In my factory, they checked our temperature before putting us to work. We are three hundred workers, placed on twenty lines, with only two inches distance between us; it was seriously scary. For women, the situation was even worse, for we had to jostle to make sure our elderly parents and relatives as well as our children, at home from school, were taken care of. Meanwhile, the government announced further lockdown measures and shelter-in-place orders, but without any provisions for women workers who continued to go to work while having their domestic burden doubled.
At my factory, during the breaks, we started discussing how this crisis increased women’s specific burdens. How we were having to risk our lives by coming to work while also having to wake up at 4:30am to make sure that our households were taken care of. Our rage began to mount, especially as we began to discuss the utter insufficiency of the safety procedures in place. We breathed the same air, were crowded in the same rooms. The virus became a tangible reality for us: each one of us could be a carrier and each one of us hoped that she was not the one.
It should come as no surprise then that it was us women who were the first to take action. We used WhatsApp and social media to start spreading the word. Our demand: either the company stops production or we will go on strike.
At the beginning of March, workers in fifteen factories refused to work in these dangerous conditions, without face masks or dividers. By March 6, thirty-nine factories were on strike, and on March 10, the strikes and blockades spread like wildfire across the country.
At this point, unions, compelled by the spontaneous strikes and protests organized by rank and file workers, were forced to ask the government to engage in open bargaining. On March 13, radical unions called for a general strike that would mobilize delivery services, the service and cleaning sectors, and factories. The next day, the main unions finally met with the government, which accepted our original demand to stop all non-essential production beginning March 15.
But the struggle was far from over. Immediately after the government announcement, thousands of companies rushed in to be acknowledged as an exception to the rule, asking to remain open. The Italian business council (Confindustria) added its powerful voice to protest the lockdown because “the global market demands it.” The Confindustria continued its pressure on the government, and when the government announced that the ban on non-essential production would be extended until May 3, Confindustria complained bitterly and, in Tuscany, even flies the flag at half-mast in protest.
This is an insult to all those who have died from COVID-19 and a slap in the face for those of us who continue to work in factories, risking being infected and ending up in an ICU. The arrogance of the bosses, who want to continue to make profits that we will only see tiny crumbs of, at the risk of our lives, forces us to ask ourselves the question, “Do we really want to continue living like this?”