DECEMBER 3 — A beautiful and great event brought the world of work back to the square. This is the most evident sign of yesterday in Rome, where despite the bad weather the workers of Torretta Antonacci paraded next to the ILVA workers, the firefighters near the Calabrian trainees, the road maintenance workers of Naples with the logistics workers throughout Italy, the teachers of Rome with the social operators, the environmental hygiene workers together with the port of Livorno, Genoa and Civitavecchia, the railways.
It is difficult to reconstruct the list of the many representatives and delegations of the companies and factories that have arrived in Rome, the sectors of public employment and the groups of the precarious and underpaid world of work brought to the streets by the Federation of Social. An event enriched by a large excerp of students and a large group of collectives, committees and political and social organizations, among which stood out the committees against the regasification of Piombino.
The opening slogan reproduced on many banners, “Down with arms raised wages”, summarizes the sense of mobilization but it is not enough to describe the variety of claims that animated the procession or the complexity of the platform brought to the streets. A platform that is trade union but is also social, it is territorial, that is, linked to places and therefore environmental but also mestizo, that is, attentive to the specificity of migrant workers, it is gender because it looks at the social condition of women and is strongly against the war and the claim to continue to drag our country into the war adventure in Ukraine.
The peculiarity and, in some ways, the real newfound novelty of this December 3 is that this platform starts from the workplace. To scream it in the square were yesterday thousands of workers. Not the workers of a sector, but simply, in their infinite complexity, the workers.
In the difficulty of an era that forces people to deal with poor wages and a growing blackmail in the workplace, those who work are able to recognize themselves in a worldview, in a field of demands that marks the difference. Yesterday’s demonstration said this: here we are, this is the point of view of those who send the country forward. If you want to stay on this side of the field, you know what you have to beat for.
And in this part of the camp there are certainly students: with their strong presence they have renewed the push for a “student-workers” alliance that is no longer just a slogan but begins to become a concrete ground for common action.
Expanding this field, embracing the many that we have not yet been able to reach, connect and unite those who decide to take sides, is what we must continue to do. Without being distracted by the small cunning of those who pursue hegemonic ambitions or act meaningless competitions.
Let the platform of December 3 live every day, take it where it has not yet arrived, put in place a mass movement that knows how to translate those indications into a daily struggle plan, keep together the detail and the general: this is what we must do. Now with renewed enthusiasm.
