed to just disappear. Go north for development, because our underdevelopment was useful to them in the north, it helped their development. Who developed the north, who developed all of Italy and Europe? We did, the labourers of the south. It was as if northern workers and southern labourers were something different, something other than an underclass. It’s us, southerners, who are the workers of the north. What is Torino if it’s not a southern city? Who works there? Just like Salerno, like Reggio, like Battipaglia. Corso Traiano happened, the same as Battipaglia, when people realised that they couldn’t go on. All the stories of work up there and down here, there is work or there isn’t work, it’s a scam. You understand that the only answer is to burn everything, like at Battipaglia. The same thing will happen everywhere soon when we get organised. And in the end we’ll change everything. We’ll tell them all to get fucked, them and their shitty jobs.

  The building workers came to Salerno from Nocera, Cava, San Cipriano Picentino, Giffoni, Montecorvino. They came from all these towns in the morning on scooters and mopeds. There was a lot of work building factories, truck drivers to carry cement, stone, steel, to make roads and everything. There was a building boom in Salerno in the ’50s. Everyone bought scooters or mopeds. You saw the first mass-market car, the 600, which even workers had. And everyone bought TVs, antennas sprouted all over the place.

  Money really started to circulate. And there was always more stuff in the clothing shops and the grocers, and new shops were opening all the time. Everyone made more and spent more in Salerno. But generally it wasn’t the working class or the unemployed from Salerno. It was the people from the villages around. Money got to those villages, but naturally it didn’t stay there. You busted your arse every day to come on your moped or scooter or in your 600 from Montecorvino to Salerno for work, and then turned around and went back every evening. Then you looked for an apartment in town. In fact, all the new apartments in Salerno housed people who had come from out of town.

  Lots of people worked on the building sites and then lived in the apartments they’d built. After a while they went to live in these apartments in town, renting and even buying them. These people weren’t proletarians like in the city, the people who had fuck-all. In their own way they were land owners, they had the house, the pig, chickens, grape vines, olive trees and olive oil. And they also managed to buy apartments in town. Then they found jobs in the factories. To be taken on in a factory, you needed a raccomandazione.5 These yokels brought prosciutto to their local councillors. They brought oil, wine, all kinds of stuff and that’s how they got jobs. That was the only way they managed to find a position. And then they became proletarians like those in town, although that’s really what they had been all along.

  I found a job through an uncle, too. Now he’s retired; he worked in the finanza. He had a cousin in the employment office. He took me to the employment office and said to his cousin: this is one of my nephews. You have to help him, you have to find him a job somewhere. He gave me some paperwork, sent me along to Ideal Standard. I had an interview, passed the health insurance medical. Then I went back for the aptitude test. You did the aptitude test at the same time as the office workers. But we had longer. They had to do it in a minute, we had three. Then they said they were sending us to do a course. The guys who’d done best in the aptitude test went to do a course in Brescia.

  We asked why we were going to do this course. They said the Cassa was paying for training to get southern technicians ready for southern industry. When I heard talk about a course I thought it was just a technical thing. The whole time I was unemployed after I finished technical school I did courses. Works mechanic, fitter and turner, I did courses in all these things but I learnt fuck-all: they were no use at all. They were only there so the employment office looked like it was training people. I don’t know what the political motives behind the schools were.

  Anyway, when I heard course I thought we were going there to listen and have things explained to us. They gave us tickets to Brescia and lunch for the journey. At Brescia station a social worker from Ideal Standard was waiting for us. They called taxis and they knew us by name, all twenty of us. Ten here, five there, seven somewhere else: they’d even found pensiones for us to stay in. These are the pensione we’ve found, they said. If you don’t like them you can move. And the next day we turned up at Ideal Standard. They told us we were good lads, strong and all of that, and they ask us if we’d like to go to France or Torino or Milano. The company ran regular excursions. But we really didn’t give a stuff about the excursions, so we said, yeah, sure, OK.

  They gave us white overalls with the IS logo on them. They took us into the factory, where the temperature was in the 30s. It was humid because of all the ceramics drying: the water evaporates and everything gets soaked. We felt like we were suffocating. We had darker skin than the Ideal Standard workers from Brescia. Being in that heat and humidity all the time you have to shower every night, and your skin gets paler. And it’s not as if there’s much sun in Brescia. Coming from the south, where it was the end of summer, we were black, which scared them all a little.

  Anyway, they show us the toilet bowls, the bidets, the hand basins, the stands for the hand basins, the bathtubs. They show us cross-sections, explain how th
ick they have to be. How many minutes a hand basin has to stay in the mould, how many minutes all the different pieces have to stay in the mould. They explain how the mould is made and other stuff. And then they start to show us how you do it. I could see that the workers from Brescia did the work straight out without thinking about it too much, bam, bam, just like that, almost like it was nothing. So I said to myself, Christ, what the fuck is this course about? Are we talking about real work here, or about becoming foremen?

  All right, I thought, if we’re talking about becoming foremen then we won’t have to work much, and so I took it easy. My workmates worked on two toilets while I made one, and I went along like that. After we’d been there two or three months we joined this struggle. There were strikes, and we went on strike too, instinctively, with the guys from Brescia. The Cassa del Mezzogiorno paid us; we got ten thousand lire a week living allowance, more than forty thousand a month. And they paid us sixty thousand lire a month and we had free meals, in the company canteen. We had free transport all over the city, on every route.

  Before Brescia every one of us was from a different town, from different areas. We all lived the typical southern life. But there five or six of us stayed at each pensione, we ate together, we caught the bus together, and so we started to understand the advantages of industrial work. It wasn’t as if they were exploiting us in that work, we were only being trained. We didn’t feel exploited, at least, that was our impression. Some union organisers from the factory came to see us, saying that once we went back down south we’d have to start up the struggle. The south had to be brought to the same level as the north and all that.

  One day these Ideal Standard workers went out on strike, and we stopped too and talked to the union organisers. They were striking for an increase in the production bonus and they said that we were productive, too. And I said, No, we’re just doing a course. No, you’re productive, because they sell the units you make. You’re not just doing a course, you’re productive. A toilet bowl costs ten or fifteen thousand lire, it’s not as if you’re doing fuck all. This was fine by us, this discovery, we thought we’d been freeloading, living off the company. So we sat down outside too, and refused to go in.

  Then the manager of Ideal Standard Salerno came to Brescia. He saw us sitting around outside and asked us what the hell we were doing. Yeah, we’re on strike. But you’re going in, aren’t you? No, we’ve decided to join the struggle. Then after two days the workers from Brescia stop, but we decide to keep going. It was just us, twenty of us outside the gates, the others had gone in. While we were there a security guard came and called us: the manager wants to speak to you. We go in. Shit, the manager wants to speak to us, who knows, maybe they want to give us a pay rise.

  We go in and he goes: Listen boys, down south there are lots of unemployed workers, you’re not the only ones. We can throw you out right now. In fact, I already should have. Why did you go on strike? Did the union tell you to? Are you in the union? No, I said, do you have to be in a union to go on strike? Yes, you can only strike if you’re in a union. If you strike and you’re not in the union we can kick you out. Well, we didn’t know that. We joined the struggle just like that, the other workers went on strike so we did, too.

  Anyway, you want a pay rise, but did you know you’re not producing anything? Did you know that in the factory in Salerno they started work a month ago and are already producing sixteen units, some even eighteen? And you lot here make fourteen and get paid more? We said that can’t be true, that’s impossible, that’s a lie to make us stop. No, he says, I can end the course right now and send you back to Salerno. If you want to work, come and work, if not, get lost. We don’t care. And we won’t be giving you any pay rise.

  Either I kick you out right now, or you all decide here and now to go back to work. If you do that I’ll think about whether to send you back to Salerno or take you back on. So we discussed it among ourselves. I say, OK, it’s better for us to be tough, isn’t it? We say we don’t want to work and so they kick us out. We’ll go back down south, all twenty of us, and make trouble outside Standard. But some of them say they’re married, that they want to finish the course as soon as possible. They want to work and earn money in Salerno, they don’t want to make trouble. And so we decided to go back to work without having won anything.

  After a month we finish the course and go home to Salerno. Well, there we discover that they were paying workers from Brescia, that is, workers from Ideal Standard at Brescia, with money from the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, with the excuse that they have to train the workers from Salerno. And that the workers were already producing more than us who’d done the course in Brescia. The factory had been in Brescia for thirty years and they made sixteen units a day. It had been at Salerno for two months and they were already making eighteen. They explained this by saying the factory was modern and the equipment was more efficient.

  It was only because instead of lifting the units by hand, you lifted all the units together with a hoist. Some of the processes were automated, which at least saved your back. But something that was good for a worker’s health cost you two extra units, that is, two more toilet bowls. I didn’t go for that, thinking of the workers in Brescia who all had bad backs. They had their sides all strapped because they were getting muscle strains. And here, this new thing, using a hoist instead of your back to lift things, they’d done it to stop people going on benefits with pulled muscles. Which they made us pay for, by getting us to make two extra units. I mean, the new equipment in the new factories was only there so there were fewer workers but everyone produced more.

  They didn’t want to listen to reason. They said: Look, the others work, they make eighteen units. Everyone was making eighteen units, it was just me who only made sixteen. So they call me into the office. They say: listen, you seem like a good kid, but you have to change jobs. We should really sack you because you’re not productive enough. But we’ll send you to another section. They put me in another section, but for two days I had to stay in the old one, in the casting workshop. There were some units that had dried that I had to finish. I had to take them out of the moulds and finish the units that I was still working on.

  I went back down from the office and found someone from the union who had been to ask for an increase in the piece rate. The management had given him the finger and this guy had said they’d have to go out on strike. As soon as I hear this I say: Great. And I join in with the union organiser shouting: Strike, strike. I go to my comrades in the casting workshop and I get them to leave. A supervisor comes and says: What are you doing here, this isn’t your section? I say: Yes, it’s still my section because I have to finish some units. So why don’t you finish them? Because there’s a strike, right? And the guy says nothing.

  There were about fifty of us not working. They start to check who is still working. So we go to the guys who are still working and herd them out. The supervisors get pissed off and one of them threatens me. I was eating and I shoved my sandwich in his face. I’m jumping on him, my comrades are holding me back, they say: You’ve done the right thing, but that’s enough. Then we go into the other sections and make them stop. We all go out into the yard and hold a meeting. We strike for fifteen days, with pickets day and night. Police vans all around. Then we march on the Salerno prefecture as well.

  When we went back to work I was in a new section. I had to load finished units onto a line. Another guy checked them and two more put them onto trolleys. But to make up for the strike they decided to run two lines. Two checkers and two more packing. Whoever had to load the units onto one line now had to load them onto two. That is, it was me who had to do this double process. To make this work, they’d told the checkers, who checked whether the finished units were good or not, to speed up the checking. That is, if the guy in front didn’t pack a unit, they were authorised to put it on the ground. Generally you can’t put units on the ground, because they’re easy to break.

  They told me to keep putting new units
on the line. To push the units up close together. But you can’t put them close together, they might break, because they’re made of porcelain, they’re not meant to touch each other. And they authorised me to squash them up. I said: You’re crazy, they’ll break. And they replied: What do you care, do it the way you’ve been told. Their only concern was to increase production. The guy calls me a comrade, a unionist and he says to me: Listen, these people here want to make us work more. They want to put on two lines instead of one and then you’ll have to bust your arse, you’ll have to load both of them.

  I tell my workmates who are packing and they say: Fuck, so we’ll have to go slow. And they say to the checker: Why the fuck are you rushing? Take it slow. He says to them: No, I don’t mind working like this. I spit in his face and go off to the bathroom for a piss. The supervisor of the kilns comes, a draughtsman. He says: You’re breaking people’s balls, be careful or we’ll fire you. Yeah, I say, if your balls are so delicate you can keep them at home. Anyway, I go back to my workplace, and the checker kept going like crazy.

  The next day I get to work and the security guards call me and hand me a letter. I open it and it says I’ve been sacked for fighting in the factory, for sabotage and I don’t know what the fuck else. Because of that they weren’t even paying me the eight days’ notice and who knows what other entitlements. I say: Can’t I go in? No, you can’t go in any more. Now, I knew these security guards, one was the father of a friend, and I’d made friends with the other one. It didn’t want to fight them, I didn’t have the stomach for it. At that moment I decided that if I ever went to work in a factory, wherever it was, I wouldn’t ever make friends with the security guards.